The October 2009 Texas Tribune/UT-Austin Texas Politics Poll was designed by researchers at UT-Austin and conducted by YouGov/Polimetrix, a firm with demonstrated success in internet polling. YouGov/Polimetrix accomplishes internet polling through a unique sampling procedure known as "matched random sampling." The firm begins with two lists: (1) a list of all adult "consumers" in Texas (covering approximately 95 percent of the adult population), and (2) a list of people who have agreed to take YouGov/Polimetrix's surveys. For each list, Polimetrix has an extensive set of demographics.

The sampling procedure then progresses in two stages. First, a random sample of consumers is drawn. For each person drawn from this sample a list of key demographics is recorded. In essence, each individual drawn is represented as a cluster of demographic characteristics, including age, income, education, race, gender, longitude and latitude, etc. Second, YouGov/Polimetrix uses a matching algorithm to find the PollingPoint panelist who is the closest match to the person drawn off the consumer file. In this way an entire "matched" random sample is constructed for all people in the "drawn" sample.

The October 2009 poll consists primarily of 800 adults who are registered voters in Texas, and has a margin of error of +/-3.46 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. The YouGov/Polimetrix pool includes people who are much less likely to have access to the Internet or a personal computer. YouGov/Polimetrix has been especially assiduous at enlisting ethnic and racial minorities, as well as people who are less affluent, as part of their attempt to ensure the representativeness of their samples. Surveys were completed between October 20 and October 27, 2009. Polimetrix interviewed 1152 respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 800 to produce the final dataset. The respondents were matched ongender, age, race, education, party identification, ideology and political interest.

Polimetrix then weighted the matched set of survey respondents to known marginals for the registered voters of Texas from the 2008 Current Population Survey. Those marginals are shown below.

Age:

18-34: 33.45%

35-54: 39.08%

55+: 27.53%

Gender:

Male: 48.97%

Female: 51.03%

Race: White/Other: 57.63%

Black: 10.94%

Hispanic: 31.43%

Education:

HS or less: 49.23%

Some College: 28.49%

College Graduate: 15.23%

Post-graduate: 7.50%

Because Hank Gilbert was inadvertently left off the list of Democratic gubernatorial nominees in the original round of surveying, YouGov/Polimetrix re-interviewed 269 respondents to the October 2009 survey who had indicated that they intended to vote in the Texas Democratic gubernatorial primary. These respondents were then weighted to the distribution of Democratic gubernatorial primary voters in the initial survey on the following variables: gender, race, age, education, party ID, political interest, ideology, and national origin.