Thanks for taking the time to provide some cautionary insights into his record. Definitely a few reasons to be concerned about the authenticity (or lack thereof) of his commitment to conservative principles. I will keep these issues in mind as the primaries unfold.
As far as the Austin area poll is concerned, isn’t that a liberal area? I would expect that kind of result based on what I’ve heard about Austin (i.e., college town, seat of government, arts and entertainment, etc.).
college town - UT definitely liberal but thankfully most of the students usually don't vote.
seat of government - Hey, Texas is conservative! There are exceptions, like Sheila (shudder!), but we don't like talking about them. It's not or any real consequence since the legislature only meets every other year for 140 days so they live elsewhere
arts - more craftsy but not a major fine arts center, that would be Dallas
entertainment - not so much except during SXSW (music) and in recent years movies have come to film at a few buildings with interesting architecture or the landscape but they don't vote.
The actual city of Austin is liberal - UT, Hippy Hollow (nude beach, ewww!), the tree huggers, the liberal yankees and Californians who moved in with the tech and other companies who want to change Texas into what they moved away from, the Keepin' Austin Weird crowd (made up of the previous groups), etc. The city is also what throws it's county, Travis, into the blue on election maps. However, the 3 main Austin tv stations broadcast far out to many of the surrounding counties which are definitely conservative. You see, we don't have many big cities in this area and smaller towns don't have tv stations or large newspapers or shopping. Even Waco, imo, isn't quite to "big" city status, yet. Look at a map - there's the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex up north, there's Houston on the gulf coast, there's El Paso in the far west, there's San Antonio in the southern area, so not counting the panhandle or East Texas, Austin has to cover Central Texas which is everything in between. In towns outside Austin, you're likely to have one grocery store and a Dollar General (which is on a boon and building a lot of new stores this year). It's not unusual to drive an hour to the nearest Walmart - yeah, I know, don't laugh. So, if you want something more than Walmart offers, then you wait to plan for an entire day of errands and drive into Austin.
BTW, thanks for being polite and not flaming.