TEHRAN - The rising popularity of the former US vice president in Texas has led to deeply unhappy Republicans. On the other hand, internal Democratic polls show that Joe Biden is more popular than his other candidates. Here's a look at some of the polls and news about the upcoming US presidential election:

Saeed Sobhani

New poll: Biden leads O'Rourke in Texas presidential primary, race against Sen. John Cornyn wide open
Connect with Gromer Jeffers Jr.

As Gromer Jeffers Jr., wrote in Dallas Times,A new poll has former Vice President Joe Biden leading Beto O'Rourke in the Texas presidential primary and locked in a close race one-on-one with Donald Trump.The survey, conducted by Emerson College for The Dallas Morning News, had a 3 percentage-point margin of error, and Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders each led Trump by only 2 percentage points.

The poll also signals that even with two favorite sons in the race, O'Rourke and Juli?n Castro, Lone Star State Democrats want a familiar face as their nominee.O'Rourke is trailing Biden in the poll, perhaps, because a clear majority of Texas Democrats would rather see him run for Senate against Republican incumbent John Cornyn.

Sanders, the 2016 runner-up to Hillary Clinton for the party's nomination, was third.The poll was conducted Aug. 1-3 among a sample of 1,033 registered voters with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. For the Democratic presidential primary, about 400 people were surveyed with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.The poll also projects a wide-open Democratic primary race for the Senate seat held by Cornyn, the  longtime incumbent. At 19%, "someone else" is leading the field, a blow to former Army helicopter pilot MJ Hegar, who's been campaigning for most of the year.

That "someone else" is leading the entire field is an oddity, but reflects the complexity of the primary race and the conundrum felt by many Democrats.

Hegar was the choice of 10% of those polled, followed by state Sen. Royce West at 8%, former U.S. Rep. Chris Bell at 7% and Houston City Council member Amanda Edwards at 5%. A whopping 51% of respondents were unsure.

West, Bell and Edwards are all relatively new to the race.

"I wouldn't be surprised to see other people jump into the race," said Spencer Kimball, the Emerson College polling director. "It's just that wide open."

The news is not great for Cornyn, the powerful incumbent who's held the seat since 2003. Only 37% approved of his job performance, while 31% disapproved. The polls found that 33% of Texans were neutral or had no opinion."That's not a good place to be. It shows that he's vulnerable," Kimball said of Cornyn's poll numbers, noting that Texas Gov. Greg

Abbott had an approval rating of 50%, with only 27% not liking his performance.

"The good news for him is that he doesn't have disapproval in the GOP," Kimball said, noting his rating was 57% approval and 16% disapproval among Republicans.

Battleground Texas

Texas could be the biggest battleground in the country, as Democrats try to win a statewide contest for the first time since 1994.In 2018, O'Rourke emerged as the party's savior, staging a dramatic campaign that came within 2.6 percentage points of beating Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.

Democrats had hoped O'Rourke would run for Senate against Cornyn, and it shows in the Emerson poll numbers.Forty-six percent of voters said O'Rourke should drop out of the presidential race and run for Senate, while 25% said he should keep running for president and 29% weren't sure. About 51% of Democrats said O'Rourke should run for Senate instead of the White House.

Before the mass shooting in El Paso caused O'Rourke to halt his campaign, he had been campaigning on his ability to win Texas' 38 electoral votes and defeat Trump for the White House.

O'Rourke also touted a University of Texas at Tyler poll that showed him beating all Democrats in Texas and leading Trump by 11 percentage points.

"Winning those 38 Texas electoral votes allows us not only to defeat Donald Trump in November of 2020, it forever changes the electoral landscape in the United States," O'Rourke told The Dallas Morning News. "This is incredibly important and we uniquely have the ability to follow through."

But the Emerson poll shows Biden ahead of O'Rourke by a 28% to 19% margin. Sanders was third with 16%, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren had 14%, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg was at 7% and California Sen. Kamala Harris had 5% support.

"Joe Biden has gone up 5 points since our April poll, and Beto O'Rourke has dropped a couple of points," Kimball said.Dallas pastor Richie Butler, who was an aide to former Massachusetts senator and 2004 presidential nominee John Kerry, said Texans -- at the moment -- feel that the well-known Biden is the best choice to beat Trump, not O'Rourke.
"A lot of people feel that Beto has a better chance of getting across the finish line in a Senate race, not a race for president," Butler said.

Though O'Rourke was highly competitive in the poll, former Housing secretary and former San Antonio mayor Castro barely registered. At 2%, he trailed businessman Andrew Yang (3%) and was tied with New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. All other candidates had 1% or less.

The polls are in, and here’s who won the second Democratic debate
Also Vox reported that Last week’s second Democratic debate did little to change the race — Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren continue to be the top candidates, per new post-debate polls.

National polls from Quinnipiac, HarrisX, Reuters/Ipsos, and Politico/Morning Consult — and a New Hampshire poll from the Boston Globe/Suffolk — all show Biden in first place, with somewhere between 21 and 33 percent of the vote.

Four of those polls show Sanders in second place and Warren in third — however, one of the national polls, from Quinnipiac, showed Warren ahead of Sanders in second place.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris appears to have declined from her significant bounce in the polls in late June following a tense exchange with Biden on busing in that first debate. Back then, she went from a distant fourth to, essentially, tied for second place with Sanders and Warren. But now she tends to poll closer to fifth-place Pete Buttigieg than to the top three contenders.A HuffPost/YouGov poll asking Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters whether their opinion of each candidate improved or worsened from the debate showed Harris as the only top-tier candidate whose image suffered on net.

Now the Politico/Morning Consult poll shows Harris in fourth place with 9 percent, and the Quinnipiac poll shows her in fourth with 7 percent (among national Democrats, in both cases). Other national polls have shown similar results. The Boston/Globe Suffolk poll of New Hampshire has Harris in fourth there, too, with 8 percent.

Biden, meanwhile, had declined a bit in national polls after the first debate, feeding questions about whether his support was shaky. But he remained in first place throughout, and even before the second debate, he’d recovered. The debate itself has done nothing to change that: The former vice president remains the man to beat.
Nobody else broke out

Beyond the top tier (broadly defined) of Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris, and Buttigieg, there were of course 15 other candidates onstage last week.
Some commentators declared Marianne Williamson had a breakout performance; some thought Cory Booker deserved a bounce; some believed John Delaney’s centrality on the first night would be good for him.

The HuffPost/YouGov poll that asked Democrats whether their opinion of each candidate improved or worsened showed a strong net improvement for Booker (20 percent net improvement) and Juli?n Castro (17 percent net improvement).

But when it came to whom Democrats would vote for, Booker, Castro, and the other bottom-tier candidates are all still polling at 3 percent or below in all the post-debate polls.

The next debate isn’t until September. But the threshold for qualifying for that one is higher — a candidate needs to hit 2 percent in four recent polls from approved organizations, and to have at least 130,000 donors.

Currently, only eight candidates say they’ve met that threshold: Biden, Sanders, Warren, Harris, Buttigieg, Booker, Beto O’Rourke, and Amy Klobuchar. A few more may make the cut too, but several will surely miss it — and with no future national platform likely, they may decide to bring their campaigns to an end.