April 30, 2021 – Second Reading Podcast

[0:00:00 Speaker 0] Welcome to the 2nd 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? Yeah. And welcome back to the second reading podcast for april 30th 2021. I’m Jim Henson, director of the texas politics project at the University of texas at Austin. And today I’m joined again by josh blank. Research director for the texas politics project for a special edition of the podcast. That’s going to Look at the body of data that we’ve accumulated in a year of polling in Texas on the COVID-19 pandemic. So welcome Josh. Thanks for having me and congratulations on all the work that you have done on this year of polling. You know, I haven’t taken the chance to look. We’ve talked about looking, I don’t know that there’s another comparable set of state data to the data we’re going to talk about today. You know, you brought that up the other day and it was like one of those things, you know, no offense boss in one year at the other like you’re trying to say you’re trying to process this. I’m like, oh yeah, let me go look for the other polls given, given the list of things we need to do. You know, I didn’t expect, you know, but you you keep an eye out and I was wondering, I figured if you if you knew about something at the time you have spoken up. You know, I’ve seen a lot more national stuff. I haven’t seen too much. And you know, we’re you know, we’re pretty tapped into that. I mean based of like professional organizations and stuff like that. But I haven’t seen much. I haven’t seen something very similar to this set of data that we’ve been accumulating at the state level. Yeah, I think that’s right. So we’re just sitting here virtually patting ourselves on the back and we invite somebody and actually this is really serious. If you do know about, you know, another series of polls in in another state. We’d love to have the comparative case and just doesn’t come across our desks yet um into our inboxes, whatever metaphor you want to use. So we’re releasing this podcast to coincide with the initial release of results from the april 2021 ut texas tribune poll today and that, you know, april 30th, depending on when you’re listening to this and if you’re listening to this on the 30th, there’ll be a lot more interesting results released on monday or two and monday and Tuesday of the following week, this coming monday and Tuesday. Um so there’s a lot in this poll but today we do want to focus on on The COVID stuff because what we’ve done is gather a pretty big to use the technical term pile of data on Texas attitudes towards the pandemic. Now, you know, a little background on the outside of the pandemic. We made an early decision in in 2020 to increase the number of polls that we were executing as the pandemic Uh began to sort of rear its ugly head. So we added a poll to our 2020 data set Um and then increase the number of polls that we had planned for 2021, both in conjunction with our frequent partners of the texas tribune as well as some standalone polling and some stuff we’ve done in collaboration with others. Ut Austin. So now we have a series of five polls going back to april of last year um that have significant batteries assessing Texans experience of the covid pandemic, not, you know, we don’t have a complete battery, Everything isn’t exactly the same or identical from beginning to end because something’s aged out. Some of the questions we asked them the first part of the sequence um weren’t as relevant going, you know, as as as the pandemic war on and as the pandemic war on, something’s popped up like vaccinations we swapped kinds of behaviors we swapped out. Are you, are you disinfecting your amazon packages and stuff like that? Yes, there were some, you know, I was going to be mean, but there’s no reason to be mean. I mean, you know, there was there was some learning that was going on and they’re learning that went on in practice was reflected in things that we asked about it in the polls. So, um, so we have this, you know, and so today, what we thought we do is talk preliminarily about what we’re seeing this and we’re, you know, we’re going to do a lot more with this. Um, as time goes on and there’ll be lots of material on this on the blog, as as time as as as we continue to go forward with this and we’re not done. I mean, we will, you know, the pandemic is not completely over and even if it was, we’d want to get the wind down anyway. Although one of the themes today is that we’re beginning to see at least some perceptions of a wind down among some Texans. So, so let’s let’s talk about this josh. And um let’s start with some of the more immediate matters at hand that people might be interested in that are maybe a little more current and relevant and and nothing probably more so than vaccines. Yeah, absolutely, Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, it was one of those things while we were, I think while we were in the field that johnson and johnson recall happened, and so, you know, there’s a possibility that that would impact people’s attitudes towards vaccines and actually, you know, we didn’t really find that. And what we’re finding is that a lot, you know, there’s some sort of, you know, class half full glass half empty about vaccines, at least with the data. That’s what’s funny. I was going to ask you, I was gonna ask you, we talked about this and so I have this be back process. And I was going to ask you whether you thought this was unbalanced good news around balanced bad news Since we’ve written about whether vaccine attitudes were yeah, good for public health are bad for public health. And in balance up to this point, we’ve been worried just to be fair. Yeah, I’m gonna say glass is half full and I’ve got some reasons for that. But we’ll put it will put a pen and that will come back. So just to set the stage here, you know, we ask a couple questions about vaccines. One thing we wanted to do is we wanted to separate out basically people’s attitudes towards the safety and efficacy of vaccines in general versus their decision about whether or not they’re going to go and immediately get a covid vaccine. They’re not, they’re unsure already have that kind of thing. And so both in this poll and actually back in february, we asked people how much or whether they think that vaccines in general are safe and whether vaccines in general are effective. And then overall, just to make a kind of symbol to discuss, we talk about vaccine trust is basically people who say that vaccines are both safe and effective in generals General, you’ve lived your life. You think vaccines are safe? You think they’re effective? You basically trust vaccines. You should give a little pull. A little pulling technique. Foot notice why we some people have just asked, do you think they’re safe and effective? And we chose not to do that? Well, right. They could I mean, those are two different concepts. Right. Ultimately, the vaccine could be extremely effective, but maybe, you know, your legs will fall off. Well, that’s not safe. right? Or you might believe your legs would fall off, right? And well, I’m just making this is a hypothetical, right? But similarly, you could say, I think vaccines are totally safe. They’re just not going to do anything for me. And so that’s why we wanted to break out each of those factors just to be really clear about it. But then we ultimately combine them back together here. It’s I think it’s an illustration of how we’re willing to do things that are kind of a pain in the ass in order to be better and more more precise because this because this has been, you know, more work and your time and, you know, except that time is money on a pole. You know, I’m just here having my head spin think about you said you just said anyway, yes, we make it harder on ourselves for you all. So anyway, the people, the people. So In this poll we found, you know, overall trust was that 61%? Which I mean is, you know, kind of damning with faint praise a little bit right, because ultimately there’s 39 of Texans who are less than trusting of vaccines in general, which I think is part of the broader context for, you know, half full. Half empty here. But that’s up five points from February, technically, barely more than half full. Yeah, technically, barely well 10%. More than 10 points. More than a fat full. Right? So anyway, I promise you promise what you want. So anyway, up to 61 from 56 in February. I think that’s, you know, good numbers because of the fact that that shows increasing education efforts are having at least a slim effect on people. Because this happened. Despite the fact that the Johnson and Johnson recall the biggest gains we saw over this period, from february to april, Were among the groups that honestly, you know, no, we no need to get vaccinated at higher rates than they are. So 18-29 year olds, their their overall trusted vaccine increased by 18 points. Rural Populations Express 17 Points Higher Trust in Vaccines. The black population saw 15 point increase in their trusted vaccines. So in general, these messages that are out there, they’re trying to mobilize communities towards the safety and efficacy of vaccines seem to be hitting their intended targets. Same time though, You know, there’s still low levels of trust in particular among Republicans. So overall, you know, the lack of trust is 47 among Republicans 48 among conservatives, 43 among Republican women, women. So, you know, ultimately it’s sort of again half full half empty on the vaccine safety measure. But it’s getting better and it’s hitting at least it’s intended targets, right? And and and even among those groups, like among republicans, and and there’s a lot of those groups you mentioned you did see some movement on trust, I mean, but I guess, I guess ultimately Republican Trust went up. I stayed about the same, I guess. So, they all were fairly stable now that I look at this, I was thinking some of them had moved, but they didn’t. So then, you know, we asked another question about vaccines, the million dollar question here, which is basically are you going to get a vaccine as soon as it’s available to you or have you already got in one? We basically, people can say yes, they already have no or unsure. You know, on this measure again, this is sort of a I would say a half full half empty result. Again, You know, 6 10% of texas or 64% of texas said they either already have gotten a vaccine or will definitely get a vaccine as soon as it becomes available to them. 36 of Texans said either they would not, we’re unsure or didn’t know. This is, you know, the lowest measure of hesitancy that we’ve seen in 44 polls were conducted going back to June of last year before the vaccine even existed. So on the one hand, that’s a really good result. You want to see that hesitancy continuing to go down. On the other hand, when we look at the people who either say that they are definitely get a vaccine or already have Of the 64% 54 of that, 64%. So all about 1010 of the total population, just because I’m talking about has already gotten at least a shot of the vaccine. That sounds high. But remember we’re talking about voters here is going to say this is where we should flag that. We’re talking. This is registered self declared registered voters this year. Right? So this is a higher socioeconomic status group than the population of the state as a whole. So we’d expect higher rates of vaccination. The problem is only 10 of the sample said Yes, I’m going to go get a vaccine after the 54 who said they already did. So when we’re sitting here talking about the demand problems that are cropping up in a lot of areas where now supplies starting to outstrip demand. This is actually a really good encapsulation of that. Because what you’re seeing is that the people who wanted vaccines have mostly gotten them. There’s a small share of people left, at least in the voting pool who say they still need to get one. And the remainder now are at the people who are hesitant Right now. You know, again, I thought you were going to go a little more with the half full on this. I mean, you know, the hesitant number has dropped from 48 to 36 between just just between February and April. So we are seeing, you know, a little less skepticism of vaccines. So that number is still pretty high. The other thing we have to, you know, probably put in here is that some of these people that are that are hesitant and it’s fair to say they’re still hesitant. But, you know, may have had it. We’ve had what? I think A little over two million people in Texas who have had the virus. Yeah, I think it’s about 2.4 Then you have to 2.3 something you have to take out of that. You know, unfortunately the more than 50,000 people that have attributed the deaths that have been attributed to the virus, probably an undercount. Um, you know, so the so the vaccination level is a little higher. That’s that hesitancy level might be not entirely hesitance. There may be some people in there that have had the virus and are just like yeah, I’m not going to get it or I don’t know and we don’t ask that. Yeah. And I think, you know, and I said yeah. And the reason I see this actually is being a half full moment is because you know, everything seems to be moving in the right direction, right? We are vaccine more people. The polling data is moving in the right direction. The hesitancy is going down. The groups who had identified earlier in the pandemic that expressed resistance in particularly african americans are starting to show more trust and higher uh, you know, basically stated intention to get or actually having received the vaccine. And so I think that’s really important. You know, I think the broader context and the reason this is a half sort of a weird half full, you know, is that when you say, well, how can it be half full of 39% of people don’t trust vaccines said, well look, you know, my attitude on this at this point, having looked at this data is that you know, not having an attitude about vaccines are not being sure about him is not the same thing as being resistant to vaccines. Yeah, no doubt some of these people that have that were in those categories in earlier polling. The reason that some of some of those people have moved, just got and got a shot at some point. Right. And the thing is, you know, I think there’s a sense, I think especially amongst public health experts, people in the media covering public health, the politicians focused on, you know, basically a vaccination campaign and programs to get people vaccinated as quickly as possible. Might underestimate the extent to which, you know, a lot of people just don’t really think about vaccines. A lot of people don’t get vaccinated the flu for example, for anything. Exactly, and that’s how they live their lives. So that when you say, you know, you need to go get a vaccine, what do you think about this? A lot of people have already made a decision that they don’t get vaccines. And so now it’s not about that they are never going to get a vaccine. But you have to overcome their initial resistance to vaccines. Which is what we’re seeing play out. Right? I mean, you don’t get like some huge number of flu shot up. Take. I mean, you know, the highest levels of vaccination probably are among Children would be for sure, right. And that’s because it’s basically required in most cases. You can’t you can’t go to school in public schools without it. And probably some private schools, I assume. Um Okay, so then, you know, so let’s let’s then move from vaccines to something a bit more speculative. Although it’s already getting off the ground and in places outside the United States I think. And that is this notion of vaccine, passports. And I’ve been interested in this, you know, very interesting this almost from the beginning of the pandemic since about May of last year. Yeah. I mean, I was sort of predicting, you know, there’s going to be a software application, there’s going to be all kinds of, you know, the market is going to respond to this. Um, you know, and I would say probably underestimated the degree and I foolishly uh, the degree to which there would be ideological pushback on this. Although I honestly wasn’t thinking that far forward. I was just, you know, in wish fulfilment mode and and speculation and also, you know, it was a matter of social speculation to to be fair at the time, I was thinking about longer term responses to all this. Well, and to be fair, you know, I think at the time that we started thinking about the idea of a vaccine, passport or you know, first of all vaccines did not exist yet. And the questions with the vaccines did exist, How do we start to kind of restart society? But also at the time that you were interested in this, I think, you know, in particular, ah, essentially the public health response, at least at the state level. And you know, maybe at the national level was let’s wait till we get a vaccine. Right. And so this was a more realistic discussion as opposed to then, once we actually have a vaccine. And the question becomes, you know, one of vaccine passports, a. K A a government record of your medical well, and in the early period when we thought that it was going to take longer to get a vaccine, it was also some mixture of saying, you know, if it turned out mm, that you only got you can only get it once, it would also be certifying that you’d had it right that you had tested positive and and we’re and we’re no longer but we’re no longer contagious. And that was that was folded into it. But be all that as it may, whatever was going on in my head at the time. You know, we did ask this time do you support or oppose the use of a credential? You know, for example, a vaccine passport we put in parenthesis For people to provide evidence that they have been vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to gain admission to events or activities with large groups of people. And if that sounds convoluted to you, it’s because the question we thought required it given that as we were putting the pole together, um, you know, we were already getting the sense that vaccine passports were becoming, you know, politically symbolic in the way that, you know, that masks and various other aspects of this had become and it would also, you know, passport, some denotes travel, et cetera. We just felt like we needed to spill it out to to spell it out. And so what we end up finding was that Texans were almost dead evenly split. 41 supported 42%. Um, we’re opposed with the rest either don’t know or or ambivalent right now, of course. And I think, you know, matching the, if you’re listening to this, you know what the political discussion around this, it sounded like 72% of democrats were in favour of vaccine passport, 72% of republicans were opposed vaccine passports just to get away from partisanship. For one second, you know, the non white populations that have really born much of the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic were more open to vaccine passports, 50% of Hispanics and 46% of blacks, compared to 36% of whites. People living in the urban parts of the state as opposed to rural and suburban parts were also more open to vaccine passport. So some of this is contextual, but I mean, just, you know, to to defend our convoluted question a little bit, you know, part of it is is that, you know, I think the convoluted nature of it reflects the fact that it’s actually a far more complicated idea than a lot of people really give it credit. Right? So one of the things we were talking about is, well, you know, will these be required or will they be, you know, something that you can do? Who’s going to do the requiring right? Is this something that you need to work? Is this something that you need to go to school? Is this something you need to attend? An event for a leisure activity? Like if you want to go to a spurs game, like what are we talking about here? So that automatically is a very different set of consideration. This has been a little bit of a political economy of the polling podcast because we did sit for a moment and we didn’t have room to do this. We considered, well, one way to ask this would be, you know, would you, you know, which of the following would you want, you know, supporter oppose using this or the speed required and then ask a bunch of those activities you were talking? Right? Exactly. And I mean, I think, you know, based on the results of this item, I’m not sure we would have seen that much variation across the different, you know, context, but again, it depends on the context. It also depends on, you know, who is, who is maintaining this data, you know. I mean, ultimately I bring this up kind of, not infrequently, but there’s two kinds of federally protected data, educational data and health data. So the idea that people would be forced to provide health information, even as simple as whether you were were not vaccinated. You know, it touches a lot of, a lot of privacy concerns and other issues. Yeah. And I think that probably, you know, I mean, you know, to continue the thought that you started, I mean, the privacy concerns, I think hit a kind of the ideology piece of this, but then there’s also you were putting this in the end, as we were discussing this the other day, I think with Ross Ramsey, there’s also a piece of this, this hit that just is the situation on the ground that you were calling it the X people’s experience or their lived experience. That is, you know, this is going to be a lot more meaningful and the trade offs are going to look different, even allowing for privacy concerns if you live in a dense urban environment versus a less dense suburban or, you know, much less dense rural environment. You know, there are just fewer applications, Right? And, and, and the way that you’re, you’re weighing this out is just gonna, you know, is bound to be different. Um, but that is something that overlaps as, as, as we know with the ideological things. So they are all kind of entangled, Right? And even the racial element in terms of, you know, uh, you know, hispanic and, and and black Texans being, I’ll think being more likely to live in denser urban environments. My guess is a vaccine, passports are going to move forward in texas and anyway, it’s going to have to be coming from the private sector. Yeah. You know, and honestly, that’s kind of, you know, I think that was kind of the direction they’re going and so well, and there’s, I don’t know where it is in the process, but I believe there’s legislation proposed, you know, that’s backed by the governors, you know, prohibiting or limiting in some way the use of such, of these such such credentials, the state agencies at least, which is common move for governments. Exactly, Okay, so, you know, let’s let’s step back and look then a little bit at the arc of the coronavirus story so far and what we’ve captured over the last year. I mean, we’ve seen, you know, a lot of movement in Texans perceptions of the urgency of the crisis and the degree to which they perceived threats. You know, the more I looked at this and the more that I’ve thought about it, it all seems to make sense to me. You know, I mean, another, you know, I mean, you know, I can piece together, you know, when the time comes, I think, a coherent story here, at least in the overall, you know, thinking about how we might superimposed, you know, this makes us like a working session podcast, you know, how we might, you know, superimposed the trend data with, you know, events, you know, with event cup points. I think that story is going to look pretty, you know, like a pretty terrible into it into it is a little too strong a word. But, you know, I think the story is going to make sense. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, you know, I think we’re probably thinking odds are we’re thinking about the same things here, we’ll set aside, you know, how much detail we need to get into in that story. But there’s sort of two. Yeah, I would say there’s sort of a broad trend that we could we could say with some specific important pieces and there’s a couple of key events. I think that sort of break the trend a little bit. And so, I mean, from my perspective, you know, when we first started pulling a year ago, obviously there was so much uncertainty about this. You know, fear was pretty, you know, I would say pretty widespread concern was pretty widespread as you’d expect. We just didn’t know. And then, you know, what you can say is there’s been a general trend towards less concern over time, which again I think makes perfect sense for a number of reasons. Right? When we know more about the virus, people were adjusting their behaviors and also, you know, people were able to start to, you know, I would say measure their concern against their own relative exposure and risk factors. And as we saw that happen, I think overall we saw little adjustments and I say little adjustments, there’s big partisan differences, but overall there were still, you know, again, adjustments. Then there were sort of two things to kind of break that trend up a little bit. One I think the surge in july so once the state, you know, basically once the the second surge was so july was a big one where you are june pulling start to pick up. I think a fair amount of increasing concern after a sort of big drop going from april uh Right, Yeah. Right. And then, and then I think another big piece of this would have to be when the variants started. So kind of going from the end of last year, at the beginning of this year, there’s a lot more uncertainty coming back up about, you know, are these variants going to basically be a big setback for, because I think we’re expecting like some change in february and a lot of the things were kind of static Between October and February. What’s interesting? I think, you know, this is really, I mean, you know, just you know, this is really a reflection. I think of the vaccinations. I mean it’s really interesting because I think, you know, you go and we asked people for example, you know, we’ll get a little bit ahead of ourselves here. But to the behaviors people thought were safe between October 2020 and February of 2021, it was almost as if there was no movement on the activities the Texans thought were safe to engage and go grocery shopping, good work, haircut. The only one was, you know, more people were confident that they could send their kids to school, which is, you know, it was true because there’s more CDC guidance that this was safe. But then you look from february now to april in almost everything we could ask people about. So a pretty big up tech and the share of people who say that it’s safe and I think that is, you know, almost surely, surely being driven by increased vaccination rates and you know, I think just generally people starting to feel safer knowing how to engage in activities. Yeah, I mean, I think we have to do some more reading up on, you know, a literature background, I don’t know, although we all know more about it and now than we did, which is kind of public health, you know, what we know about, you know, public health perceptions, but I’ve got something for the wrap up on that a little bit, but as I think about it, it’s sort of like, you know, I mean, is I’m thinking about, okay, if we take the we take the data on public attitudes that we have, and then there’s going to be overlays, there’s like a public health overlay that is kind of some of the things you’re talking about, what are people, you know, what’s the situation on the ground, you know, level of knowledge, level of, you know, to your maybe that’s I’m not sure exactly. I would even even think about what the thresholds are on that. Um you know, and then there’s just, you know, there’s there’s gonna be, we’re gonna have to have a set of political variables at the state. Well, that’s what makes it, that’s what makes it complicated, right? You know, which is what is, you know, how do we how do we think about it? You know, I mean, at a certain level, it’s like, you know, governor declares emergency, governor, shuts down, governor, you know, then loosens shutting down, you know, Shelly Luther, you know, Shelly Luther lime, um you know, all of the, you know, the, you know, the election, right? So there’s a set of political variables on the overlay that are going to be interesting on that national state, you know? You know, so there’s that, I got to say, you know, you just said something that really, like, I just, I’m just going to throw this out here because I hadn’t really thought about this. But it’s really interesting thing to think about. So, one of the things that were kind of glossing over here are the different and we’ve talked about this in the past, but the different experiences of the pandemic between democrats and republicans, right? And we’ll get there. I mean, the main, the main just here is the democratic concern has been consistent and extremely high, basically from the start of the pandemic until today. I mean, even to this poll, it’s still extremely high when we ask about, you know, concerned about community spread, when we ask about, you know, concerned about contraction, you know, asked to rate, you know, the significance, you know how the crisis it is, it’s been pretty consistent. Republicans peaked a year ago in april the drop consistently. And I’ve seen some of these bumps, you know, that we’ve talked about, but, you know, it’s interesting you bring up the election and that’s, you know, a really, I think that’s a really interesting point because, you know, one of the things we think about, you know, I feel weird reaching back into my political science bag here Dusty, but I mean, we talk about the purpose of campaigns is to, you know, they say they called enlightened preferences. Ultimately, most people are kind of floating around, they don’t pay a ton of attention to politics, but they have an attachment to one party or the other. And it’s interesting to think about the impact that, you know, a year of being stuck at home in such a hyper partisan environment during a presidential election cycle would go and reinforce people’s partisanship and the extent to which that partisanship reinforced attitudes about the pandemic. Right? Well, and and yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I mean, that’s kind of that’s broadly what I was, I mean, that’s pretty much what I was thinking, that, you know, I think what we have to do then, I mean, we’re talking about the overlays, but then the other thing is that the trend lines and attitudes, you know, your decomposing those as well, and looking at the overlays and saying, okay, what does the overlay look like uh against the overall population? What does it look like again, republicans, democrats, even independence? Um you know, and how does how do all these things in Iraq and what is the story that comes out of that? Um and, you know, in the story, I think is going to be, I mean, because, you know, just to the in the way that you explain it or that you described it, you know, the fact that republicans change their attitudes much more rapidly and, you know, in a definite direction than democrats and, you know, there’s some democratic movement, we haven’t talked about behavior very much and we’re going to run out of time, but, you know, there, you know, we are seeing that democrats are doing more, you know, they’re not doing as much as republican, you know, they’re they’re shifting, you know, they’re shifting in a more active, more direction towards more careful public activity, where I would say, you know, you know, republicans are ahead of that curve and, you know, shifting in a more careless, you know, public activity or, you know, back, you know what, we careless as being a little sharp, but but basically a huge share of republicans shit report now, just becoming and going is normally from there. I mean, careless might actually be the most accurate way to describe. No, I think it’s, you know, I mean, I think it’s just to be fair, yeah, I think that’s right and not a majority of or it dig it as being very literal and that’s kind of like it into that language, Right? Yeah. I mean, you know, if we say, you know, democrats, republicans or democrats are still being more careful, you know, I guess we can stay carefree. Um, but so that that’s so in that sense, I think, you know, that that’s an interesting pattern that we’re seeing. It’s gonna have a lot of implications as we go forward and, you know, you alluded to this, but, you know, the list of behaviors that people see as more the larger shares or majority shares of subgroups see us safe rather than unsafe is just getting longer and longer. Right. Right. And just, you know, the people of the Democratic list is longer this time too, right. I mean, but without getting to the political differences, well on that we have time, let’s just do some quick summaries on the behavior because I think it’s worth talking about what this looks like. You know. One of the questions you ask people is, you know, regardless of the restriction your area, basically. How are you living? You know, and on one of the scales, you’re living normally coming and going as usual from your home, on the other end of your skills, basically, you’re just never leaving home and just focus on the people who make their living normally. You know, back in april, only 9% of Texans in april 2020 so that they were living normally coming and going as usual to that slowly ticked up over time. within the context of some of those things we were talking about today, it’s 33% so one in three Texans, however, fewer than 10% of texas, democrats still say they’re living normally. In fact only 8% it’s never gone above 10% over the five polls among republicans that started at 11 went to 30 to 41 40 and it’s up to 55% today. So half of republicans in the voters in the state currently, so they are living their lives normally coming and going as usual, you see similar Types of changes with social distancing behaviors, for example. So whilst they’re still upwards of at least 64-80 of people basically engaging in social distancing wearing masks, those kinds of things, it’s always been above 90 for Democrats. For all these behaviors. For Republicans, for example, you know, wearing a mask at the beginning of the pandemic, 69 went up to 78 81. It’s back down to 67 Avoiding large groups. Was at 80 at the beginning of the pandemic for Republicans went to 73, 17 is now at 56. So, you know, these are, this is where we are now. We are in the wind down, as you say. And one of the things I think, you know, we need to dig into that I’m really interested in is, you know, the relationship between, you know, vaccine attitudes and vaccine, uh, you know, regiment whether people actually taken the vaccine and their behaviors right now in action because it’s going to be interested. You know, whether the republicans who are living freely are the ones who’ve gotten vaccinated or whether it’s the ones who have to, right, well, hopefully we’ll have that in the next couple of weeks. So, you know, I’m sure, I’m sure that that so you know, I think the you know, I’m gonna ask you quickly, I mean, you know, and this is like a lightning round because this will be like the subject of and we haven’t looked at this enough, but like first cut, I mean this is almost like a hot take. I mean, you know, you stand back and say, okay, you can because you’re putting all the data together, what do you learn from this, what do you think we might have learned from this? Um you know, this is a little, a little, I mean like you know, I don’t know why I’m even prophecy that this is a give you a lot of caveats. There is a little big thing. I mean, you know the thing that I keep thinking about that I’ve sort of learned from this from, from where we sit, you know, that’s all I can say. You know, I think the relationship between people’s concerns and their behaviors is very complicated, right? I mean, I think, I think that’s the thing that I really, you know, sort of taken away from this both from a polling perspective, but also from a public policy perspective, from a public health perspective, you know, and a part of that is because, you know, concern is a very odd emotion, right? It could be it could be the cause of a lot of information or none. And it can also change over time in terms of, you know, the the balance of of again those two factors, you know, and then it’s all taking place in this broader sort of political, you know, environment, we have a campaign going on, we have mixed messages about what’s happening and, you know, so, you know, it’s an interesting, it’s interesting to see where, you know, the public’s concern matched. You know, let’s say the concern being expressed by public health officials and affected their behavior consistently and where it didn’t. I think that’s kind of the thing that I’m really sort of interested in going forward and trying to go back and learn a little bit more about, you know, the nature of it, the nexus of a particular emotional state and the behavior that, you know, we would we like to think is linked to it somehow. What have you, what have you learned? Well, you know, I think I’ve learned something obvious honestly. You know, I mean, right now and again, I think as we dig into this more, I’ll I’ll think more, but, you know, to me, I am still pretty astounded at, you know, the degree to which partisanship really was so fundamental to people’s perceptions and behavior in this, you know, as much as we try to qualify that at various points, so that frankly, it didn’t seem like we were blaming republicans for being, you know, careless or, you know, indifferent which they weren’t and by and large, but nonetheless, I mean, you know, and I think I think we’ve internalized it already and I think that’s what I’m almost trying to backtrack a little bit in terms of my own processing of it, but, you know, and I think it’s too easy in retrospect to go, well, of course, you know, of course, you know, why would this be any different? But I think as we saw people begin to die in significant numbers, uh, you know, I’m trying to not be jaded about this or you know, intellectually defensive and go, oh yeah, well of course, you know, partisanship is different. I mean, it’s, to me it’s really kind of interesting and fundamentally meaningful that something this fundamental in this much of a disruptive social crisis with such human costs was so easily vectored bipartisanship by at least some people, you know, and I don’t buy some people, I mean, you know, look, some democrats were, we’re guilty of various things that points in this, but you know, the degree to which partisanship really fueled a lot of denial about this that I think is not going to go away. Um, you know, it’s fundamentally really, really interesting to me. You know, I wonder how much I mean, like one of the things that, you know, there’s two things I think about one here, you say that is one, you know, I agree. and I think, you know, the first is sort of, yeah, You know, you think about how many deaths we’ve experienced in the car and you sell these sort of graphics complications like, hey, How many fewer people died in 911 and that immediately mobilized the country 90 behind whatever, right? You know, how many people have died in world wars and you know, you start doing some Jesus, you know, this is like a huge thing. And I wonder if it’s the fact that it happened slowly. I mean it’s been a long year, right? But the fact that, you know, it’s kind of rolled out over time. On the one hand, I think there’s sort of a difference in terms of the shock value of it, right. I mean, ultimately, you know, we didn’t get to a point where we were rationing care in the hospitals and choosing who was going to live and who was going to die. And I think that probably, you know, made a difference. Uh, but at the same time, you know, you’re, you know, when you’re saying you’re saying, hey, you know, we’re having a 9 11 every day in terms of deaths. And you know, the answer from, you know, going to partition from one side is no, we’re not, those numbers are wrong. It’s like, uh, what I just, I don’t know, I don’t know what to do with that. You know, there are a lot of things that, you know, I mean to explain here, you know, and we’ve, you know, we’ve we’ve engaged some of these things as we’ve gone through it. But, you know, you asked me whatever, you know, what have I learned? It’s like, you know, that we are in, you know, we are in a real fundamentally interesting world about the you know, in terms of the way that the people can engage in the kind of cognitive leaps and twists and turns that you were just kind of referred you referred to a couple of them and you know, I think one of the things that decomposing all this data and thinking about it and doing something with this kind of a project scale obviously is gonna, you know, that’s going to be a big piece of it. Right? So I think with that I wanna thank josh for being here. I want to urge listeners to keep an eye out the texas tribune today rolled out. There’s a whole other couple of clumps of data that are very interesting that came out in the tribune today. Nothing hot, right? Nothing hot. Just election reform and voting. Um so you know, have a look at that, have a look at the data on this. Uh we will be rolling stuff out as always at the texas politics project website texas politics dot utexas dot e d u. And you know, keep an eye out on the tribune monday and Tuesday morning, there’ll be other waves of this. Um not giving away too much, I don’t think, you know, monday will be tons and tons of stuff if you follow the texas legislature and the fundamental issues that are that are being engaged there. And what has been, you know, speaking of expectations, a very active session legislatively so far. There’s a lot going on. Uh we pulled a lot of that. There are the results, there are a lot of fascinating results in that. And then later in the week we’ll have, you know, the usual things like approval approval levels of political leaders other issue, polling some national stuff, So keep an eye out. Thanks for listening. Thanks to our crew in the liberal arts development studio in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of texas at Austin. Be well, if you haven’t gotten it, just get a shot, talk to you next week. The second reading podcast is a production of the texas politics project at the University of texas at Austin