April 6, 2021 – Second Reading Podcast

[0:00:00 Speaker 1] 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? And welcome back to the second reading podcast for the week of April 5th 2021. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Uh, here to talk with Josh Blank again of the research director of the same Texas politics project. How are we today, Josh? Doing

[0:00:57 Speaker 0] excellent.

[0:00:58 Speaker 1] I thought so. We’ve got a lot done this morning.

[0:01:01 Speaker 0] I’m excited to be here.

[0:01:03 Speaker 1] That’s good. And talking about an exciting topic. So, uh, right before the de facto long holiday weekend around Easter, we released the results of a poll that we did in March that we, Josh and I developed in conjunction with a team of researchers at U T s Energy Institute, and we asked dozens of questions about Texans experience during the winter storm about their attitudes towards the causes and the consequences of the storm. Uh, there are views of and expectations about the the possible policy responses. Um, particularly those being engaged as we speak in the in the Texas Legislature, Um, and their views about a wide range of actors from their neighbors utility providers, industry, state political leaders, regulatory bodies, corporate actors, you know, we threw a lot. We do a lot in this poll, um, some of which was developed, um, you know, specifically towards research objectives of some of our colleagues at the UTI Energy Institute, some of which was stuff that we were interested in. Uh, it was it was a nice collaboration with, you know, among a large, diverse group of people. Um, and we you know, I thought we got interesting results, didn’t you? I mean, sometimes we forget to even stop and talk about that. I think we crank these things out and you move on to the next thing. But, you know, I was pretty happy with this.

[0:02:35 Speaker 0] Well, you know, I mean, I think when you conduct a lot of polls, you kind of get used to an interesting results from time to time. And you start to find ways that they’re interesting maybe to you, if not other people.

[0:02:46 Speaker 1] And I’m thinking, I’m thinking of some of our listeners going. Yeah, no kidding.

[0:02:49 Speaker 0] Yeah, well, exactly. Well, look, we know it’s not like, you know, every question we ask is some, you know, home run. And the truth is, you know, that’s good, because obviously, we don’t expect everything we asked to have some sort of shocking and ridiculous result. But, you know, in this case, I mean, it was actually very interesting because I mean what I always serve, You know, the way I classify interesting is usually, you know, how much do I think? I know about what the responses are likely to look like. And if it’s a question or topic we’ve asked a ton of stuff about, you know, usually we have a pretty good idea of what you know, the distribution of opinions can look like with something like this. I mean, really, you have no idea, right? I mean, it’s this huge event that is this huge event that just happened. We don’t even really fully understand the scope of it in terms of, you know, people’s experiences of it again, there’s been a lot of political talk about it, But I mean, what was so nice about this is I think this poll was a really, you know, great mix of, you know, both sort of just the kind of practical policy analysis stuff. What happened to people. What was their experience like, you know, if we were trying to develop solutions for the future, what kind of things would you want to deal with? And I think this place to uncover some things that maybe people aren’t talking about. Um, you know, But on the other hand, there’s sort of this general, you know, set of evaluations of the range of actors involved. You know what people perceive is actually having happened? Because I think a big part of this we’re gonna discuss a little bit as sort of the attempts to frame what happened and how that’s landed with people. And then also, you know what their reactions are to the policies that are being discussed as a result to you as a response to what is ultimately actually a very complicated, you know, event in a very complicated system of interlocking parts. And so, you know, I think this poll gets a lot, gets a lot of the way towards understanding a lot of things that I can’t say, You know, prior to doing it, that we knew

[0:04:33 Speaker 1] the answer, Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think you make a good point about complexity, and this has been, if not the calendar year, because this happened in 2021. But certainly the last 18 months or so have seen us engaging a series of, you know, we’ve talked about this on the podcast before a series of problems that have that are very systemic in nature, or at least function in in very complex systems, you know, in our direct and are directly related to them, obviously thinking about the pandemic and the pandemic response. And now this. And so it’s been It’s been very interesting for these kinds of things that, you know, we didn’t do in the 1st 10 years of polling. Uh, and that’s certainly, you know now have come up and really and really shifted things. So you know, Let’s start with some of the framing. Um, you know, And as we talked about this will go back. And, you know, we could We could do this in kind of a linear way. But I think for our purposes, you know, I think we’ll start with the framing and then go backwards. You know, back into some of the causes, we

[0:05:33 Speaker 0] could have a linear discussion about this, but that wouldn’t be this podcast,

[0:05:36 Speaker 1] right? And then then we’d be different people in a different podcast. We’ll do it this way. So, uh, so you know, you talked about framing, and I think, you know, one of the one of the things that really came out of this, I think, was where the leadership in the state were successful and maybe less successful. Although I think, you know, we see signs of a lot of success here in framing the crisis and particularly the Who was gonna get blamed. I think we talked about this a little bit a couple weeks ago, before we had these results. But, you know, pretty clearly early on, you know, you have to say it. I mean, the governor was pretty clearly looking to hang this on her cut, I think from, if not the very first press conference and and public addresses the storm is unfolding in which there were members of the railroad Commission and the PC and ERCOT and you know, other emergency actors in this kind of all hands on deck. Here comes the storm press conference. Once things started going bad, we started seeing fewer. Those people show up at those events, in particular the market. People seemed to be no longer invited. Um and that was a sign. And then we saw obviously very explicit sign saying that this was this was ERCOT and and this was her cat’s fault and that that was gonna have to be where the attention was put. And I think, you know, for an entity that almost certainly nobody knew anything about or very few members of the public it probably even knew existed. Which makes sense, given their role as an intermediary in the system. Uh, a lot of people had attitudes about ERCOT and they were overwhelmingly negative,

[0:07:25 Speaker 0] right? But, I mean, we say they had a lot of attitudes, not deep attitudes.

[0:07:28 Speaker 1] Right?

[0:07:29 Speaker 0] So I mean so you know, there’s two items that kind of touch on these regulatory bodies. You know, we asked people just at the outset of the poll before we even got really going to the set of topics. How familiar would you say you are with ERCOT? The piece we defined, you know, we call the Public Utility Commission, but the P. U. C and the Railroad Commission and overall, this is again after a month of many. You know, many actors, you know, explicitly bashing these entities. They’ve been, you know, in the paper in the news. And even at this point, only 16% of Texas said they were extremely familiar with market. 7% said the same of the P. U C 5% said the same in the railroad commission. Having said that,

[0:08:05 Speaker 1] 72

[0:08:06 Speaker 0] percent said they disapproved strongly of how ERCOT handled the

[0:08:09 Speaker 1] storm. Well, they did 72% disapproving, I think 61 strongly but 72% distinction without much of a difference. 70

[0:08:16 Speaker 0] 2% disapproved Howard Carter and the store, and 50% disapproved of how the PUC handled the storm. And 25% disapproved of how the Railroad Commission and the storm. And that’s not to say that people were overwhelmingly positive. On the railroad commission, only 12% approved of how the Railroad Commission on the storm. The rest has had no opinion or idea which I would say, if you’re the railroad Commission victory

[0:08:36 Speaker 1] right, which we’ll get to and I and I and I think that yeah, so I mean, I mean from a you know, just thinking about that and doing some math. And, you know, So basically, when we asked people, you know how big a factor you know this, you know, these entities were or how they whether they approved of these entities and now a variety of actors handled the crisis, 80% had an opinion about market. 62% have an opinion about the Public Utility Commission. Only 37% had an opinion about the railroad commission. So that right there, you know, sets up a lot of the politics of this and and suggests that while you know, I think the governor early on and you know, was trying to blame her cot. And there wasn’t much discussion of the Public Utility Commission. And when the utility commissioners or when the chair of the utility commission went to testify in that very long and eventful day in the Legislature. I mean, look, the legislators certainly, you know, beat up on her coat and CEO Bill Magnus, but they put a lot of heat on the PC, and and I think the chairman, the utility Commission at that point is now departed made a pretty good effort to avoid responsibility. And that was pretty unsuccessful. And it was unsuccessful not only with Democrats, which one might be expects, as the Public Utility Commission is made up of gubernatorial appointees. But there were a lot of there were a lot of Republicans really not buying it, either. And, you know, some of that was the division among, you know, to to broach another topic. You know, the lieutenant governor and his allies and the governor and his allies. But, you know, this became kind of a legislative executive branch thing as far as the Public Utility Commission was gone, was concerned, And I think that shows up in these numbers, and so I think that’s where you know we can say, you know, in some ways the effort to blame ERCOT obviously yielded some fruit for Republicans here, given these numbers, but you know, the the effort of damage control by the governor and it’s sort of sheltering the PUC, given not only these numbers but the fact that all three of them wound up having to resign under pressure to one degree or another. That didn’t work very well.

[0:10:55 Speaker 0] Yeah, And I think you know the reason that it clearly, you know, I mean, you know what I’m hearing you talk about this. I mean, part of the reaction I have is, you know, ultimately, let’s say you know, you know, mistakes were made, you know? I mean, let’s say And the question is, is you know who you know who is doing those mistakes. I mean, I mean, ultimately, one of the big difficulties in this in this space is the fact that I think you’ve seen this. You’ve seen various actors you know who have every reason to defend the system. We have electricity generation both saying that the market system failed and that it worked. And so ultimately, part of I think what’s going on is about the you know, it’s about the operation of the system. And I think you know, you’ll see this. And we have this and some other polling items that I think touches on this, you know? And so there’s this question of, Well, who do we blame? There’s, You know, I think the sort of the psychology of blame is interested in all of this to, um, But the bigger issue is you know, if if we’re not going to say that the system is a problem and I think that’s something that Republicans in particular loath to say, given that our electric system is a stand out as a market based, uh, energy, you know, producing system and it’s supposed to be an exemplar. So it’s not very easy for Republicans, say, Boy, that’s you know, that market based system really messed up. So ultimately that it comes down to operation of the system. And, you know, the question is, is the system you know, the child of, of legislators and policymakers? Or is it these guys who are running the system that they’ve set up? And I think that’s kind of where you know all this focus. I mean, there’s an advance. There’s an incentive for everyone. I think, you know, in the political process, whether the governor or the lieutenant governor or the Legislature to try to shift, shift the emphasis as much as you can to the way that these actors were running the system, not the system itself. And there’s and there’s some evidence in the polling for why that’s you know why that might work but also why it might not. So we asked in another part of the pole. You know, basically what caused this, you know, we gave him a list. You give a big list of things. Some of them are more reasonable and realistic, some of them less so. But they reflect the public discussion, which is the point here. And you know, the clear leading cause, according to Texans, is the lack of winterization, both electric facilities but also gas facilities, followed by the unprecedented nature of the storm. Now it seems to be what strikes me in this discussions were happening. It’s like, Well, okay, well, then whose fault is

[0:13:14 Speaker 1] that? And look and look, it’s fair to, you know, step outside of the framing for a second and and and point out that people that either worked in this. I’ve had, you know, people that have worked in or close to the system and people that were involved in its architecture say, Look, ERCOT is designed and really set up to be the guys that take the blame If something goes wrong, right, And you know, And look, there’s something you know, I mean, if you’re going to be the person you know, driving the car, the roads, you know, if you’re driving a car and you were in somebody, the roads might be wet. You know, you might have been distracted by, you know, something that, you know was worth being distracted by, like a child in distress. But you’re driving the car, you hit the car in front of you. It’s your fault. And, uh, you know, and that’s that’s kind of structural to the way we drive cars. And I think there’s something to you know, you know, to be entirely fair. It’s okay, you know? I mean, you know, No, I I don’t want to be taken as saying Look, you know, like, I just got unfairly blamed. You know, nothing went wrong. They could have done anything differently. Um, but but the extent to which public opinion landed this way. It’s pretty interesting.

[0:14:26 Speaker 0] Well, you know, I’ll take This is my

[0:14:27 Speaker 1] opportunity, given the complexity of all the things that you were, you know where you were going with the factors.

[0:14:33 Speaker 0] Well, I’ll take. This is my opportunity to try to quickly, you know, talk about this for one second, which is, I think this is really interesting aspect of the framing around this, which is that, you know, generally speaking, it’s a lot easier for people to conceptualize individual blame than systemic problems.

[0:14:47 Speaker 1] You

[0:14:48 Speaker 0] know, ultimately, just just as people you know were limited in our ability to to attend to anything, to focus on anything. And we can basically focus on three things we can focus on ourselves and our internal dialogue and all that kind of stuff, which is what we like to do. Generally, you know, we can focus on things in our environment, other people, other stimuli that we can see or interact with. And then there’s this third area, which is this idea of focusing and attending to systems, and ultimately it’s it’s this. This is very hard to do ultimately, because we’re I mean, we’re just we’re just limited animals, you know? You know, you’ve heard of chunking like, you know, we can only basically store seven things in our working memory at once. That’s why why phone numbers are about seven numbers long, you know, you can extend that with all kinds of tools and tricks and whatever, but then when you’re talking about something like, Well, you know, we’ve got this market based system with market and the PC and we’ve got providers and we’ve got the people transmitting the energy that we’ve got the retail

[0:15:39 Speaker 1] and it’s and it’s and it’s market ties. But it’s a regulated market designed by

[0:15:44 Speaker 0] I haven’t been counting, but we’re past seven, and all these things require definitional explanations. So, you know, it’s just one of those things trying to, you know, you know what voters want answers, even if even if the most honest answer and even if it’s the answer that politicians want to give is look, there were there were problems with the system that we’re going to address. These were the problems. It’s a fair bet that people aren’t going to understand either the problems with the system or the solutions that are going to be there. But it’s a lot easier to say is you know what these guys screwed

[0:16:13 Speaker 1] up. And then once you go, honey, and then once you go on that hunt, all these other factors come into play and you’re not You’re not really trying to understand anything anymore.

[0:16:25 Speaker 0] No, I mean, you know, it’s funny. A

[0:16:28 Speaker 1] blaming, blaming, laying blame and understanding, ideally, overlap a lot. But, you know,

[0:16:34 Speaker 0] I mean a lot of anecdotal stories around people who don’t follow politics as closely as we do or who aren’t involved in the process. You know, those are the conversation often most interested in just to hear what people kind of think. Most of the initial reactions I had after this were, you know, why can’t we sue ercot? Yeah, and that’s like, where do I start?

[0:16:55 Speaker 1] Right.

[0:16:56 Speaker 0] And the answer is and what I did and then, you know, can

[0:16:59 Speaker 1] I just get you another beer?

[0:17:00 Speaker 0] And then and then I think better. And I think, you know, I don’t know,

[0:17:03 Speaker 1] right? Well,

[0:17:06 Speaker 0] sovereign immunity

[0:17:07 Speaker 1] and one of these other, you know, And so, you know, in terms of, you know, than how that that hunt gets affected by conditions on the ground. You know, I as you know, I’ve been fascinated by the role of the railroad commission on this and and the fact that, you know, if you if you made it this far in the podcast, you’re among, you know? Well, you’re among the as well, say, the about 39% of Texans who who know what the railroad commission does, right and which is, you know, regulate regulate the oil and gas. We

[0:17:41 Speaker 0] didn’t even we even put this. I mean, we haven’t even mentioned the item yet that you’re referring to. So in the back of the survey, we always ask what we call information questions. And we preface it by saying, Hey, look, these are questions you may know the answer. You may not. A lot of people don’t if you don’t know the answer, just tell us. And part of the idea is allow people to sit to say they don’t know something, but also then we use these items to assess a basic measure of whether people are informed and we don’t use it that much. But it’s kind of a common political science thing to do. We played with this at the end. We basically asked, You know which state agency regulates oil and gas production in the state of Texas, 39% correctly identified the Texas Railroad Commission. 38% said the PUC,

[0:18:20 Speaker 1] right? And and And only 17% admitted that they didn’t really know. Right. So, you know, and there are And I think we talked. We talked about this briefly a couple weeks ago. There are, you know, often efforts to or at least not efforts is maybe the wrong word. You know, the idea is raised of Hey, why don’t we just call the railroad commission, You know, the oil and Gas Commission or something like this and be like, No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We’re not gonna do that. And if you look at, you know, these blame items and you look at the fact that going back to this, you know, systemic peace, and without making any judgments about blame, you can’t really discuss the system without talking about the role that you know, natural gas supplies play in the system that broke down. Mhm. You know, kind of full stop. So you know the fact that the railroad Commission has has, you know, and and to some extent the oil and gas industry have escaped, I think a lot of discussion and attention relative to the others. And they haven’t. They haven’t escaped completely, you know, there there have been some uncomfortable discussions, but for the most part, this has been focused on restructuring or caught restructuring. You know, perhaps, you know, restructuring the P. You see, not a lot out there that’s moving anywhere in the legislative process about, you know, addressing issues related to oil and gas, and particularly to the railroad commissions. And there’s now been a couple of pieces on that recently, Andrea Zelinski out of Peace and Texas Monthly. There was a piece in the Texas Tribune today. I think it was today, today or yesterday. Um, and I can’t remember who wrote it. Forgive me if you have it up in the window, Josh, we can give credit where credit is

[0:20:10 Speaker 0] due.

[0:20:11 Speaker 1] Now, you know all of this. You know, as we’ve alluded to points to the question of Well, you know, what’s the response gonna be? And look, there’s been you know a lot. You know, obviously there’s been a lot of response in the Legislature. Um, you know, the fact that this affected such a broad swath of Texans, you know, did did get the attention and and caused concerns among legislators, as we alluded to earlier, you know, there were, you know, hearings very quickly. Within about a week or so, as soon as things were stabilised, there were hearings and and those hearings had were multiple. There have been a couple of rounds of them in different committees.

[0:20:50 Speaker 0] We heard we heard from various people. We know that they were definitely hearing from constituents. But just to give you, you know, some of the size and shape, at least of the measurements we have now these are voters. So I would actually say these numbers are actually probably a little bit lower. Then what I would expect for the state as a whole, because voters as a whole are going to be of higher socioeconomic status than the state as a whole. By comparison, points expect negative impacts, you know? I mean, it’s in the data, but you see, negative impacts will reverberate amongst the people least able to bear them. But overall, among voters, 66% said that their electricity stopped working working. 54% said they had an interruption. Their water service, one in five had damage to their home. 56%. And this is sort of an important one. The ones we’re not talking about. 56% didn’t have reliable Internet service in the during the storm, 30%. So a third were unable to go to work and lost income due the storm. So, you know, when we sort of think about this and it’s like, Hey, why are we you know, if there’s anybody out there who’s saying Hey, why are we still talking about this? Well, it was it was it is big deal,

[0:21:47 Speaker 1] right? And people. So people have expectations that something was going to be done about this and had ideas about what the Legislature should do. Um, and I think one of the things that’s very interesting that you know, there’s an interesting dynamic here and that you know, when we look at the the approval ratings of political figures in response to this, they’re pretty mediocre. I mean, abbots, I think was, you know, the governor. You know, the rating of the governor’s response is, I think, three or four points right below his overall response. Is that right?

[0:22:19 Speaker 0] Yeah. So he was. His response to the storm was 41% approved. 45% disapprove, which was, you know, better than Cruz and Cornyn. And we’ll talk about that because that’s funny. Uh, second, you know, but lower than you know, honestly, the all the entities and actors that were closer to the ground, you know, neighbors were ranked the highest in terms of their response. Local businesses. Next, then local government, then your own water utility and your own electric utility than the governor.

[0:22:48 Speaker 1] Right? So you know, that’s not And and then when we asked people, you know, do you expect the Legislature to respond, you know, to to to pass an effective, effective responses to the storm and its effects? Yeah,

[0:23:04 Speaker 0] only 9% are extremely confident. 60% either somewhat or not very confident.

[0:23:09 Speaker 1] So not very confident in general, of a lack of confidence? No, I think one of the but but what’s interesting about that, though, is if you look at the kind of solutions that that Texans think ought to be coming down the pike. You know, they’re reasonable. Well, they’re reasonable and and they and they do. And look, there’s some indigent. And, uh, you know, it’s endogenous here because we frame the response is a lot of the responses to at least some of them to what is on offer at the Legislature. But nonetheless, I mean, you know, winterization seems to have been the, you know, the winterization of facilities and providing for that in some ways seems to have been seems to be emerging pretty front and center in the Legislature. And that’s front and center in public opinion. Right?

[0:23:55 Speaker 0] Well, that’s what’s kind of interesting I think about, you know, this discussion we’re having about, you know, simplicity and complexity and systemic versus individual actors is that, you know, despite all the noise around this and all the posturing and positioning, you know, I would say it seems like the voters landed at a pretty consistent position, which is they said, you know, the biggest effect. The biggest cause of this was the lack of authorization, the unprecedented nature of the four storm, and then further down, it could be policy making failures or independence of Texas electric grid even further down below that as human error. So what do they think that should happen? What the policy proposals, number one response or number? The issue or the policy that had the highest support was required? Energy providers to Winterreise followed with a lot less intensity, but still number two, which is basically just paying for them to winter eyes. The difference there is that, you know, and requiring has a lot of strong support. Where is paying for them is split between strong and somewhat, so it’s not as much strong support after that, the next to highest, you know, policies were required or cop members to reside in Texas, which I think is, you know, an interesting sort of weird discussion point out of all of this. And then the other one is the higher energy reserve requirements, basically, having the regulators require higher energy reserves, and after that there’s a pretty big drop. But, you know, there’s not a huge amount of support for, like, a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do or has limited potential effect. If you look at what people saw happen during the storm. How they understand it, What they want to see on the back. It is, actually. I mean, I’m actually proud of Texans on this one. This is like a pretty good, pretty good alignment of, you know, of the whole thing.

[0:25:25 Speaker 1] It will be interesting to see if the Legislature gets credit if they do all this stuff or they do the winterizing or they, you know? I mean, if we go and tell people they did this, will they approve? You know, Will the approval of the Legislature’s performance go up? I don’t think

[0:25:42 Speaker 0] I don’t think so. This is such a This is such a bag is such a flaming bag of poop because think about it. Right? So you do this and then first things first, let’s say let’s say it’s successful. Nothing happens. But assume that, you know, overall energy bills are going to have to go up somewhere to pay for some of the cost of all this. Not even with the Legislature is doing. I’m just saying the cost

[0:26:01 Speaker 1] of the stores. That’s just that’s the way the stuff that was that was baked in from the moment,

[0:26:06 Speaker 0] right?

[0:26:06 Speaker 1] So how severe. It all was. So,

[0:26:08 Speaker 0] as much as you know, as active as the Legislature has been, they can’t go out and be like we did all this stuff because, really, all the people are gonna notice as well My bill went up. The flip side is is that if we have a brownout come July, none of it matters.

[0:26:20 Speaker 1] There’s gonna be hell to pay Well, and I think it also, you know, it also raises the issue of, um you know how how, how salient this route this remain. You know, this kind of this bundle of issues remains You know how selling it remains for how long And, you know, and and how it just, you know, as you say, you know, brownouts or or just or how much it just gets crowded

[0:26:45 Speaker 0] out,

[0:26:47 Speaker 1] you know? And you know, I mean, I was you know, I mean, I think it’s an interesting question about whether there is, you know, any election relevance for this in any direct way. Now, you know, I think there’s I think there’s an overall arc in which this feeds into a larger frame. You know that that Republican elected officials are worried about, because when you have when you have the, you know, the covid response, which you know, for all the attempt to make it seem otherwise, has not been particularly great in Texas and and has been politically problematic. But But just from a kind of demonstration of capacity and responsiveness, position has not been great, you know, Then you have essentially a short term infrastructure collapse, and now we are having a discussion about corporations and voting. You know, the Texas is open for business and is a great place. It is a great place for everyone, for for businesses and people to relocate and set up shop. Because this is such a great environment, which has been central to Republican appeals, at least you know, in part and certainly central to the Republican brand, you know, all looks a little dinged up.

[0:28:12 Speaker 0] Yeah, you know, let me add to two things to that list, right? I mean to other things I’ll add is, you know, if the Legislature advantage to pass the trigger bill that would outlaw abortion. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, I think there’s gonna be a very interesting you know, I’m gonna say a very troubling for the state business reaction. If you know the Legislature goes through with that, I mean, it will have to wait to see what happens. But the idea of Austin becoming, you know, a southern tech hub. If it isn’t already, that’s gonna be a problem. Probably the other thing I’ll add is, you know, but depending you know what, What gets passed around gun rights or loosening gun rights or expanding gun access? You know, I mean, I’m not saying this, you know. I don’t even I don’t even have to preface this, But ultimately there’s going to be another mass shooting and when you know And the idea is, this is the first legislative ship session after El Paso after George Floyd, after a lot of big issues that have really activated in particular large shares of Democrats but also Republicans not in the same ways. You know, it’s going to be interesting to see again in terms of this narrative. What happens next summer going into the fall and how you know the orientation of legislative leaders now, you know, is a reflection of priorities, and I think it’s becoming even more contentious than and I think it was before, in some ways, so, you know. So we asked in the poll about, you know, basically approval of the response of a range of actors towards the winter storm. You know, another thing we asked was basically, who was who do you think was most hurt? And this was an open ended question. And what most people said was either, uh, basically the poor or the elderly was the maid response that people said, you know, anyone who basically couldn’t, you know, handle the storm. But in the approval battery makes me think maybe the person who was hurt the most by this is John Cornyn.

[0:29:56 Speaker 1] Because

[0:29:58 Speaker 0] even with Ted Cruz abandoning the state in the middle of the storm to go of all places to Mexico

[0:30:05 Speaker 1] and getting knocked out by his friends getting

[0:30:07 Speaker 0] knocked out by his quote unquote friends, I think she doesn’t quote he still had a higher overall approval than Cornyn.

[0:30:14 Speaker 1] Okay, I’m glad you were waiting to say that, So So as we um yeah, there’s a couple of things that would have to that, but I’m not I’m not going to, but as we you know, So as we kind of then think about where we’re going to go. As we go forward on this and this idea of, you know, frankly, you know where Republican candidates, legislators and and and then as candidates are standing as we go through one of these cycles in which the Legislature leads into the statewide elections with the governor on the ballot and and, as always, all the legislative, the Legislature, you know, this has highlighted the big gambit that is, that is happening right now in in Texas politics, which is, you know, the ascension of the, you know, the Post Trump. You know, Republican Party, that looks a lot like the pre trump Republican Party. But with, you know, some conditions changed. You know, gambling on some pretty hard, right turn plays, you know, you and you kind of provided a list of some of them on guns on abortion. Um, it was even evident in, you know, some of the attitudes about explaining the, you know, the differences between Republicans and and Democrats and their responses to the storm, and in particular, the other early scapegoat in this, which was renewable energy, you know, um, and that and that that resonated with elements of the Republican base. But you know, the environment is a treacherous one. And it’s going to be interesting to see if going back to gambling on mobilizing the base in order to both inoculate incumbents against primary challenges where possible and then gamble on. The fact that Republicans are still going to have an electoral advantage in the general election is one of the powerful subterranean storylines going on in the state right now. So on that, uh, thanks to Josh for being here, thanks to our ever present in ever excellent crew in the liberal arts development studio in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin, thanks to you for listening, um, also a nod to our colleagues on this pole at the UTI Energy Institute who were great to work with and came up with some terrific questions and ideas for doing this poll.

[0:32:41 Speaker 0] And I should just add I mean, there’s a ton of stuff in this poll that we’re not talking about. That’s very interesting. And so, if you want to look at all these results, top lines cross tabs graphics again. A pretty much all of the results of the poll. And really, there’s an extensive battery of what people experienced during during the winter winter black that you can find all that at Texas politics dot utexas dot e d u

[0:33:00 Speaker 1] Yeah, tons of stuff. And also, while you’re there, check out the blog. There’s a lot of you know we’ve been sort of parceling these out, So if you have thematic interests, that may help you to, although we have great search tools all over the site for all this stuff. So thanks to everybody, thanks to Josh for adding the plug at the end, and we’ll talk to you next week. The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin