AUSTIN, Texas _ Donald Trump's lead over Hillary Clinton in Texas is now within the margin of error in a new poll, his smallest edge yet in the nation's biggest red state.
Trump, the Republican candidate for president, is leading Clinton, the Democratic candidate, 47 percent to her 43 percent among likely voters in the poll, conducted by SurveyUSA, a leading national, independent, nonpartisan polling firm. Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson garnered 3 percent, Green Party candidate Jill Stein received 1 percent, with 5 percent undecided.
The poll _ commissioned by WFAA-TV in Dallas, KVUE-TV in Austin, and other Texas television stations and released Thursday night _ represents a tightening of the race since a Texas Lyceum poll, conducted Sept. 1-12, that had Trump leading Clinton by 7 points among likely voters in a four-way race and by 5 points among registered voters in a two-way race.
The SurveyUSA poll contacted 800 adults in Texas, including 734 registered voters, 638 of whom were considered likely to vote. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 points.
It was conducted Monday through Wednesday, days after a tape from 2005 emerged of Trump speaking in vulgar terms about assaulting women and after several high-profile Republicans had urged him to drop out.
"The electorate is volatile," according to an analysis of the results by SurveyUSA. "It is possible Trump will carry Texas by more traditional margins than this data set shows. It is also possible that the state's score will be settled in the single digits."
Republican candidates have carried Texas by double-digit margins in recent elections: Mitt Romney won by 16 points in 2012; John McCain won by nearly 12 points in 2008; Texan George W. Bush won by 23 points in 2004 and by 21 points in 2000. The last Democratic candidate for president to carry Texas was Jimmy Carter, who narrowly defeated Gerald Ford in 1976.
Joshua Blank, research director for the Texas Lyceum Poll and manager of polling research for the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, said he found the SurveyUSA result "eminently plausible."
"This is the direction in which Trump has been going in Texas for quite some time," Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson said.
Jillson thinks it is still extraordinarily unlikely that Clinton will win Texas, unless "the bottom falls out of the Trump campaign and Texas and 45 other states go for the Democrats."
"Short of that, if Trump holds 10 states, Texas is one of them," Jillson said.
The new survey was conducted amid an explosion of controversy over Trump's comments about women, but SurveyUSA found there wasn't an obvious gender gap. Trump was leading narrowly among men and women.
But the poll found that among rural Texas women, Trump held a 41-point lead. Among suburban Texas women, Clinton held a 1-point edge.
Clinton holds a 26-point lead among likely voters ages 18 to 34, and she has a 23-point lead among likely Latino voters, a margin that Texas Democrats hope to widen.
Trump has a 33-point lead among white voters and a 35-point lead among voters who identify as evangelical Christians.
Garry Mauro, who is playing a leadership role in Clinton's Texas campaign, said Trump's problem in Texas remains his inability to expand his appeal beyond his Anglo male base in a state where Anglo males are a waning proportion of the electorate.
Trump leads by 10 points in military households and among voters who lack a college education and voters earning more than $80,000 a year. Clinton leads narrowly among lower- and middle-income Texans.
For all Trump's uniqueness as a candidate, the vote in Texas is fundamentally a base election _ with Trump winning 88 percent of the GOP base, Clinton holding 94 percent of the Democratic base, and Clinton leading Trump by a nominal 2 points among independents.
The poll also found that "of Trump supporters, 61 percent say they are voting 'for Trump,' compared to 39 percent who are voting 'against Clinton.' Of Clinton supporters, 68 percent say they are voting 'for Clinton,' compared to 30 percent who are voting 'against Trump.'"
