June 27th, 2016 – Second Reading Podcast

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[0:00:33 Jim] Welcome to the second reading podcast. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project, that I’m joined, as always, by my colleague Joshua Blank. Today we’re gonna focus on the just released University of Texas Texas Politics Project poll, which we designed and implemented with our colleagues that you, Gove Ah, the top of the agenda for that poll. I suppose Joshua’s, though getting around it was the presidential election.

[0:00:56 Joshua] Yeah, that’s right. I mean, I think, uh, you know, we always look at the timing of these things and what you know where it fits in the political calendar and for near legislative session, we usually ask about a lot of policy questions of the Legislature’s gonna take up. But in the June of an election year, right after the last primary, Ah had ended in when, you know the District of Columbia. A real focus on this was basically getting a sense of where, where Texans weren’t, you know, with respect to both the candidates in the presidential race, but also some of the issues that been animating that discussion over the last, you know, six months or so,

[0:01:29 Jim] right? So we should talk about both of those. So let’s start at the top, essentially not quite, but close to the top of the pole. And really, the conceptual sort of heart of the poll is, as you say, when we’re thinking about this poll in writing the questions and and designing it. The idea was, we know the presidential election is happening. As you say, it’s that it’s a certain time of year in a time in the cycle of how we pull. But there’s also this sense that there are attitudes that are sort of intersecting at both the state level and in the presidential election. But nonetheless, the thing that most people were we’re waiting for in terms of our audience,

[0:02:08 Joshua] say This is where we make our money

[0:02:10 Jim] and our desire to get the poll and further the greater good of the University of Texas, where people would wait we’re waiting for were the results in the presidential race. Right,

[0:02:20 Joshua] Right. So we found that overall in a head to head matchup between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, while 41% of registered voters in Texas that they’d be sort porting Donald Trump while 33% said they’d be supporting Hillary Clinton. And the You know, the read of this broadly was Clinton’s within single digits of Trump and taxes,

[0:02:41 Jim] right, And by single digits just for people that don’t live in this all the time. In other words, ah, lead of that, she’s She’s only behind by less than 10 points, and we also had 19% in that matchup that what said they were, they preferred someone else and then 8% said they didn’t know. Um, we also then followed up in the way that we organize the pole with a question that included the libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. And this is maybe one of Josh’s least favorite topics. If you were in the studio. You could see him. He has. It’s a poker face, but it’s but it’s barely.

[0:03:15 Joshua] I can help make this face every time we talk about this.

[0:03:17 Jim] So in the three way race, there wasn’t a whole lot of impact. By including Johnson, Donald Trump had 39%. Ah, Hillary Clinton drops a point to 32. Johnson gained seven. Most of that gain on the face of it comes from the people that had said someone else so that someone else reading drops from 19 to 14 when you include the Libertarian candidate. And we should just say, for people that are looking for an alternative to the two party system, there is, Ah, a lot of talk shall we say about Gary Johnson and then this third party candidacy. We often, you know, libertarians almost always are on the ballot in Texas at the presidential level, on actually field some candidates and legislative races. But the typical pattern when this is, you know, the source of frustration. I’m teasing you, but I feel it too, which is we put a libertarian in. They always get mawr that, like clockwork, they always get Maurin the poll than they wind up getting in the final tally once the election rolls around. And so it only makes it look like we’re that much further off if we include the Libertarian and then the libertarian doesn’t get any votes. I think Gary Johnson got a little less than 2% 1.41 point 4% in the last general election when he ran into in 2012. We know it’s gonna happen, but Ferris fair. So we did do the matchup with

[0:04:42 Joshua] one interesting thing about this. Actually, I should say, I will throw this out. There is just, I think, you know, given how ah negatively. Both Trump and Clinton are viewed both by, you know, partisans of the other side, but also to some degree within the road within their own parties. There was the possibility that you’d see, you know, a surge in support for an alternative candidate. And really, if anything, this is actually a little bit lower than usual. I mean, usually we’d expect to see about 10% this far out for the Libertarian candidate and expected to drop to less than 2% on election day. In this case, Seeley pulled 7%. So, you know, despite that narrative, it’s really there’s no there’s no there there.

[0:05:17 Jim] I like the way you said that was reasonable to do it, but then came back around to. But still I’m right to feel this way. Yeah, definitely. Okay, so So that gives you a sense of of what it looked like. Overall, Um, and then there were interesting story lines. So when we put this pull together, if you step back, there’s nobody out there in Yeah, that received this poll is as an interested consumer who looked at these numbers and wow, that’s shocking. Donald Trump’s ahead by eight points. It’s in the ballpark of what we expected, very similar to where the Romney Obama race was four years ago. Interestingly enough, that may just be a coincidence, but I think it’s not, you know, completely irrelevant.

[0:05:58 Joshua] I stopped pumping positive point. For one thing. I’ve been thinking about this a little bit because on the one hand you’d say, I mean, I think what the the A lot of the coverage has been to point out that this is only this is single digits and the obvious response sort of from someone who follows us regulators to say exactly what you said, right? Well, you know, when we pulled in May 2012 you know, Romney was ahead of Barack Obama by eight points. So really, we should expect that gap to widen. Having said that, there are some differences, right? Certainly. Which I mean well, yes, there. Certainly some differences I’m gonna hold. I’m gonna hone in on one minor difference and the minor differences that Romney hadn’t actually secured the nomination at that point. And so, to the extent that you’d expect to see Romney’s vote share grow from that eight point lead early on, a lot of that would be the consolidation to expect to happen once he became the nominee and it was cleared everybody that this was the candidate. And you see that sort of rallying that if you’ve been kind of following politics in the last few weeks and since the you know the primaries have closed out, you’ve been hearing about, especially with, you know, Sanders voters have coming to Clinton and whether you know, Cruz and these other supporters were gonna come, Teoh trumpet will talk some more about, but, you know, in this case. Actually, at this point in polling, you know, the primary was over in Texas, the nominees were set. And so actually, you know, even though this eight points is comparable, toe this historical numbers, you know, the context is a little bit different. You’d almost you would, I think, with the more traditional will say, Republican candidate, maybe expect this gap to be wider, given the fact that you know, you expect republicans to generally winning statewide elections by double digits,

[0:07:29 Jim] right? I mean, I think they’re countervailing tendency. There is the fact that, you know, Romney wasn’t quite the presumptive candidate as of June that I think he was leading the pack by that

[0:07:36 Joshua] definitely wasn’t there the pack.

[0:07:38 Jim] But on the other hand, at this point, Trump is a bit more of a divisive candidate. T put it gently.

[0:07:48 Joshua] That’s a good Segway.

[0:07:49 Jim] Eso? Yes. So what we cared about in a lot of ways, the reason I started on, you know, that this wasn’t a huge surprise was that we’re interested in after very divisive primaries, how much the each candidate was consolidating support. Given that, you know, on the Republican side you had Donald Ted Cruz making a real run at Donald Trump,

[0:08:13 Joshua] right? Texas Senator Ted

[0:08:14 Jim] Cruz For a long time, and certainly on the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders has been giving president or a president secretary of State Clinton, Ah, pretty good run for her money and is lingering in a way that is causing some degree of discontent. I think you know both of these, then were factors that we were interested in. Put most simply where the cruise how much were the Cruz supporters coming around to support Trump? How much of the Sanders supporters coming around to support Clinton? Two very different answers,

[0:08:44 Joshua] right? So we asked. Ah, we asked respondents who they supported in the primary. Ah, and among Cruz supporters, 69% said that they were gonna be supporting Donald Trump in the general election. Not surprisingly, you know. 2% said they’d be supporting Hillary Clinton, and you may say, Who are those 2%? That’s like a good gut check on any poll. Nothing’s ever 100%. If you don’t have a couple of people who are confused or messing up in some way,

[0:09:06 Jim] be more troubled by zero than

[0:09:08 Joshua] it would be much more troubled by zero than to so again Cruz supporters. You know, about 70% of them said they are coming to Donald Trump and they’re gonna vote for him 22%. That’s someone else among Sanders supporters with little bit more mixed. Ah,

[0:09:21 Jim] a little uglier,

[0:09:22 Joshua] a little uglier. 10% said they were supporting Donald Trump. 40% said they were going to support Clinton. 44%. The plurality said they were going to support someone else

[0:09:32 Jim] and that 44 is Ah, is a highlighted red number in many ways now, on one hand, given events. And given the way that Senator Sanders has played this, that is his reluctance to throw in the towel and unambiguously endorsed Hillary Clinton in the last week or week and 1/2. He said that he was gonna vote

[0:09:54 Joshua] he’s gonna vote for,

[0:09:55 Jim] but he did not stand up until his supporters. I’m gonna vote for for her. You should, too. We are standing down. It’s time to unify the party. We’re not hearing that kind of message from Sanders, Um, and his reluctance Or, you know, I guess we have to call it his refusal to withdraw from the race. Even though Clinton is the is the presumptive candidate is clearly ah, informing this number.

[0:10:24 Joshua] Yeah, and I think they’re serving. Somebody asked me this question is a smart question. Which is, you know, is can you look at this and say, Hey, you know, Clinton is only down by eight right now and again, it’s early, he’s moved. Numbers are gonna move. We expect, you know, that gap to expand overtime. However, 44% of Sanders supporters was about 20% of you know, the people we polled say they’re voting for someone else and presumably there. A lot of them are gonna come to Clinton at some point, right? Doesn’t that give her room to grow? And my response to that was, Well, you know, if you sort of do the math, so do you know, multiply percentages by percentages and everything. You know, really, you’re talking about 7.5% of the overall electorate. Okay, so that could clear, you know, basically, actually, cover would be helpful to cover some of that gap a same time. You know, what’s been notable about Sanders supporters in a lot of ways is is, you know, there again they’re dug in and they also skew younger

[0:11:16 Jim] right, which means they’re going to skew the lower turnout, right? It’s going to be attrition there,

[0:11:20 Joshua] and it’s not gonna go 100% to Clinton in those who do show up. So you know, it’s it’s an interesting question. I think there’s a lot of I mean, there’s a lot of, Ah, there’s a lot in this poll in the early are thing that indicates maybe a closer race in Texas and we think that a competitive race, right, but a closer race

[0:11:36 Jim] well, And I think the other thing, you know, you’ve said this at the outset, and I keep reminding people of this It’s June right. We still have ah, bunch of, you know, sort of stimulators of public opinion shifts of you know, there’s still a lot of consolidation to go there. So a lot of people that aren’t paying close attention, probably most people, and so there’s a lot of ships now on the Republican side, something a little, you know, I mean, it would seem similar in that Ted Cruz has not endorsed Donald Trump and has given every signal that he has no intention of ever doing so when I think that’s unlike Sanders, frankly, extenders will eventually come around. Thanks, Um, but with with Cruz, he’s made it clear, you know the story. Say, you know, these not going to get that he is not gonna respond to Donald Trump’s requirement that they that he endorsed Trump in order to speak from the engine. He’s like, not enforceable. Yeah, we’ll go, But we’re not going, you know, I don’t care if we speak. Basically, they’re not. They’re not going to do it. Nonetheless, there’s a higher level of support for Trump among Cruz voters than there were then there. Then there was among Sanders voters for Clinton, right, 60 with 69%

[0:12:48 Joshua] right, 69% right,

[0:12:50 Jim] So 69% are on board, suggesting that in one sense, at least as far as these candidates kind of rivalries, the Republicans don’t have much of a problem in Texas. And we’ll see this in some of the other attitudinal stuff. Texas Republicans, by and large, are coming around to Trump’s candidacy, but they’re doing so in a way that, you know, still is happening in the contacts and maybe even because of a lot more kind of structural division and tension inside the party. And And we see that when we look at these approval numbers of the major parties among their partisans,

[0:13:27 Joshua] right? So I mean, if you think about the fact that you had this divisive primary season and ah, you know, at the very least maybe Cruz supporters are not happy with the process may be I mean, clearly, Sanders supporters were not happy with the process. But when you actually ask, ah, you know, these these supporters, how they feel about the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. You know, Bernie, voters air, you know, pretty much I would say, you know, relatively ambivalent towards the Democratic Party. You know,

[0:13:56 Jim] Right, right, That’s it. You know, the Sanders. The people that said they supported Sanders and 20 in the in the primary have 44% have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. 36 unfavorable. Now that’s not great, but it’s some, you know, it’s it’s not. It’s not the end of the world, either. But if you compare that to Clinton voters, people that vote for that say they’re voting for Clinton have a 75% approval of the Democratic favorable, a favorable view, the of the Democratic Party and only 9% negative. If you look then at the Republican side, you know it’s much more complicated. Cruz voters again have a net positive, favorable view of the Republican Party. 45 favorable, 36 unfavorable. But Trump voters who have just triumphed and whose candidate is presumably just triumphed in the process themselves, only have 50 favorable 31 unfavorable. So, really, at best, only about half of Republicans have a favorable view of their own party,

[0:14:56 Joshua] right? And is actually, you know, we’re looking specifically at subsets of voters, but that does obscure like he doesn’t obscure, but actually a little bit the bigger trend, which is, you know, Democrats. Overall, in Texas, 73% of a favorable view of the Democratic Party okay, good Republicans in Texas, only 52% have a favorable view of the Republican Party. Almost 30% have an unfavorable view of their own party. So I mean, how you know, we were talking about this a little bit earlier. I mean, in some ways, I mean, this is a lot of what the primary was about and how it ended up, sort of shaking out right, the sort of a long time kind of party guys, the Jeb Bushes, the John Kasich’s right, you know, they didn’t gain much traction, and then the two guys who were left standing were the two people who are the most critical of the party from the get go Donald

[0:15:41 Jim] most bluntly, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who were the last two men standing, spent almost a much time kind of the, you know, taking punches at their own party is they did the Democrats,

[0:15:55 Joshua] right? So I mean, you can see out. Now. Both sides are

[0:15:57 Jim] found an audience clearly

[0:15:59 Joshua] right, And so both sides are facing sort of different kinds of challenges right now. I mean, with the Democrats, it’s classic, right? It’s, you know, how do you incorporate the losing candidates supporters back into the party? The truth is, it shouldn’t be that hard, because overall, they generally Democrats have a positive view of the Democratic Party. There’s generally agreement about these sorts of issues, you know, the issues that animate the Democratic Party, they’re going to kind of come back over with the Republicans. This sort of, you know, structural distrust of institutions, including the party itself, is really baked into the cake, and that makes it difficult to sort of

[0:16:31 Jim] rally around the label. In a sense, right, if you’re if you’re somebody that’s used to. If the idea is the party’s provide a degree of cohesion and a point of identification for voters that help the candidates, it’s hard to look at these numbers and not feel like the Republicans are gonna have less of that now in Texas. Two things I think that keep in mind here one quickly in Texas, there’s just so many more Republicans than there are Democrats that actually show up to vote on Election Day in terms of what we, in highfalutin terms, call the composition of the electorate. Because Republican turnout is so much higher than Democratic turnout. And there’s just so many Republicans. This would have to get really bad for us to start thinking that Hillary Clinton was going to take this thing. The other piece of this is that there’s another piece of the puzzle, and that is the antipathy that people in their party, no matter how much they are skeptical or not of their own party. There’s his deep antipathy towards the opposing candidates that we also tested in what was most in on what was motivating people’s votes,

[0:17:33 Joshua] right? I mean, it’s important. I mean, this is her. So when we look at Ah Clinton Hillary Clinton’s favorability numbers among Republicans, she’s feel she’s viewed unfavorably by 91% right of Republicans. Ah, you know, 86% of Democrats view Trump unfavorably,

[0:17:50 Jim] and and if you drill down into those numbers, the vast majority of those air not just unfavorable, they’re very unfavorable. I mean, the thing I always imagine is that when we are asking people about these questions, the person taking the polling, their computer is just like slamming its house so they could go very unfair. And when we asked people really directly about this, what do we get? We asked people So once they once they expect their product, they express their preference. We said, Were you voting? So is your vote mainly a vote for Donald Trump or mainly a vote against Hillary Clinton? And then we did the same reverse with Clinton voters among Trump voters, 45% said that their vote was mainly for Trump, 55% against Clinton,

[0:18:32 Joshua] right in 57% of Republicans,

[0:18:34 Jim] right? And so, yeah, and then on exactly. And then on the among Clinton voters. Overall, 57% said that they were voting for Clinton. Ah, 43 against Trump’s again. I think we’re seeing a little bit more of that positive affect among Democrats. Evident that number. But the against votes in that are both pretty high,

[0:18:55 Joshua] right? Exactly. These things air. All this is sort of reinforcing, actually, in a way that, you know, uniquely a kind of me is unique in the sense that it’s not classic, but it actually pushing us to the same point, which is, even if I’m not excited about my candidate. So against the alternative that we’re still going to see a lot of sort of normal partisan voting kind of. I mean,

[0:19:15 Jim] there’s there’s, you know, people are going to be pretty locked into their party candidates. I think we’re not going to see a lot of movement. The question is, how does it affect turnout before we get too far in the weeds? Let’s talk a little bit before we sign off for running long, Probably about issues We we looked at ah, set of issues that is, we said we thought were intersecting the national conversation, but also in some cases, have been very prominent in Texas. So we asked a battery of questions about immigration and and found not too many surprises in that. I don’t think

[0:19:45 Joshua] right is not surprised us, Maybe maybe to you. But we’ll let you now eso won. We ask a regular question about whether undocumented immigrants currently living in the US should be deported immediately. This is served goes back to kind of Mitt Romney. We’re gonna deport 11 million people. And I think Donald Trump is sort of, you know, waited. This is a possibility. Uh, overall, in Texas, you know, 50% of registered voters approve or agree with this sort of approach of immediate deportation, 42% disapprove. Among Republicans, it’s 73% state in approval, 23% against Donald Trump’s proposal to build a border wall between the US and Mexico. Again, very similar numbers. 52% of Texans you know support this idea. 40% oppose it. Among Republicans, 76% support it, 17% oppose it. And then, ah, a ban on non citizen Muslims from entering the U. S. Ah, on this one again, similar 52% overall in support, 37% opposed. 76% of Republicans approve, 16% oppose and this is actually went up a lot. We asked the same item about sort of, ah, ban on Muslim immigration back in February, and it was 63% of Republicans, so it’s jumped up 13 points during that period. Now, some of that is no doubt due to the Orlando shooting, even though you know he was a citizen and all that. But, you know, we don’t

[0:21:05 Jim] know you got probably fed it, but you know, when I step back and look at all these in an ensemble, it’s a lot of parties. You know, we didn’t give any of the Democratic numbers. The Democratic numbers are almost the complete mirror image. And all of these on the border wall, for example, for example, Democrats only 21% suppose support, 72% oppose. So I think, a couple of things here. One. The frame of the discussion in the presidential election is reinforcing tendencies that we’ve seen in Texas long before Donald Trump. You know, straight, we have his reality said, and onto the political

[0:21:36 Joshua] we get asked a lot about, you know, extra. Explain how this is Donald Trump’s fault, that people have these restrictive immigration views and the answer is, Well, no. Trump has benefited from these views, but they existed long before you know his. You know, his success in the primaries

[0:21:51 Jim] right? He is. He is exploiting them in a more direct way and not attempting to balance other interests in the party. I think in a way that that we have become familiar with in Texas, in which political leaders have done that. So another another. Another issue quickly that we talked about was transgender access, the public facilities and bathrooms. We found similar degree of partisan structure, and they’re not quite as not quite is. Ah is polarized, but pretty close.

[0:22:18 Joshua] Yeah, I mean, I think you know the first thing we want actually

[0:22:20 Jim] about is polarized. Really?

[0:22:21 Joshua] Yeah, well, I wouldn’t say has polarised

[0:22:23 Jim] Democrats are a little more or Democrats or a little more divided, but Republicans air pretty

[0:22:27 Joshua] well, right? the Republican structure is the same. I think there’s two things were sort of interested in with this with this issue is one, you know, kind of want to do a heat check. I mean, elected officials have been talking about this stuff a lot over the last couple of months

[0:22:38 Jim] and just to be direct. And Patrick has been all over this. The lieutenant governor in Texas is really Roll the dice. And, you know, I had a reporter talked to talking to me a few weeks ago that it had a sort of a semi off the record with lieutenant governor who had and who came away, the reporters saying it really feels like Dan Patrick views this as him standing up to the president of the United States. It’s him versus Obama.

[0:23:05 Joshua] Okay. Well, um, you know, I think from my perspective, not knowing, not knowing. And I haven’t spoken with the lieutenant governor. I was sort of wondering, Is this you know, is he out on a limb? Here? Is this is this you know, Is this a misfire on his partisan to reach and the results kind of show? Probably not. You know, it seemed that overall, you know, Ah, 50% of republic are sorry of Texans said that they were very or somewhat concerned about, you know, transgender public facility access. But, you know, like the immigration numbers that included, you know, 66% of Republicans Ah, and then across sort of a couple different issues. You know, should transgender individuals have access to public restrooms based on their birth gender or their gender identification? Should transgender students, you know, have access toe? You know, public school facilities based on their birth gender, their gender identity, You know, 75 70 75% of Republicans basically said birth gender is very clear, is unequivocal with Democrats, is a little bit more mixed with respect. Teoh access toe public restrooms. 29% of Democrats at birth gender, 50% said gender identity. And these, you know, results kind of held across across the items. And I think that’s kind of why you see it’s such a good issue for Republicans is that they’re concerned about it, and they’re very clear words for Democrats is not. It’s not exactly clear in a state like Texas how you respond because you know that about 1/3 of your voters actually would disagree with you if you took the gender identity right. Which is why you probably haven’t heard too much from Texas Democrats on this issue.

[0:24:36 Jim] But another reason we ask this now is that so we can follow this. I mean, my my suspicion is that as this issue takes more shape and as the politics of it become more public, we’ll see a little bit of movement. So I think with that, speaking of movement, we’re gonna move out of here.

[0:24:53 Joshua] You know, if you want to check out these results, any others you know you can go to the Texas Politics Project website of Texas politics that you text the study to you and we have all these

[0:25:05 Jim] more stuff than you can possibly. Just in a setting, you will be a link to latest poll. There’s also blood a link to the blogger. We’ve written up some of this stuff if you wanna have a look. So with that, thanks for listening. And we will see you next week. Second reading podcast is a production of Texas Politics Project and the Project 2021 Development Studio at the University of Texas at Austin.