Apr 2nd, 2024 – How competitive will the 2024 presidential election be in Texas?

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to the second reading podcast from the University of Texas at Austin. The Republicans were in the Democratic Party because there was only one party. So I tell people on a regular basis, there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called Texas. The problem is these departures from the Constitution, they have become the norm. At what point Must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room.

[00:00:35] Jim: And welcome back to the Second Reading Podcast. I’m Jim Henson, Director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Happy to be joined again today by Josh Blank, Research Director for the Texas Politics Project. Top of the morning, Josh. Top of the morning to you. Um, it’s a very nice day in Austin, Texas.

[00:00:53] Jim: So it’s that part

[00:00:54] Josh: of the year where we’re like, Oh, it’s so great to live here. Yeah, this is amazing. You have to tell yourself that aggressively. Yeah. And

[00:01:00] Jim: try to, you know, earlier conversation about, you know, what you choose to remember, to try to remember this. Um, so, you know, The idea today, we thought we might take an early look at, you know, the perennial Texas election question, which is already being asked to some degree.

[00:01:19] Jim: And that is, you know, how competitive are the two parties in Texas at the presidential level, uh, in 2024, you know, or to put it a little, you know, I’ve initially thought about this in a slightly different way, which was a, a spin on the election questions. Are Republican candidates better or worse off today than they were four years ago?

[00:01:38] Jim: And, you know, can we tell?

[00:01:40] Josh: Right. And in some ways, I mean, the way that question is phrased is broader, but, but I think, you know, you can’t begin to even start to deal with that question. We talk about, you know, the presidential level, right? It’s just such a dominant force and thinking about the next set of elections.

[00:01:52] Jim: Right. And so, you know, that, you know, that, yeah, that has a pretty big effort effect, although, you know, we’ll have to do a podcast looking at. you know, the gaps and presidential performance and legislative performance, which have been interesting.

[00:02:04] Josh: Well, yeah, even even top of the ticket performance have been kind of interesting.

[00:02:07] Josh: And last, I mean, it’s gonna be useful to look at that obviously.

[00:02:10] Jim: So, now you know, yeah. I mean, and you know, dis, discussion can be tricky for a lot of reasons. You have to kind of look at multiple polls and think about trend, but not get too locked up in it. But we do have a lot of data that we can look at in terms of, you know, our polling data going in going into The last, you know, this election cycle, last election cycle, you know, how that data lined up with election results in the final analysis when the votes were cast in the presidential election and even the U.

[00:02:39] Jim: S. Senate election. And then, you know, we’ll end as always, you know, in terms of our perennial theme, you know, we can consider things that we know, but there’s a lot that we don’t know. Or things we think we know and a lot that we don’t know. So, you know, I think the initial frame for approaching this, just to set the baseline is the trend in presidential election results in Texas over the, you know, we were looking at the last kind of post Bush elections, you know, and what those margins, you know, tell us.

[00:03:11] Jim: And that’s, that’s both the indication of caution, but also really why we keep returning to this question,

[00:03:19] Josh: right? Yeah. I mean, Right. I mean, it’s one of those things where it’s funny because I feel like, you know, there’s, I mean, I know right now, sometime within the next, within this year, we’re going to get calls, multiple calls and say, is Texas going to turn blue on election day?

[00:03:33] Josh: And we say, it doesn’t work that way. Right. Right. It’s not that, but, but there’s a reason these questions get asked. Right. And

[00:03:38] Jim: the first, Or somebody will be more sophisticated and say, but purple, right? But

[00:03:41] Josh: purple, right?

[00:03:41] Jim: Yeah. Yeah. Sure. I’m not naive. I’m not going to say blue, but it could

[00:03:45] Josh: be purple. Could be purple.

[00:03:46] Josh: But if we look back over the election cycles, I mean, this is the, I mean, especially at the presidential level, this is sort of the fundamental reason there’s more and more interest in Texas, especially as some other, you know, more traditionally competitive states like Florida, maybe Ohio are becoming like less competitive, right?

[00:03:59] Josh: I mean, among other factors, the twist

[00:04:02] Jim: in Florida, but that will depend on that in the last couple of days. But, but when

[00:04:05] Josh: we look at, you know, the, the Bush elections in 2000, 2005, You know, the Republican advantage in those elections, we’re just gonna use points right now. So many points did they win by was 21 and 23 points respectively.

[00:04:14] Josh: So that’s when we’re thinking about a 20 point advantage for Republicans. Right? When we look back over the Obama elections in 2008 and 2012, what we see is, you know, in 2008 there’s a 12 point Republican advantage. In 2012, there was a 16 point Republican advantage, and that’s sort of something you’d expect.

[00:04:28] Josh: I mean, in some ways in both of those, just notable thing right here, you know, you might expect the gap. to grow a little bit, especially with a Democratic incumbent in the White House and a nominally Republican state. And then we go ahead to the 2016 and 2020 elections, and we look at the Republican advantage there, we see 9 points in 2016 and then 6 points in 2020.

[00:04:46] Josh: So we’re looking at what was clearly a 20 point gap become about a 15 point gap, look now like a single digit gap, you know, sort of above 5 but below 10. And it’s

[00:04:56] Jim: also, you know, I mean, just as an aside on all that, I mean, it’s interesting to note that if you, particularly from the perspective of Texas and what we know about the Texas electorate.

[00:05:06] Jim: Yeah. There’s been something very distinctive and a little bit new or at least notable in each of not the, not even just these last four, but the last six presidential elections here. Right. And the fact that, you know, in the sense that, you know, you had the two Bush elections with Um, and then you have a well known and popular former governor on the ballot, then you have the first African American major party candidate in the next two elections, and then you have Trump in the next two elections.

[00:05:38] Jim: So I think it is fair, you know, there is a little bit of a like, so what is normal?

[00:05:43] Josh: Absolutely. Yeah. No. And one, I think that into your point right there, I mean, this is why this sort of thing is so important because I mean, right now we’re sitting here and we’re in this moment where you’re starting to hear who has weaknesses, who has strengths, where they are, and all these people are starting to try to, you know, read these tea leaves at this point.

[00:05:59] Josh: But what’s really important, I think, and what we’re trying to kind of do here is say, like, you know, what, what are your expectations, you know, where, where do they come, where do they come from? Because a lot of, you know, a lot implicit in a lot of these analyses are these, you know, sort of Often, you know, unexamined expectations about the electorate, and you do have to ask yourself, you know, is Biden weak?

[00:06:16] Josh: You say, well, compared, compared to what? With whom? How would you know, right? Is Trump strong? You know, does Texas matter? Does any of this matter in Texas? And ultimately, this does come down to a question of comparison points, which is why that’s kind of what we want to look at here, right? Right. You know, I think when we’re talking about Texas, Competitiveness in Texas, you can’t sort of ignore the 2018 Ted Cruz election, you know, which, you know, could be described as a blip, but also when you kind of look at it a little bit more closely at the Senate level, you are seeing something similar here.

[00:06:43] Josh: If we look at, uh, Ted Cruz’s two, you know, two elections in Texas in 2012, he won by 16 points in his first election, 2. 6 in 2018. Now it’s easy to say, well, that was during Trump’s, uh, you know, in the midterm of Trump. 2018

[00:06:57] Jim: was a, was a huge democratic turnout election everywhere. Right.

[00:07:01] Josh: At the same time, though, when we look at John Cornyn’s, uh, electoral results in 2014, he won by 27 points in 2020, he won by 10.

[00:07:09] Josh: So actually he had a larger numerical drop in his advantage, even though Cruz ultimately got closer in terms of the overall outcome, right? So Cruz saw about a 13. 4% Let’s just say 13 point drop between 2012 and 2018. Cornyn saw a 17 point drop between 2014 and 2020. And so if anything, you know, this, you know, while it may be easy to sort of say, well, that Cruz election was a strange one, it’s also, you know, reinforcing this overall trend at the statewide level of a, at the very least, let’s say a declining Republican advantage in the electorate.

[00:07:40] Josh: Right. Right.

[00:07:41] Jim: I think that’s fair. Okay. So all of this suggests, you know, I mean, look, so, so, I mean, if you look at all that, yeah, you know, there’s something going on here. As we’ve said repeatedly, the state is becoming, you know, in numerical terms, more competitive in the last four presidential elections. We are seeing movement in these Senate races.

[00:08:01] Jim: So, you know, in terms of thinking then about where we are now, and, and, and we should start by saying, you know, This is one of those baseline discussions. Yeah, absolutely. Right, it’s still, you know, I mean, even given what, you know, the political science of all this, it’s a little early to be thinking that we could look at the polling now, and it will tell us very accurately what it’s going to look like in the fall.

[00:08:24] Jim: I’m really glad you said that. Nonetheless. Yes. You know, we do, you know, I mean, so the exploration here is not in prediction, but like, how do we interpret what we’re seeing now at this stage of the campaign compared to what we’ve seen in the past at this stage of

[00:08:39] Josh: the campaign? And the thing is, again, we can’t say where it’s going to go, but ultimately to say where it’s going to go, we think we probably want to have a pretty clear eyed view of like where we are.

[00:08:49] Josh: Yeah. And where

[00:08:50] Jim: we’ve been.

[00:08:50] Josh: Right. Exactly. So, so one way we could start this is just by looking at trial ballot comparisons. So I mean, because we actually have the two same, you know, the same two candidates running again, we can look at our, you know, sort of simple trial about what she has among all registered voters at this point and see how Trump and Biden fared, uh, in February, 2020 compared to February, 2024, our most recent poll.

[00:09:10] Josh: And to sort of break this down relatively quickly, the notable thing first and foremost is that the top line, it’s remarkably similar. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in February, 2020, Trump was sitting at 47 percent Biden at 43 February, 2024. Trump is at 48%. Biden is at 41. We can say those results are within the margin of error of each other.

[00:09:28] Josh: We can’t say they’re even different from a statistical standpoint. Right now. Uh, there are some similarities, but there are notable differences. Ultimately support among Democrats and Republicans for their respective standard bearers looks, you know, almost identical. Um, I mean, remarkably so actually, uh, which I think speaks to this whole question about, you know, I mean, there’s a lot of questions that sort of raises about the way that people are certainly right now framing this election.

[00:09:51] Josh: You know, does it seem like Biden is cratering Democrats? Not really compared to where he was last time. Does it seem like there’s a, you know, a big share of Republicans with, you know, apprehensions about Trump? Well, currently it doesn’t look like it, at least in any sort of obvious way at the top level in a trial bout.

[00:10:05] Josh: There are other ways we can get into this. But just at the most sort of gross level, it’s not obvious there where there are differences, though, we would say is among some key groups in the electorate. And this doesn’t, you know, bode well for Biden, you know, in all honesty, right? So among independents, February 2020, uh, Trump was at 32.

[00:10:23] Josh: Biden was at 38. When we look at February 2024, Trump’s at 46. Biden’s at 27. So Trump’s, uh, support among independents over that period, you know, I’m just going to say that’s a weird definition, but goes from 32 to 46 percent Biden’s drops from 38 to 27. And

[00:10:39] Jim: remember the, you know, we, this is our true independence.

[00:10:41] Jim: So we’re looking at, in each of these polls, probably between 10 and 12 percent of the sample. Right. So, you know, the six point difference. In Trump’s advantage, you know, is small, but not insignificant, I don’t think.

[00:10:55] Josh: Right. And especially given the fact that if we take as a set piece to all this, the elections are getting closer, then we’re going to care about these groups of voters more and more.

[00:11:02] Josh: Another group of voters that we tend to look at because of how competitive the state is in these areas is suburban voters. In February 2020, Trump had a two point advantage over Biden, 46 44. February 2024, it’s grown to a 10 point advantage, 50 40. And then another group that we look at, you know, uh, Again, given competitive status, Hispanic voters again.

[00:11:23] Josh: Here we see a similar story. Uh, in February 2020, Trump was minus 11 among these 38 49. Uh, when we look in February 2024, he’s only down 142 43. So when we think about, you know, just looking at this on its own and thinking about the election outcomes, we should say, uh, so real quick, just if anyone said, well, yeah, but those are just, you know, polling results.

[00:11:43] Josh: And you just said they’re not accurate. That’s a that’s that’s Fair, but the

[00:11:47] Jim: way you say they were accurate, we said they weren’t predictive.

[00:11:48] Josh: They weren’t predictive. Yeah. So, but our last poll, our last poll in October before the election, we had Trump at 50 and Biden at 45, ultimately Trump won 52, 46 and a half, which would say is very much within the margin of error of those results.

[00:12:03] Josh: And generally speaking, I think our results look pretty consistent and lined up pretty You know, with again, post weighted, you know, waiting on exit polling and thing like that. So that’s, that’s how we got there. So if we say right now, what do we take from this? I’d say, you know, I’m not seeing a lot of evidence of necessarily, uh, apprehension within the parties of their candidates.

[00:12:20] Josh: Right. And we’re not necessarily. And another thing that I didn’t mention, but I’ll mention now. We’re not really seeing any difference in, you know, African American support, which has been a big topic of conversation. And in fact, if anything, we see a little bit higher African American support for Biden in 2024 than we saw in 2020, just barely.

[00:12:36] Jim: Yeah. And, and look, and the white numbers don’t change much. Right. But they do move in Trump’s direction by three points.

[00:12:44] Josh: Exactly. And so ultimately, you know, there’s probably not a wash there, but, you know, Trump gets, you know, three more points among white voters. Biden gets five more points among black voters, but it’s Hispanic voters, which where you really sort of say, Ooh, that, you know, that’s something that Biden would have to shore up to make this more competitive.

[00:12:58] Josh: Right. It was

[00:12:58] Jim: consistent with a theme that we’ve been hearing.

[00:13:00] Josh: Right. Okay.

[00:13:02] Jim: So, you know, so if we look at that, so that, so that sets it in terms of, you know, I think the other thing that I would notice there, I guess, is just that, you know, there’s You know, we saw not much proportional movement between the February 2020 numbers and the final, and our October numbers, the gap was the same, more people decided, and you know, they were pretty close to what we saw.

[00:13:28] Jim: Yeah. And,

[00:13:29] Josh: you know, as you say, on election day and on our October poll, just one big difference between these other polls we’re comparing is we have a likely voter screen. And so ultimately, the number should change a little bit there at that point, which is what we’d

[00:13:40] Jim: expect. And we are. And again, we also expect that this far out.

[00:13:45] Jim: The trial ballots tend to look a little more tight than the final result, generally speaking. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I think that’s right. You know, all things, again, all things being equal. So if you’re kind of thinking about that trend line, and we’ll come back to this, you know, I don’t want to, you know, spoil her alert, but I, you know, so, you know, you kind of put a pin in that at this point.

[00:14:10] Jim: So like, you know, dig down a little deeper, you know, we have job approval and, and favorability numbers for both of those, we can, you know, so before we, you know, we’ll want to move on to the environment if you will, but let’s look at how they looked at, you know, what the job approvals were for each of these incumbent Trump in 2020 incumbent Biden in February, 2020 incumbent Biden in February, 2024.

[00:14:33] Jim: And of course we have to tweak this a little bit because that February 2020 poll came. Right before I mean COVID was probably here, but right before everybody knew

[00:14:43] Josh: it was yeah before it hit before it was You know incorporated into the numbers, right? So let’s start by just talking about you know, the 2020 to 2024 comparison since Trump in February 2020 compared to Biden in February 2024 Where did each incumbent president stand at this point in their reelection campaign?

[00:14:58] Josh: And again, I mean, I don’t think this will be surprising But I think it’s also kind of Interesting, given this sort of discussion about Texas and what Texas looks like and actually they looked pretty similar in February of 2020, 45 percent of Texas voters approved of the job. Trump is doing 48 percent disapprove when we look to today, February 2024, 42 percent of proof of the job.

[00:15:16] Josh: Biden is doing 50 percent disapprove. So Biden’s approval is down three compared to Trump’s. His disapproval is up to, but ultimately these are actually pretty darn similar. Yeah. Again, speaking to this question about sort of discontent within the party, 9 percent of Republicans disapproved of the job Trump was doing in February, 2020, 10 percent of Democrats disapproved of the job Biden’s doing in February, 2024.

[00:15:37] Josh: So this idea again, that, you know, Biden’s, you know, cratering Democrats, you know, it’s not, not really evident in the data now. Again, where do we see some evidence of, of, you know, sort of problems for Biden? Well, number one was independence again. So Trump was, was net negative 11 in February of 2020, 36 approved, 47 disapproved.

[00:15:56] Josh: Biden is at negative 46. Yeah. And that’s, you know, that’s, that’s a problem. That’s, yeah, that’s. That’s, that’s a, that’s a big problem, right? Not a lot of opportunities there. And ultimately, I should just go back, go back a bit to that 2018 race. I mean, one of the notable things in the 2018 election that brought I think that final result between Cruz and O’Rourke so close together was that independents flipped in that election to sort of holding, you know, more democratic views, really more positive views of democratic case, significantly more positive views of O’Rourke than Cruz.

[00:16:26] Josh: And so, you know, to the extent that that wasn’t, uh, A 10 point race or wasn’t a six point race or a seven point race, but was a two point race. You have to consider the impact that independents have at least a couple of points of

[00:16:37] Jim: that was

[00:16:37] Josh: independent, right? On shaving that margin. Yeah. Uh, you know, similarly, when we look in the suburbs, Trump was at minus seven in February 2020 Biden is at minus seven.

[00:16:45] Josh: Teen this year. And then among Hispanics who again, Trump is not, you know, expected to sort of, you know, be on the positive side was, uh, he was at minus 17. Biden is not doing worse than Trump among this group, but he’s still at minus six. Yeah. And so not as bad as all you can say there. Now, to your point, this is a little bit weird because we’re saying, okay, well, February 2020 and then meet COVID hits.

[00:17:08] Josh: Then what happens? Right? Well, what we can do is we can look at Trump’s October 2020. Uh, approval numbers was right before the presidential election. The idea is COVID has been incorporated. It’s been ingested and spit out. Right? And first thing to notice is that, however, however, yeah, I mean, his approval goes up among Republicans by three points.

[00:17:27] Josh: Yeah. Uh, his, his disapproval among Democrats doesn’t change much at all because they had already decided how they felt about him. Uh, his disapproval goes up among independents about six points, but on the flip side, you know, he does better in the suburbs slightly than he did in February. Um, while going down with Hispanics.

[00:17:45] Josh: But, but I think the overarching thing I’d say is, you know, by the time we get to the election, you know, his standing decreased with some key groups, especially independence and Hispanics, but increased slightly in the suburbs. And I think most notably, you know, it didn’t. Dramatically shifts.

[00:17:59] Jim: No, no. We were talking beforehand.

[00:18:02] Jim: I think the striking thing is we’re like, well, we got to check the COVID impact and actually we’re look what we’re seeing, you know, to some extent, this oversimplifies a little is kind of the reverse, right? It’s almost as if, if you look at some of the other data we have, it’s not in the notes, but. We’ve discussed rather than the handling of COVID cratering Trump’s numbers over this period, basically the messaging on COVID from Trump and increasingly other allied elites moves Republican opinion on COVID.

[00:18:34] Jim: Right. So for example, I mean, one of the charts that we dine out on is, you know, all the time, to illustrate a different point is, you know, we have a trend chart of the website and we’ll stick it in the post for this at texaspolitics. utexas. edu. There’s a chart that show a line chart that shows the trend in the share of voters that say that immigration or border security is the most important problem.

[00:19:00] Jim: The only decline you see is for, I think, two to three polls, and I think it’s, I think it’s only two. And it’s basically April and August of. of 2020, April and June. Right. Yeah. Or yeah, April and June. It may even last until August, but maybe, you know, it starts to pick back up where immigration and border security, there’s a real clear dip, but then it just goes back up to pre pandemic levels are pretty close very quickly as Initially, we see COVID viewed as a real problem, and then Republican attitudes just

[00:19:36] Josh: shipped away.

[00:19:37] Josh: Just in time for the fall campaigns. Exactly. Right. Now, at the same time, it doesn’t mean there wasn’t a COVID impact, right? And I think, you know, for Picking this out is a little bit trickier in terms of thinking about some of these other things. So when we look at, you know, some other big macro kind of mood things that we might want to compare between February 2024, we can ask about the direction of the country.

[00:19:59] Josh: Now in February 2020, uh, 40 percent of the country is headed in the right direction, 49 percent sit on the wrong track. That’s not, you know, out of line, I think, with historical trends in some ways, maybe a little bit more negative. And in February 2024, Again, the comparison point is 28 percent say it’s going the right direction, 62 percent say it’s on the wrong track.

[00:20:18] Josh: Now, in isolation, you’d say, well, that’s, that’s pretty bad. Now, I think even, even not in isolation, you’d say that’s pretty bad.

[00:20:24] Jim: Right. It’s

[00:20:25] Josh: objectively bad. But then we also have to go back and look at that October 2020 number. And what we find is in October 2020, it was almost exactly the same as it is today.

[00:20:33] Josh: So today it’s 2862. In October of 2020, it was 2962. So there is sort of a, a story here that again, I think the campaigns are going to start to elucidate and we’ll see even more as we get to the economic numbers about, you know, wait a minute, why do you have bad, you know, where did these negative attitudes come from?

[00:20:49] Josh: Right. Who’s, who’s responsible for these negative attitudes because ultimately those negative attitudes. Have been baked in since the Trump presidency and haven’t really receded.

[00:20:58] Jim: And how, where are they going to land vis a vis a candidate? Right. And, and of course there’s been a lot of discussion about economic conditions and we looked at that too.

[00:21:06] Josh: Right. So, you know, a lot of, you know, heading into, you know, I think 2020 the Trump team was probably pretty happy about the economy. When we look at the numbers, they looked pretty good in Texas. 48 percent said the economy was better than the previous year. 25 percent said it was the same. 24 percent said it was worse.

[00:21:23] Josh: Now that’s much better than the numbers we see today. So again, 48 percent said it was better in February, 2020. Today it’s 33%. 24 percent said it was worse in February, 2020. 43 percent say it’s worse today, but we have to throw COVID in there now. Right. And so when you throw COVID and you look in those October 2020 numbers again, at that point, 67 percent of Texans said the economy, the national economy was worse than a year ago.

[00:21:46] Josh: So if you’re comparing, you know, this becomes a story of, you know, which comparison are we making when, you know, when, when Biden, uh, and, and his team want to try to, you know, potentially take credit for any sort of economic improvements. You know, one of the things, one of the challenges are going to have is You know, which Trump economy are you talking about now again?

[00:22:05] Josh: We’ll come back to this later. I mean, Trump, I think, as a candidate was pretty unfortunate in terms of the way COVID and the economy interacted.

[00:22:12] Jim: Yeah, no, I mean, I think, you know,

[00:22:14] Josh: remarkably, um, but the question is going to be, you know, to the extent that, you know, the Biden campaign is both, you know, successful in making this a choice and not a referendum on his election.

[00:22:24] Josh: Fire, prayer for years. And then it becomes a choice. It becomes okay. Well, let’s talk about the Trump economy becomes well, which Trump economy, this sort of, this speaks to both. I think, you know, I mean, I would just say, this speaks mostly to the challenge of that because it’s not as simple as just saying, remember when Trump was, it’s like no remember this period

[00:22:41] Jim: in when I, you know, I mean, we thought about this a little bit because there’s been so much discussion about this in the last year is the economy as you know, as the inflate as inflation is cooled.

[00:22:53] Jim: You know, there’s been a lot of talk about, you know, what are people going to think about the economy? When will they notice that what will they remember? Right? What is their anchor point? Yeah

[00:23:02] Josh: And I mean, and I mean, you know, you and I’ve talked about this before but like, you know, the the limited memory that most people hold about Politics, politicians, campaigns, past policy, that kind of thing is something that, you know, is someone who studies public opinion is just something that never fails to kind of amaze me.

[00:23:21] Josh: Well, and

[00:23:21] Jim: not, yeah, and, and, and not only limited, but You know, selective and cognitively biased, right? Right. In terms of motivated reasoning and, you know, just the patterns of memory, you know, yeah, you know, are, you know, the likelihood of us, us being generally more likely in a lot of circumstances to remember a positive experience.

[00:23:44] Jim: If it’s mixed in with a negative experience, you remember the positive part where you, Disproportionately weigh the positive part.

[00:23:51] Josh: Yeah. And I’ll say, you know, part of what makes something positive in a lot of ways is something that confirms your preexisting beliefs. So ultimately the thing, the information that you’re more likely to encode and hold onto or the things that are easier for you to hold onto because they don’t challenge your existing beliefs.

[00:24:04] Josh: So if you are, yeah, this applies to both parties right now, you know, And so that if you’re a Democrat right now, you know, you might be more inclined to say, yeah, prices are higher, but, you know, it could be so much worse and inflation’s cooling and, you know, things are, you know, control if you’re a Republican, it’s really easy to say, you know, Hey, the economy was really humming under Trump and things were great.

[00:24:22] Josh: And, you know, basically Democrats spent too much

[00:24:24] Jim: money and, you know, and, and, and look, although,

[00:24:27] Josh: although, although, although I should say Trump did sign the first check, he put his name on it, if you remember, well,

[00:24:31] Jim: and Democrats, you know, have, you know, a real challenge here because the, You know, the partisan politics around COVID are so baked in now that, of course, if you are somebody that goes into this with the belief that, you know, you don’t even have to be a COVID denier.

[00:24:50] Jim: I mean, but you know, I mean, the moderate. You know, and in some cases, very plausible and defensible position that some of the COVID reactions, anywhere from some COVID, some of the COVID policies was a little bit of an overreaction or misdirected or whatever, to it was all, you know, a crazy overreaction and, you know, whatever, you know, it’s going to be very, you know, you’re not going to be very open to democratic arguments that say, yeah, but he mishandled, you know, Trump really fundamentally mishandled COVID made it work, you know, it would have, you know, made it worse than it needed to be, et cetera.

[00:25:25] Jim: I mean, that’s just not, it’s just going to pass through or bounce off. I don’t

[00:25:29] Josh: imagine that either candidate really wants to make the campaign about their handling of COVID. I don’t think

[00:25:33] Jim: anybody wants to relitigate it. I mean, You know, Trump likes to take credit very briefly for the vaccine, but even that’s tricky, very tricky with you mean that you mean the

[00:25:45] Josh: government

[00:25:46] Jim: ship?

[00:25:47] Jim: Right. So, so we don’t see, you know, so, you know, the takeaway so far, you know, Interesting differences in key groups. Yeah. Not a lot of help in how we think about what we see in the economy. Right. And, and the fa and you know, we can do the favorability numbers real quickly. We haven’t done those. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, so those, you know, those tell a fairly similar story though also probably not as good for Biden as

[00:26:12] Josh: for Trump.

[00:26:13] Josh: Yeah. So we can look in Texas. Yeah. So we can look at, you know, just on a. on a straight comparison between whether voters have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of each, which gets, gets around this whole one’s in office, one’s not right. You know, we find in the February, 2024 poll, Trump was plus four overall with voters, 49 favorable, 45 unfavorable.

[00:26:32] Josh: Biden was at minus seven, 43 50. Personally, for me looking at that, I don’t necessarily take that and see that as a, as a. Is a wow kind of result partially because Biden is the incumbent. I mean, he’s in office. I expect there to be stronger negative opinions about him currently than Trump as a, you know, potential nominee and now nominee.

[00:26:51] Josh: So I could see that, you know, sort of that gap closing between them over time, both as Democrats come, you know, warm back up to Biden over the course of the campaign, even if that’s because of aversion to Trump. Um, and also because of aversion to Trump and simpler with, you know, Republicans. Uh, You know, interestingly, again, going back to this question of, you know, is there a bunch of, you know, dissatisfied Republicans or Democrats, only 12 percent of Republicans that they had an unfavorable view of Trump, only 9 percent of Democrats that they had an unfavorable view of Biden.

[00:27:18] Josh: And they had basically the same rate of favorability for each of their own candidates. Going back to these key groups, we see, you know, the same problems emerging, you know, among the independents, Trump’s at minus 7, 42 favorable, 49 unfavorable, Biden’s at minus 48. 2270. So yes, you can say, you know, if anybody wants, if you hear anybody saying, well, you know, this is one of those, you know, uh, you know, what’s the best, you know, the best bad decision.

[00:27:43] Josh: It’s like, well, yeah, but clearly there’s one decision that seemed much worse than the other right now. I think, yeah, I

[00:27:48] Jim: mean, I, I think, you know, Biden suffers among independents from two different dynamics. One, A conservative lien, all things being equal to independence in Texas, you know, and then also, you know, and I probably had not noticed this as much, but I think it holds cutting across that a slight anti incumbent lien among independents

[00:28:08] Josh: as well.

[00:28:09] Josh: Yeah, I think so too. So yeah, I would say what I flesh out the second part saying, you know, the anti incumbent lean is because, you know, at least in my mind, not being more to bipartisanship, all those filters we were talking about, all those confirmatory things don’t exist, stuff, all those filters don’t exist.

[00:28:22] Josh: And so ultimately, you know, whatever sort of is going wrong, it’s very easy to attach to whoever, whomever, you

[00:28:28] Jim: know, as we put it, You know, our, our ongoing portrait of independence, it’s another little piece of that independent mindset.

[00:28:34] Josh: Just to let you all into the, into the, into the black box, you know, one thing I’m thinking about now, as I look at this too, and something that we should go back, I mean, we haven’t done it because we do look at true independence, we’re only looking at 10 percent of the sample, but we could average over time.

[00:28:45] Josh: And one of the things I would suspect, but I’d have to look is to see whether independents are whiter than the electorate as a whole. And whether that also is picking up, you know, some, some, some of that conservative lean in there too. You know, when we look at other, it seems like they would have to be, it seems like they would have to be for sure.

[00:29:03] Josh: The question, but yeah, I mean, we’ll have to go, but I, you know, yeah, we’ll actually look, we’ll actually look and report back. So, you know, and then we look at, you know, another key constituencies here is, you know, suburban voters, Trump’s at minus three, Biden is at minus 15. So that’s, you know, a pretty big, it’s five times larger that gap.

[00:29:18] Josh: Right. Uh, and

[00:29:20] Jim: probably not far off. What the core suburban breakdown is. Yeah. I think

[00:29:27] Josh: that’s, you know, certainly, certainly with, with, you know, within one standard deviation, as you might say, right. You know, certainly not, not, not out of line. And then among, again, we’ll just, again, among Hispanics, uh, Trump is at minus eight, 42, 50, and Biden’s at minus six right now, 40, 46.

[00:29:44] Josh: And so, You know, almost breaking even there with that group in terms of, you know, basically similar sets of views. So, you know, a little, you know, underwhelming to say the

[00:29:54] Jim: least. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think one of the things we see here is, you know, to the extent that, you know, and we talked about this a little bit last week, it really does point to this.

[00:30:03] Jim: You know, how we’re gonna, how we’re gonna be able to parse out voters responses to these candidates and general negative partisanship. It’s, well, I think, you know, that looms really large in these favorability

[00:30:20] Josh: ratings. Yeah, I mean, this, you know, we brought this up briefly last week and this may be, it gets into more of the discussion piece of this sort of what’s unpredictable and you know, there’s the sort of the unpredictable and then there’s the unpredictable and hard to To handicap piece of this.

[00:30:32] Josh: And we, we talked about this a little bit last week, and I think this puts a little bit more meat on the bones here, but you know, in mobilization elections, you know, the idea is how many of your voters can you turn out? And again, here, we’re not saying that, you know, you said you don’t see in core partisans, any sort of weakness here, but you do see two candidates who generally are on the wrong side of most things.

[00:30:53] Josh: Metrics with the key constituents of the electorate. Yeah. They’re campaigning underwater. They’re campaign, they’re both campaigning underwater. And so, you know, I think just as a, as just sort of, you know, a student of elections or scholar of politics or whatever you want to call it, this is an odd situation, right?

[00:31:09] Josh: I mean, it’s, it’s a little unusual in that, you know, nobody is really fire, you know, clearly firing up the electorate or clearly. And this idea of like, you know. Well, you know, Biden’s the incumbent, but also he’s going to try to make this a referendum on, or not a referendum, but a choice between his record and Trump’s, you know, that’s

[00:31:26] Jim: an interesting, I think you could say he wants, if, you know, if you asked Joe Biden, what would you really like this election about?

[00:31:31] Jim: He would. Might even say a referendum on

[00:31:33] Josh: Trump. Yeah. Oh yeah. Even better if that was possible for Biden, not, not likely, but, but so that’s sort of a weird thing when you think about it, you’ve got sort of two underwater candidates, you know, you, you know, that they’re going to lose some of their voters. And I, and again, I think we’ve made really clear right here, not a lot, not a lot, but that’s also the difficult part.

[00:31:49] Josh: I mean, that’s so much of the discussion right now is sort of where the candidates are weak within their own party, looking at, you know, the nature of the Haley voters or, or. you know, how many Hispanics Biden’s losing, or if he’s losing black voters, or what if Trump, you know, has a black vice presidential nominee, what might that do to Biden?

[00:32:04] Josh: Yeah. You know,

[00:32:04] Jim: and in both cases, you know, who is, who are the third, are the, are the non major party candidates going to help or hurt or? Right.

[00:32:11] Josh: And I mean, those in some ways are the easier questions because you a little bit more clearly, but, but, but, you know, just as again, from a social science polling standpoint, you know, what we are talking about is we’re talking about.

[00:32:21] Josh: little, little subsets of the electorate that each maybe add up to one or two percent and overall might have some, you know, kind of notable impact on the election, but it’s really hard to uncover in the data. Right. I think,

[00:32:33] Jim: right. Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, I, I think, and I, you know, this was, I’m not going to, Um, you to this, but, you know, as we were talking about this going in and we were looking at the data and, um, you know, I mean, if you look at the overall trend data, yeah, you look particularly, you know, you, you know, I mean, I think you take into account all these, these kind of gray area campaigning underwater factors we’re talking about here, but you also look at the gap between the trial ballots, the trial ballot in 2020 and the outcome in 2020 and where we are now.

[00:33:11] Jim: Yeah. Now, we’re about to talk about all the things that would confound this, but you know, the big question is, you know, if you look at this downward trend in the top about top of the ballot results that we talked about in the margin at the outset of the podcast, you know, the question is, does the slope continue to make it tighter or does it perhaps flatten out and fan up a little bit, you know, and it does.

[00:33:37] Jim: I think we both agree that you’re probably looking at a slightly wider margin, all things being equal right now, right now, seven to

[00:33:52] Josh: eight. Yeah. And I would agree with that. I would say, you know, we said six points in 2020, the polling showing us at seven. But, you know, and what we do more and much more frequently, the more often we poll is, you know, you can kind of look at these micro trends and say, yeah, but because, cause ultimately we’re looking at registered voters and we’re looking at all the, a lot of these numbers right now, except for the trial ballots.

[00:34:10] Josh: Well, actually no, even including the trial ballots. So we’re looking at registered voters. So we have to kind of condition our reaction to these numbers a little bit by the fact that this isn’t going to be the final electorate, knowing, you know, what we know based looking at these numbers and looking again at the.

[00:34:24] Josh: The key groups that we think of as being competitive in the state. It seems unlikely to think that Trump’s starts it below six points. Right. I think it’s unlikely that he starts at 10 points or 12 points, but I think saying seven or eight is sort of where he’s beginning this race seems pretty fair.

[00:34:42] Josh: Right

[00:34:43] Jim: now. Okay. So having set that up, you know, there are, you know, there, there are a lot of unknowns and the, I said, you know, all things being equal, all things are unlikely to be equal, butt. So, you know, tons of stuff. Obviously, you know, we don’t have to like beat this to death because we ended with kind of a little bit of this now last week, but, you know, there’s the generally unpredictable nature of this being a presidential rematch and not just a rematch, but a rematch between two people that have both Already been president right this kind of in contest of the

[00:35:12] Josh: incumbents, right?

[00:35:14] Josh: And I look this up because i’m not like a historian So, you know grover cleveland is is the these sort of the only former president who’s come back after being defeated to win a second Non consecutive term right, but I also notable When he lost, he won the popular vote. He lost the electoral college. So there is that not trying to make a controversial statement, just throwing it out.

[00:35:32] Josh: And

[00:35:33] Jim: it’s a different, it’s a different setup. Right. But Teddy Roosevelt tried to come back, but he had to come back as a third party candidate. Right. Because he was unhappy with his successor, Taft. He lost and dragged half down with him and you get what is a somewhat surprise presidency of Woodrow Wilson, now kind of infamous in everybody’s eyes, right?

[00:35:55] Jim: You know, either, you know, Woodrow Wilson goes through, you know, periods of being down and being up. I think he’s in kind of a down period right now. I think he’s He’s in a down period right now. Uh, and that, and that was 1912. And, uh, but then that was a fast, that was a really fascinating election for a lot of different reasons, subject for another podcast, maybe a whole other branded podcast.

[00:36:17] Jim: Um, so you could find someone else for that one. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I, you know, you probably, I wrote, well, anyway, we’ll come back to that. I wrote my master’s report, had a lot of research on that 1912 election for reasons that are, cause it was Um, and um, Well, first of all, I don’t think that the government is going to be able to protect itself.

[00:36:34] Jim: There’s nothing that the government can do to stop the spread of this virus. But there is a lot of information that is out there on the internet about how the government is going to deal with this virus, because you know, it’s a virus that will, it’s a This, this flip in what we think of as the literal incumbent advantages and the liabilities, which is kind of what we’ve been talking about, right?

[00:36:56] Jim: That

[00:36:56] Josh: is what, you know, and it’s funny you can kind of come back to this and, and you know, it was in the notes and now that we’re here and we’ve gone through all this, you know, it’s interesting because if, if we didn’t do any of this, we didn’t do any of, look at any of the data or whatever and you’d say, okay.

[00:37:10] Josh: day. You know, as an incumbent in a very difficult election, and I mean, you can go back to those podcasts. I said, doesn’t matter Donald Trump, anybody else, if you were sitting there and these are the COVID numbers, these are economic numbers, you’ve got a hard time on your hands. Now, Trump isn’t saddled with any of that, potentially, right?

[00:37:26] Josh: And if you kind of set that aside, you’d say, boy, you know, it would seem to me that with the advantages and liabilities flipped, Trump should really be in a strong position. But at the same time, we’re looking at the numbers and saying, so what does that amount to? Maybe a couple points. Yeah. Right. You know, which speaks to the closest overall of like, you know, elections in general.

[00:37:42] Josh: And again, you could say like, yeah, but you’re talking about the difference between six and seven eight. It’s like, yeah, but that also means in other states where people are

[00:37:48] Jim: really looking to say, it’s a good time to remember people were talking about Texas. Right. And you know, that couple of points may not matter so

[00:37:55] Josh: much here, but it definitely does in Arizona.

[00:37:58] Josh: Yeah. And,

[00:37:59] Jim: and, and whether it’s, you know, what direction that couple of points is right.

[00:38:03] Josh: Right. Okay. So, but what’s the, but again, I think it’s surprising in some ways because, you know, I think depending on what your expectations are coming in, you could think either Trump should be massively advantaged because he’s not being saddled with these liabilities.

[00:38:15] Josh: Biden is at the same time. If you’re a Democrat, you can think, but it’s Trump, right? And yet, you know, the overall movement is, is kind of seems looks like looks kind of minimum, but at the same time. Right. Trump brings a whole lot of other things to the table this election that are going to be Novel

[00:38:35] Jim: and that we’ve all proven.

[00:38:37] Jim: I think generally bad at forecasting the impact of yes agreed You know generally in the overestimation of the impact direction, I think yeah I think well overestimation of the negative impact and probably and They’re not the same thing underestimation of the positive impact

[00:38:54] Josh: Right. So I mean, so for example, the things we’re thinking of right now, like, you know, the, the, the long tail of January 6th, and then it’s kind of mobilization into threats of democracy towards democracy, this idea of, you know, sort of various legal entanglements and troubles that he’s still currently facing.

[00:39:10] Jim: You know, even the impact of the pandemic, which we’ve seen, you know, we expect both candidates to kind of set aside, but it’s out there. It’s

[00:39:15] Josh: out there. And then I would say, you know, we’ve talked before about, you know, if, if, One of the things that I think is a bit of a weakness for Trump in all of this is the fact that, you know, people have said, I think this is true, he hasn’t done a lot on, let’s say, assertively to expand his coalition and where this is sort of most obvious is, you know, I think in the courting of, or at least the failure to just openly disavow the very far fringes of his party, which aren’t going to help in a general election campaign if they’re, you know, too front and center, right?

[00:39:40] Josh: Or even at all,

[00:39:41] Jim: right? And on the other side, I mean, and I don’t think it’s hard to predict is that, you know, particularly because of. It kind of goes back to the partisanship, individual candidate piece, but also the degree to which we know that Trump is, you know, a mobilization machine for Democrats.

[00:39:56] Jim: Exactly. Or at least has been to

[00:39:58] Josh: date. Yeah. And he’s, but you know, and he’s also been a mobilization machine for I would say, you know, unlikely Republican voters in a lot of cases. Now what also makes this complicated, I think, is on the other side is, you know, the nature of Biden’s policy accomplishments thus far is that they almost all include some kind of a lag, right?

[00:40:16] Jim: It’s, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s, you know, I mean, this is an obvious irony, but I mean, it’s the scale of achieve, of his achievements are kind of the problem, you know, I mean, the infrastructure spending, the green energy spending, the CHIPS Act, you know, all of these are. Yeah. Medium to long term policies. Oh, and

[00:40:36] Josh: I’d even add to that, dealing with inflation, which has to be slow.

[00:40:39] Josh: It can’t happen fast, because if it happens fast, you’re in a recession. So, I mean, even that in and of itself is on a much longer timeline than say, you know, boosting, you know, or decreasing unemployment, you know, boosting,

[00:40:50] Jim: you know. Yeah, and that’s making it, you know, particularly hard, you know, we’re not, you know, but tricky to make sense of where we’re seeing economic numbers moving because, you know, people’s, the, uh, the estimation of the economy, as you described earlier, are

[00:41:04] Josh: getting better.

[00:41:05] Josh: Yeah. I mean, you know, so to come back to the economy for a second, again, views of the national economy and Trump as a candidate was, was remarkably optimistic. Unlucky in that, you know, in February of 2020, uh, you know, I think nearly twice as many people said the economy was better than said it was worse.

[00:41:21] Josh: Yeah. You know, by April of 2020, 64 percent said it was worse. 21 percent said it was better by the next poll in June. It was 70 percent said it was worse. Uh, it improved a little bit. In October, but at that point you had, you know, more than two thirds of, you know, the electorate, at least in Texas saying the economy isn’t good.

[00:41:38] Josh: Yeah. And interestingly enough, you know, he, he leaves the presidency and, and, uh, attitudes improved, you know, significantly, although the economy was, you know, the views of the economy were still underwater during much of 2021, but as inflation took hold, and this is sort of, you know, Biden’s cross to bear now, right in the middle of, you know, sort of his first term in June of 2022 is when you saw, uh, the highest share of Texans saying that the economy was worse off at 73 percent even beating Trump’s peak at 70 percent back in June of 2020 and sort of the, the, the real, you know, meet the early days of the pandemic.

[00:42:09] Josh: But there’s another story, right? Which is since that point in time, views of the economy have been improving, you know, pretty clearly and pretty steadily. So in much of 2022 still negative 60, you know, High fifties, low sixties said the economy was worse off during much of 2023 that dropped into the mid fifties in the last three polls.

[00:42:27] Josh: It’s been 55 percent say the economy’s worse off 49 percent 43 percent going up into February, while the share say it’s been getting better went from 23 to 28 to 30. 33 over that period. So the question that becomes, how did those lines terminate between now and October? Yeah.

[00:42:40] Jim: And, and, and we also, you know, we always feel this way as we’re running up to another poll, but the next poll, I’m really interested to see this number.

[00:42:47] Jim: Yeah. Me too. Whether it flat, you know, whether it, you know, kind of flattens a little bit or the word continues to go, yeah, continues to converge in terms of the, the, the positive versus the negative reading. So, with all of this, where does this leave us? It leaves us, you know, we’ve already sort of said, given where it looks right now, you know, to go back to the original question or even the sub question.

[00:43:13] Jim: Are Republicans, you know, we’ll start with the sub, are Republicans better off than they were four years ago for Republican candidates? I think probably. I would say yes. You know, I think probably. You know, on the whole, including Trump in Texas, you know, it, it looks better. Is Texas becoming more competitive?

[00:43:33] Josh: Oh yeah, I would

[00:43:34] Jim: say yes. Yeah, we’ve been saying yes, but we’re probably, because of the answer to the first question, we’re probably not going to get the kind of, you know, we’re going to, we’re going to continue to get this question based on. what we probably see this, this, yeah, right. This, this election, certainly at the presidential level.

[00:43:57] Jim: And I think, you know, I think we’ve, we’ve collectively or jointly decided that, you know, we’re going to wait on talking about what the Senate race might tell us about this. And we’ll do that in another podcast. And we have, we need to get a little more data on calling

[00:44:07] Josh: all red. Yeah. And I would say, you know, I mean, the only sort of thing I’ll just put out as a question, just to think about, you know, a little takeaway homework, right.

[00:44:14] Josh: Is, you know, how much How much do we think, you know, how much ability do we think that Cruz is going to have to shape his own campaign environment and how much is he going to be reacting to the environment that he’s in? Right. And I think, you know My lean is towards he’s going to be reacting and that’s the thing that’s the one thing you say, you know This is where we sort of expand the question from you know, you know is Trump better off than he was four years ago Well, almost certainly right he’s not in the middle of a pandemic.

[00:44:39] Josh: He’s not yoked with these negative economic evaluations and ultimately It’s not as though all the post presidency stuff has really hurt him with his core constituencies And if anything on the constituencies that we think are the most competitive in Texas. He’s in a pretty good position.

[00:44:54] Jim: It seems like all these other things are already so baked in,

[00:44:57] Josh: right?

[00:44:57] Josh: It seems like all these other things are so baked in

[00:44:59] Jim: now in the context of views of Biden and the difficulties of the economic difficulties of the last

[00:45:04] Josh: couple of years, right? Now, how that all plays out for candidates down ballot is, you know, not entirely a one to one match. And I think that’s something we need to think about.

[00:45:14] Josh: And we’ll, we’ll talk about again

[00:45:16] Jim: because some of the things that we’ve seen is that there are, you know, There are many Republican House districts where the Republican candidates outperformed Trump. Yeah, and there

[00:45:24] Josh: are many, and there are many counties and also districts where even John Cornyn, much, you know, much criticized, even among Republicans, outperformed Donald Trump at the last election cycle, which speaks to, you know, some interesting factors that I think still are going to require us to go even deeper into this data.

[00:45:39] Josh: This sort of first setup, you know, does kind of misses.

[00:45:42] Jim: Yeah. I mean, because I think, you know, uh, these numbers show Trump better off for, you know, reasons that I think, you know, are not, we can’t extrapolate from the data, I don’t think. And it’s something for us to think about, I think is, you know, what would help us figure out where Trump, where Trump is stronger and where his vulnerabilities are and with whom.

[00:46:01] Jim: Right. And we, you know, we’ve explored that a little bit with some of the awareness of his legal problems, et cetera. But I think where we stand now, it certainly seems like, you know, there’s no reason to say that. to expect at the presidential level, an increase in competitiveness or any kind of increase in that trend at best, probably a flattening of it.

[00:46:22] Josh: I mean, yeah, I think so. I mean, the way again,

[00:46:25] Jim: based on where we are right now in this, all these things we just talked about in the last five or 10 minutes would underline how that could be disrupted, but it’s also fair to say if it hasn’t disrupted it yet.

[00:46:36] Josh: Yeah. I mean, I think this is, this is like a good example of Bayesian thinking, right?

[00:46:40] Josh: We had a prior probability, which is basically what. What we saw in the last election cycle, right? And now we’re looking at the polling the polling makes us both think that that gap is probably a little bit wider than we Saw in the last election cycle. Great. That’s the update now All the things we’re waiting to see are you know, if economic perceptions don’t pick up, right?

[00:46:58] Josh: Uh, and then with them overall views of biden among some of these key groups Well, we should expect that number to maybe expand a little bit Right the flip side is is you know if If, if, you know, the economy continues to improve, if perceptions of the economy can need to improve, and honestly put in a big bucket, all the things that could happen because Donald Trump initiates them or they happen to him, right?

[00:47:18] Josh: Then maybe that, that gap closes, but do we think it’s going to close to like one or two points or like four or six? And I’d say probably the

[00:47:25] Jim: latter. Yeah. I mean, I, I think there’s nothing in these numbers or the history of Trump’s polling in Texas writ large, right? Not to mention nationally, you could even say it’s part of this argument, you know, to expect that even given, you know, the very strange circumstances of Donald, you know, the Donald Trump finds himself in, that the bottom is going to drop out.

[00:47:46] Jim: There may be some erosion, but unlikely that people are going to wake up one day, go, you know. Maybe that, maybe this isn’t a good idea. Maybe not. It just seems unlikely. So with that, thanks for, uh, the prep and a good discussion, Josh. As always, thanks to our excellent production team in the dev studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

[00:48:07] Jim: If you’re listening to this on a podcasting platform, Form you can find all this data that we’ve discussed and much more at Texas politics dot u texas.edu. Thank you all for listening, and we’ll be back soon with another second reading podcast.

[00:48:27] Jim: The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.