The polling
They say it's fringe. The polling says it's the majority.
In 2022 the best-rated pollster in America asked Texans whether they wanted out. A supermajority said yes. Here is the definitive read: what was asked, who answered, why it holds up, and how the other side makes it disappear.
For twenty years, the people who did not want this conversation had one reliable move. They called it fringe. A handful of cranks. Not a real position, not a majority, nothing Texas needed to take seriously.
Then the numbers came in, and the word stopped working.
In July 2022, SurveyUSA asked Texans a direct question about leaving the union. Sixty-six percent of likely Texas voters said yes. Not a plurality, not "lean yes," but a supermajority, in a poll that a year later would carry the highest grade in the business. This is the definitive read on that number: what was actually asked, who actually answered, why the poll holds up, how it stacks against the independence votes that Scotland and Britain actually held, and exactly how the other side makes it vanish.
Read on its own, the number is something the opposition can dismiss as an outlier. Read beside everything else Texas has done, it becomes the opposite: the most settled fact in this whole debate, and the one its opponents work hardest to keep away from a vote.
Fig. 1 · The headline
of likely Texas voters said yes when SurveyUSA asked whether Texas should peacefully become an independent country. July 2022.
What the poll actually asked
The poll was run by SurveyUSA in July 2022 across eight states: Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, New Hampshire, and Hawaii. It reached 4,375 respondents, roughly 625 per state, and the sample was built to mirror the population by race, gender, and political affiliation. Of all eight states surveyed, Texas registered the highest support for leaving the union.
The Texas question was plain:
"Would you support Texas peacefully becoming an independent country along with other conservative states? Or not?"
Here is how Texas answered.
Fig. 2 · How Texas answered
The most common answer was 'definitely yes'
It is not a Republican number
The first thing opponents say is that this is just Republicans talking to themselves. It is not. Texas Republicans did back independence heavily, at 76%. But a clear majority of independents favored it too, and even with every non-voter in the state folded in, support for peacefully withdrawing held at 60%. As the Texian Partisan put it at the time: that is not 66% of Republicans. That is 66% of Texans.
And the number climbs with exactly the people who decide elections. Among Texans who vote only in presidential years, support was 63%. Among regular, likely voters, the ones who actually turn out, it was 66%. The more reliably a Texan votes, the more likely that Texan is to want out.
Fig. 3 · It rises with turnout
The more reliably Texans vote, the more they want out
Is the poll any good?
This is the honest question, and it has a clean answer. When the SurveyUSA result first landed, the people it embarrassed reached for the only defense they had left: the poll must be junk.
Nine months later, that defense collapsed. FiveThirtyEight, the analytics outfit that grades pollsters for a living, reviewed 856 SurveyUSA polls and handed the firm an A+, its top grade, and found it carried the least partisan bias of any pollster it tracked, one of the most accurate in the country. The poll showing 66% support for TEXIT was not an outlier from a fly-by-night shop. It came from the single most reliable name in American polling.
There is a smaller, sharper tell, too. When Texas Monthly set out to write that secession was going nowhere, Daniel Miller handed the author the SurveyUSA results, question by question, cross-tabs and all. The magazine left the data out. When the best-rated pollster in the country contradicts the story, and the story runs anyway, the problem was never the poll.
Fig. 4 · The pollster
FiveThirtyEight's top grade for SurveyUSA after reviewing 856 of its polls: the least partisan bias of any pollster it tracked, and one of the most accurate in the country.
The poll does not stand alone
Here is the move the other side needs you to miss. Treat the 66% as a single data point, one survey floating by itself, and it is at least arguable. Call it an outlier, an artifact of one summer and one question. That is the whole game: isolate the number so it can be waved away.
It does not stand alone. Set it beside everything else, and it stops being a poll and starts being a pattern.
The dominant party in Texas wrote independence into its platform, not once but twice, by roughly 90% of its delegates. In the 2026 primary, 1.6 million Texans voted Texas First, and Texas First candidates won up and down the ballot, from statewide office to unseating a sitting member of Congress. Support has climbed from the single digits in 2005 to a supermajority today, two decades pointed in one unbroken direction. And across the country, the same shift keeps surfacing: secession has become a serious, mainstream conversation, and Texas is out in front of it.
Isolated, the 66% is a number the other side can call an outlier. Standing where it does, beside the platform, the primary, the twenty-year trend, and everything else Texas has done, it is gospel.
"But the question mentioned other states"
Read the question closely and one phrase does the opposition's work for them: along with other conservative states. Didn't Texans just say yes to a national divorce, the argument goes, rather than to Texas standing on its own?
It does not survive contact with how independence actually works. Leaving the union is a state-by-state act. No state leaves on another's behalf, and none can. Texas would vote on Texas. Every other state would decide for itself, on its own timeline, by its own hand. So the clause about other conservative states placed no condition on the Texas answer. It described the real-world dynamic Texas is part of: a union coming apart at the seams, with more than one state reaching for the exit. A Texan who answered yes said yes to Texas leaving. What Oklahoma or Louisiana chooses to do is up to Oklahoma and Louisiana.
How 66% compares to the votes that actually happened
A poll is one thing. A referendum is another. So set this number beside the two independence votes everyone remembers, measured at the moment those campaigns won the right to hold them.
When Britain granted Scotland its independence referendum, support for Scottish independence sat around 33% in the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey. When Britain voted on Brexit, the Leave campaign never once led with a polling majority; it trailed for most of the run and won anyway. Both movements got their vote, and both outran their pre-vote polling on the day.
Texas is starting from 66%. That is double Scotland's pre-referendum support and well clear of Brexit's. And these votes draw enormous turnout: the worldwide average for an independence referendum is about 85%. Texas is not behind the movements that won. Texas is ahead of them.
Fig. 5 · Ahead of the movements that won
Texas starts where Scotland and Brexit only wished they were
Trailed for most of the campaign. Won the vote anyway.
Won the right to a vote. Outran its polling on the day.
How the other side makes 66% disappear
When a number is this lopsided, the only way to argue against it is to hide it, and the playbook is consistent.
Quote old data and stop. The favorite move is to cite a 2009 figure, that 18% of Texans would vote to secede, and let the reader assume nothing has changed in the years since. A great deal has changed in the years since.
Ignore the polls that agree. A 2014 Reuters/Ipsos poll found 54% of Texas Republicans, 48% of independents, and 35% of Democrats supported leaving. A University of Virginia study found more than 40% of Trump voters and 30% of Biden voters nationwide favor their own state seceding. This is not a fringe daydream confined to one corner of one state. It is a mainstream conversation across the country, and Texas leads it.
Then ignore SurveyUSA entirely, even when the cross-tabs are placed in your hand.
Watch: the polling, in full
Daniel Miller walks through the national-divorce polling, what these surveys are really measuring, and why support for independence runs higher than Washington is willing to admit.
The tell: they will not let Texas vote
There is one more piece of evidence, and it may be the loudest of all, because it comes from the opposition's own conduct.
The people who insist Texans do not really want this hold the simplest way imaginable to prove it: let Texans vote. A referendum that came back no would end the Texas Nationalist Movement in a single afternoon and settle the question for a generation, in their favor, for good. If they believed for one moment that Texans would vote to stay, they would not be resisting a referendum. They would be demanding one, today, to be rid of us once and for all.
They are not demanding one. They are working to make sure the question is never put to the people of Texas at all. Nobody fights that hard to stop a vote they are certain they would win. The refusal is not confidence. It is a confession. They have read the same numbers we have, watched the same momentum build, and concluded that their safest move is to keep Texans from ever marking the ballot.
That is the case, distilled. When one side is asking to put the question to the people and the other is spending everything it has to prevent it, you already know which one has counted the votes.
The only poll that counts
For all of it, here is the caveat we put on every poll, including the ones we like: a poll is not a vote. The 66% is real, it is sourced, and it agrees with everything around it. But the only number that will ever truly settle this is the one that comes out of a ballot box, when Texans are finally handed the question directly.
That is the entire point, and it is exactly what the other side is working to prevent. The argument is no longer in real doubt. The polling says so, the platform says so, the primaries say so, and the opposition's own refusal to test it says so loudest of all. The work that remains is not to win the argument. It is to win Texans the vote.
Texas First. Texas Forever.