August 17th, 2022 – Second Reading Podcast

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. 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. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin. Happy to be joined yet again today by Josh blank research director of the Texas politics project.

Good late morning, Josh. Thank you. Good morning to you. Um, Well, thank you. Well, you know, so I, I thought what we do today is circle back to the dominant story that we sort of, that we talked about a lot last week, um, but has seen some significant developments in the interim as, as expected. And that, that would be of course, the, the political repercussions of the search warrant that was executed last week.

Now, about 10 days ago at Malago in the Trump work areas and, and areas, um, That resulted in the removal of several boxes of documents. Now, when we recorded last week on Wednesday, it’s remarkable how different the story looked. Right? I mean, given that this had a lot to do with what we didn’t know at the time.

And, and some of the things that we, I think we almost assumed were the case in terms of what the motivation was here, what the re the warrant, what the reason for the search was, right. That turned out to be very. Right. So, you know, last week we, we talked a lot about how reflexively many Republicans, um, including the most prominent Texas Republicans, including governor Abbott and, and Senator Cruz, you know, really went from zero to 60 in denouncing the search on Monday night as Nixonian, gustapo like, you know, a sign that they’ll be coming for you next.

Right. Um, You know, the implication being, you know, without any evidence. And in fact, lots of evidence to the contrary, you know, that the, the Biden administration had ordered this search in order to undermine, uh, their, their possibly, you know, undermine Donald Trump as a possible contender in, in 2024. And,

and also lots of basic logic to the contrary.

But anyway, exactly, there were a lot of things that were, you know, not, not right about. And we talked a lot about that last week, even based on what we knew, um, Lots of developments. Send that since then two very important ones. I think if we’re gonna talk about the political response, although some of the other stuff that’s come out will certainly come up.

As we talk about this. Mm-hmm , you know, one was the armed attack on an FBI office in Cincinnati last Thursday, mm-hmm , uh, wound up with the attacker killed in a shootout in a rural area, not too far from the, that office. Uh, the shooter was a regular on Trump’s truth, social network. Um, Posted things that made it seem as if he was at least in part motivated or triggered, if you will, by the rate on the

compound.

And I believe I read this morning too, you know, he’s still under investigation for activities around January 6th. I mean, so

right. Yeah. He had, he, he was not a stranger to the active in the space. Right. And then the other, you know, which, which followed the next day on Friday was the release of the search warrant and the property receipt for items that were removed by the FBI.

And while there. A ton of detail. There wast enough detail in the characterization of, of the boxes and packages of, you know, batches of documents that were removed, that we know that there were some different levels of top secret and classified documents, but also some that were highly classified. Right.

You know, there are usually, you. To be viewed only in a very secure facility, et cetera. Right.

Um, which is not the basement of

Margo, right. Is not the basement of Margo and, and, and the statement of probable cause for the search, which was not really which, what everybody had been speculated about. Right?

The initial speculation had been that this was about the violation of a law passed in 1978. That requires presidents to turn over other documents mm-hmm and affirms the fact that these belong to the country, to the national archives, not. Right. The, the office holder. Um, but it turned out that this was really much more about national security issues, these classified documents, right.

And the fact that there had been ongoing negotiations, even previous visits, they knew these documents were there. A Trump lawyer had signed a, an affidavit to the effect that there were no more classified documents there and the FBI did not believe them. And so now there’s an old issue of obstruction, right?

Yeah. You. A coverup, et cetera. Right. And that they were holding on to, to some of these documents, um, that are not supposed to be out in the wild and you know, something I hadn’t put in the notes, but also I think is worth flagging. Is that at an earlier meeting? I think in early June with FBI officials, encounter intelligence officials, The FBI had reviewed video tapes of one of the areas where these documents were being stored mm-hmm and they saw something that they didn’t like, right.

That suggested to them that the area was not secure. You know, they had them put a padlock on it, et cetera. Right. So, you know, all of which leads us to how Republicans are now positioning themselves, vis Avi, these developments, the search itself. The actions of the FBI mm-hmm , you know, the, the imple, you know, the, the imputations that this was, as we’ve said, without any evidence, a politically motivated action aimed at Trump rather than what is actually in the document in the court documents, cetera.

Right. And. You know, we’ve seen interesting dynamics in the last week where, you know, we talked a lot last week about how quickly people jumped on this. You know, you were saying even last week, I think, and, and people were saying, you know, there had been even some reporting that there were people from inside the Trump camp, urging people to maybe cool their jets, right.

That another shoe was gonna drop. Shoe. Definitely other shoes definitely dropped. And so we’ve seen some adjustments now.

Right, right. And I think, you know, I said, you know, we, we spend a lot of time cuz of, you know, our focus is on the politics of this stuff always. And you know, we spent a lot of time last week talking about sort of the.

The, you know, sort of the presence or AB you know, really exploring the presence or absence of a political calculus and the immediate response and how sort of uniform it was and how strong it was. Um, you know, with more information coming out, you know, you’re kind of seeing, you know, there’s an evolution to these things.

And I mean that, you know, in a classical evolution, some of these arguments remain and they kind of, you know, refine and they work themselves out to kind of where we land. And some of them kind of drop by the wayside a little bit. And I think, you know, what you’ve seen is, you know, the pre. I think, uh, Republicans sort of respond to this one, I think really marked by both, uh, Florida, governor, Ron DeSantis, and then our governor Greg Abbott is basically, you know, sort of, it gives a better read.

I think, of the final calculation on this. And I think it tells us something that kind of actually is informative about sort of other things that are going on. Right. And what you see about, I think we’re DeSantis and Abbot. Landed was to basically say, look, you know, there’s basically to play on the dark demons that already exist, which are, you know, negative attitudes towards the federal government, which are widespread in the Republican party.

Yeah. We talked

about some of the polling on that last year, right?

Negative attitudes towards Joe Biden, which are, you know, extremely wide similar the Republican party, you know, ideas about a deep state. And potential, you know, and again, this idea that especially Democrats are going to mobilize, you know, basically government in whatever manifestation to basically crack down on, you know, dissidents now the sort of thing that’s sort of floating around out there.

And so you endorse all these things by saying, you know, the FBI has, you know, gone, gone overboard. This is tyranny. This is a banana Republic, et cetera, et cetera. But what you’re not hearing a lot of is like, and what Donald Trump did was. Right. And, but the thing is, is you’re not hearing any condemnation of that either.

And that’s exactly, and that’s really the perfect sweet spot, right. Because basically you’re, you’re saying the same things in a lot of ways that Donald Trump is saying about the administration side of political terms. Yeah. Political terms. Yeah. I mean, in, in, in normative terms, it’s a horrible spot. We’ll get to that.

But if

you’re a Republican trying to position yourself yeah. You get

to say, Hey look, you know, you don’t have to say, I defended what the president did because right now you’re not really clear exactly where this is gonna go, but you can say the same, you. Enemies that he’s pointing out. Those are my enemies too.

And therefore I’m in league, but there’s plausible deniability. I’m not justifying what the president has

done. I’m fighting a good fight and I’m fighting it for principles and to, you know, and to protect the Republic. And we’ll put a pin on that. Yeah. We’ll put a pin on that rather than, you know, then the former president per se.

Right. And so this is,

you know, and so on, just from a political standpoint, you say, this is the sweet spot, right? I mean, you basically get to say, look, you know, I’m playing on themes that are very prominent in Republican politics and among Republican voters, I’m echoing the president, which allows me to say that I’m supporting.

him without necessarily endorsing any actions that you may have to eventually, you know, justify why you would’ve, you know, again, justify the president’s actions, but the results obviously can be pretty messy and dangerous here. Like when people take guns to FBI field offices. And also, I think, you know, you see a similar parallel here in the other kind of, I would say maybe one of the big stories in Texas this week about the effect this is having on the administration of elections, where again, you’re seeing something similar.

Whereby on the one hand, we are talking a lot about, uh, primary elections in which candidates either, you know, win, be, you know, win. And a lot of times fueled by, you know, denial of the 20, 20 election and endorsement of Donald Trump’s vision of what happened there. Right. And then obviously, you know, very hope high profile cases like representative Liz, Chaney losing.

Right. You know, because she basically didn’t endorse this view of it. There’s actually something pretty parallel here and we’ll

come back to Cheney, cuz Cheney is actually even a step beyond a lot of that. I mean, right. The, you know, the contrasting Cheney and the people you’re talking about is an interesting one, but keep going.

Right.

But I guess I, the main point here is, you know, this overall political dynamic, you can kind of see it playing itself out, which is to say, you know, well, we can’t, you know, there’s not a lot of, there’s a little bit more reticence to justify Trump’s actions around the election around January 6th, but you can still.

Uh, see a lot of Republicans continuously parroting the claims of fraudulent elections, right. Of fraudulent election administration, a voter fraud. And again, it provides the same amount of plausible deniability to say, well, if something comes out that says, well, you know, we have these, you know, email, you know, we have these text messages between Trump telling someone, you know, we’ll send the people with the guns or whatever, you know, whatever it is.

He said, whoa, I didn’t, I didn’t say that was okay. But it doesn’t mean that the, that the underlying electoral process ISN. Right damaged. Now, again, just like in the case of this, you know, where the FBI and Myer leads a man to basically go and attack an FBI office. The other kind of big story in this week was, you know, these instances of harassment of local election officials here in Texas.

Right. Right.

And we should mention that, that, you know, that was an interesting, I mean, you know, what really kicked that off this yeah. News cycle or, you know, right in, in the last couple of weeks was, um, Reporting that actually started in the local Fredericksburg paper. I think mm-hmm yeah. Um, that the local, you know, county level, election officials, you know, like there were three of them, right.

Had all kind of resigned on Moss because they were being harassed and receiving threatening phone calls and, you know, just kind. Didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

Right. Ultimately, and I think it’s important to point out, you know, if you’re listening and you’re not, you know, familiar with the geography of Texas, you know, Fredericksburg is probably, I would think, you know, about 80 miles west of Austin.

Give or take

yeah. Something like that. Maybe not even that far. I don’t. Yeah. 60 to

80 miles west. So Austin is in Gillespie county. This is a county, uh, that. In 20, 20, 70 9% of the vote went to Donald Trump. This is not a democratic county. Presumably if 79% of the, you know, vote went to Trump, you’d think that good chance that Trump voters are running the election process in Gillespie

county.

Yeah. Those, those, those hill country counties, Gillespie county being one of them are. Long time. I mean, long time, Republican bastions, I mean, they were one of the areas where, you know, there were, you know, Republicans sort of sat out the a hundred year storm between, you know, the post between reconstruction and the civil rights era.

Those, those are some of the few counties that were where there were, you know, there was Republican. There were real Republicans for a long time, right? So this is not, this is not like an embattled area. Right.

And this is part of, I mean, the thing is, you know, there’s a way you kind of zoom out and you can zoom in and zoom out again on this.

Right. But I mean, ultimately, you know, this, this came up, you know, I was asked, uh, To kind of give like a hot take on the K for the KX and, you know, report on this. And I, wasn’t still kind of figuring out what to say, but one of the things I said to to them was like, you know, you should probably like reach out to some of the big counties in Texas, like bay county, where San Antonios or, or Harris county where Houstons or Dallas county, because I’m my guess would be those election officials.

There are receiving a lot of harassment and, and. And as it

turned out, there was a story that came outta San Antonio and bear like

the next day. Yeah. Basically, basically at a, at a meeting of the, you know, sort of election, you know, administrators basically saying, yeah, you, this is, this is what it’s been like.

And in addition to the fact, you know, Texas has made it kind of harder for us, not because of mostly because of the new laws that essentially are adding, you know, increasing reporting requirements, uh, greater, you know, scrutiny, more penalties, more power to poll Watchers. But on top of that, you’ve got tons and tons of people filing freedom of information, act requests, you know, basically.

Dell using these departments to try to find this

fraud. Yeah, I think, I think in bar I could be wrong by, I believe it was in bar county where they were, you know, filing open records requests for every ballot,

for every ballot, for the source code, for the

machines, they had to hire people to process these requests.

Yeah. It’s it’s clearly like a form of harassment. Yeah. Well, I would

say, look, give me on its face. I wanna say like on its face, there’s nothing wrong with that. Those laws exist for a reason. I mean, I think of anything, you know, Texas actually, you know, You know, a spotty history with the way that it, you know, is, is transparent with open records requests.

So I don’t think that in and of itself, but it does raise this, this broader issue, which is, you know, you kind of take a step out, you can keep kind of keep stepping back and you’d say, you know, we are looking at all these elections, uh, for, uh, you know, often cases, secretaries of states in places like Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Arizona, especially, uh, where, you know, you.

Uh, candidates using the small de democratic process and use, you know, fueled by, you know, campaigns fueled by, you know, the SIM the same conspiracy theories that Donald Trump is promoting. Right. And really an overt, uh, and naked plea. To take par in control of the election process. Right. So you’ve got that set of attitudes, right.

And that sort of thing going on, and we’re seeing that all over the place, but then the same set of underlying attitudes that we were talking about here, both, you know, uh, the conspiracy theories, but then also, you know, sort of negative attitudes towards, you know, the election system and yeah. Election trust in the,

in the validity of the

system.

Right. That’s leading to. , you know, again, I would say this happened at a more local levels with people trying to take over, you know, county level, election positions and things like that in Michigan. There’s a story where the secretary of state Michigan is concerned that there are a number of county canvasers that are called there who basically have not committed that they will certify the upcoming elections, which, you know, I mean, if you just had take a step back and say, well, yeah, I mean, why should someone commit to certifying the electric.

I don’t know. I think maybe one, some people might say the person whose job it is to like run the election smoothly might be able to say, yeah, we expect to certify the election results. But part of this is that the same set of, you know, attitudes and theory is leading people to sort of potentially go into mostly Republican counties and say, yeah, we might just grind this to a halt.

Yeah. And then this is the other thing though. And then you’ve got this sort of other set of actors, which is much more disparate, right? Who are taking again, the same set of conspiracy theories, the same set of attitudes and calling election officials and leaving voicemails threatening to end their bloodline.

And this comes from, you know, a report that, uh, I guess, what is this? This is

from the, yeah, the democratic staff of the house committee on oversight and reform put out a, a, a report last week called exhausting and dangerous, the dire problem of election misinformation and disinformation. And that’s, you know, got a little, you know, I mean, it, it got some attention because it was written by majority staff.

It was seen as a partisan. Right, but it did have a lot of interesting things. And, and in particular, they focused on Arizona, Florida, Ohio, and Texas, where, you know, uh, it was found that this election misinformation appeared to be having significant impact. So, you know, and there was evidence of, of coordinated campaigns.

Mm-hmm, , you know, to, in the directions that you’re talking about.

Um, and so, I mean, at least, you know, just, so this is all the setup, but it, again, it gets to the point where, you know, I I’m sort, it’s a long setup. It’s a long, well, Hey, Welcome. , you know, this is a running, running commentary between us. Um, but I mean, it does raise this tradit.

I mean, I say, you know, you kind of go back and say, you know, as someone who watches the process and studies government, I mean the American system certainly tolerates and the American public certainly tolerates a fair amount of, uh, you know, I’d say people in political power. Having avenues to use the political process, to try to maintain their power.

We see that in the incumbency advantage, we see that, uh, in gerrymandering, you know, we can see that in, right. The fact that, you know, basically the majority party can pass any election laws more or less than it wants that don’t, you know, violate the law. And so we, we allow this right. I mean, and, and I don’t, that’s not, that’s just a, that’s an observation, right.

That’s not a criticism or anything. And that’s one thing. Right. And then you’ve got this sort of small de democratic effort of people running for office to, you know, Put their finger on the scale of the electoral process. And that’s not the same thing, but I’d say it’s in the open, right. Because they’re campaigning and they’re telling you

exactly.

Well, yeah. I mean, there’s two diff, let me add a couple of overlay points on that. So, you know, one, in terms of, you know, the, the tolerance or the expectation of some degree of partisan inflection of. You know, to use a term that used to be fairly neutral, but is now being used by these people to be kind of, you know, basically leverage over the, the administrative apparatus of the state.

There you go. right. And, but, you know, as you were talking about that, well, we expect a certain degree of that. Yeah. You know, in a way there’s, it’s been kind of a settled model in the United States that goes back to. You know, administrative reform movements. Mm-hmm, that limited patronage that began right in the late 19th century and really went into effect in the early 20th century hatch act.

You know, basically the creation of. Civil servants. Mm-hmm right. That are supposed to be insulated, you know, at, at the operational level, right. From the kinds of things we’re talking about. And so, you know, you have appointees and appointees impact the direct, particularly at the federal level impact the direction of the bureaucracy.

We see that at the state level mm-hmm um, And then on top of that, and then parallel to that, you also have the historical development of something that has also settled around that time. Mm-hmm that also became, it seemed like at least in the intermediate term kind of a settled issue, which is that. The election administration apparatus should be particularly right.

Insulated from political influence because it is so close, you know, it’s the vehicle for political competition and for, yeah. For ministering popular preferences. And I think that, you know what we’re witnessing now in various. Places is a challenge of both of those, you know, settled models of how we’re going to administer government and administer elections.

Right. And, and one of the interesting things is you were talking about Lupy county and San Antonio and the democratic report. You know, if you go back to earlier this year and, and into last year, um, The, the person in charge of elections, the county clerk in Travis county, Dana Deva recently stepped down after a long and you know, frankly, pretty illustrious tenure.

Yeah. As the, I mean, she was like a national figure involved in well elections administration. If you’re pro participation, she was basically, you know, under investigation, not because a bunch. You know, the kind of folks that were talking about are activists were questioning what she was doing. She was under investigation by the attorney general, right?

The Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, who was, and, and we should say, you know, David Deborah was partisan. I mean, she’s a Democrat in Travis county. Right. You know, she’s won a million elections in Travis county. You don’t do that as a Republican, um, And those charges were ultimately

dropped. Well, they couldn’t, they couldn’t, they mean they couldn’t get an, I don’t know if they could get an indictment, right.

They

couldn’t get the indictment and, you know, cost her some money. You know, she, she wound getting that compensated, but the point being, I guess the, the other overlay point I wanna make here is that there’s an interesting elite mass dynamic here. Mm-hmm that goes both to. The efforts to impact the, the machinery of elections.

Right. That predates Trump, as we were thinking. Yeah. I mean, this is the long term. Yeah. Trump

didn’t make this up. Right. There’s, you

know, there’s been a long term, you know, effort in Texas, as in other places to raise doubts about the integrity of the electoral process, right. With, you know, that goes back, you know, at least a decade, if not decade and a half or so, we could unpack that if we wanted, um, But there is a, you know, elite mass dynamic going on here that goes back quite a while that I do think elites have some blame for, but now it’s impacted public attitudes.

Right. And it’s impacted pub it’s impacted public attitudes. In a partisan template and we’ve talked about it on the podcast. It’s been a while, but we’ve asked, you know, pairs of questions about different partisan frames about people’s doubts about elections, you know, right. And to oversimplify Republicans are very likely as a group to think that people are voting that are not eligible.

To legally to vote legally. Right. You know, that’s usually very adjacent to wildly unsubstantiated claims that undocumented non-citizens are voting. Right. Democrats are very likely to think that people, um, that are eligible to vote are being prevented from voting. Right. And that’s not new. Yeah. And that comes from to some degree, you.

Particularly in the Republican case and, you know, Republican, the, somebody was here would say, well, wait just a second and that’d be fair, but both Democrats and Republicans are modeling this, but the, but the Republican kind of position now that electoral institutions have so little integrity that what we’re seeing is basically the jettison, the jettisoning to my mind of.

The principle of an impartial election apparatus, if

not the principle of democracy.

Right. And, and, and well, and that, but I think, and that falls out of that. Right. Right. Or, you know, I mean, I think probably in different cases, I mean, I, you know, we were talking beforehand for those of you that haven’t seen it.

Um, Robert Draper who’ve, you know, probably well known to some of you wrote in Texas for a long time, uh, is now doing stuff mainly for the, for the New York times magazine has a very good long piece on. The kind of ideolog, you know what you’re pointing to the ideological underpinnings of the movement to take over election apparatus.

That is, that is built on the assumption that the election apparatus is inherently corrupt and it’s inherently corrupt in part, because it’s been subject to too much small D democratic influence to some degree. Right, right. Yeah. You know, and it sort of enters these longstanding arguments on the right about.

you know, the catch phrases, the, and Draper does a good job of re raising this mm-hmm, going back to Barry Goldwater. And even before that, ultimately that, you know, the United States should not be thought of as a democracy, it should be thought of as a Republic. Right. And the implications of that are that, you know, do go back to debates at the time of the founding and, and in political philosophy, if you want to go that far.

you know, the fact that you need to modulate democracy, right. Um, you know, in, in, in a literal sense that you, you know, direct democracy is a threat, you were sort of implying this for too much participation is there’s a, there’s such a put it this way. There’s such a thing as too much participation and too much voting and that.

Is a shift. The fact that that argument has become so much more prominent. Yeah. In these debates is a shift from the era of expand, you know, where it was seen as an unambiguous, normative. Good. Yeah. Right by the majority of people to expand

participation. Yeah, I think the takeaway line in that Draper article, if your takeaway one is this idea, you know, the, you know, some candidate in Arizona basically says, you know, America’s not a democracy, it’s a Republic.

Right. And the idea that, you know, and it’s saying, you know, just take a pause for a second and say the idea that, you know, candidate for major office in the United States would come out and say, this is not a democracy as a, not in terms of as a criticism. Right. But as a statement of fact is pretty interesting.

The thing to me that I think, you know, again, as someone who kind of likes to think about these things from the strategic perspective of politics yeah. Is how outta control this is. I mean, because again, I said the same sets of attitudes are, are, are, are resulting in, you know, sort of anti-democratic efforts at multiple different levels.

Um, You know, and in case of, you know, I think the harassment of election administrators, I think, you know, borders, if not walks, you know, borders the line of, if not crosses the line of what you’d call terrorism. Right. Because ultimately you’re trying to influence the actions of basically, you know, civil servants who are trying to like run the process for political ends.

Yeah. You, I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s

terrorism, right? Yeah. You’ve raised that a couple of times as we’ve been talking about this in different contexts when we were working on the poll yesterday. Yeah. Um, you know, it’s funny. I mean, I, I see that. And maybe this is just, I don’t know, who knows what this is, but.

The term that that really occurs to me though, is more like organized crime or racketeering , but see, but, but, you know, but here’s, you know, which hinges on intimidation violence. Yeah. But, but here’s the threat of violence, but

see, but here’s, here’s the thing though. I mean, I would, I would agree if I, again, I go back to where we’re, where I was starting that point, which is.

But I’m not sure, you know, when we were talking about, you know, what, you know, for example, you know, we, I was talking to you, uh, in reaction to the Gillespie thing before I was talking to the, you know, K X, a N we were talking about, you know, you said something I think was important, which is like, well, what’s the goal of these people.

Now, when you say these people, part of is, it’s already a disparate group of people who are, you know, leaving nasty voicemails and threats on phones. So I think automatically, you know, it’s easy to kind of say. Well, you know, let’s, let’s discount, but it’s an important question, right? Yeah. And I think, you know, part of it is I go, I go back, you know, it’s one thing to say I’m running to be, you know, the election, you know, the chief election administrator in Georgia.

Right. And here’s what I want to do. It’s another thing to say. Yeah, I’m ready to be the county, you know, commission, you know, the county canvasser in this district in Michigan, because even though the vote went 80 20 for Trump, the whole process is screwed up and you know, I’m gonna go in there. I’m gonna find it.

And if anything, I don’t even know if I can trust these votes enough to canvas it. And it’s another thing still to say, I’m gonna end your blood. Yeah, because you’ve been involved in like running elections here, wherever here is. And I can’t say, and this is the thing I think is a little bit scary about this.

I think if you went and said to Greg Abbo. Ted Cruz? No, honestly, like what do you think the end goal is here? Where, where do you think we’re gonna get with this? Even if they can give you a clear answer. I don’t think they can give you a clear answer for the people who are calling and making these threats.

Yeah. And I don’t think that they can necessarily give you an answer for the people kind of who are running for these generally like pretty like low level, you know, really administrative offices. They’re almost like really, I mean, they’re public service to make sure the like, run well and trying to basically see what you can do at a local level, which again, in an era, in which there’s no trust in journalism, uh, very little local journalism, you know, what’s gonna happen kind of under the radar as you sort of put people in office who, who, who are basically already saying, yeah, my number one job isn’t to, to run a good election.

My number one job is to,

you know, make sure one side wins and if I have, you know, and yeah. Prevent the other side from winning. If I, and I mean, it’s a

very, and again, just like again, just like saying. You know, the FBI is run by fascist and you need to watch out, might lead someone to take a gun to an FBI office, you know, this constant rhetoric about elections.

Yeah. Even in a place like Texas, where Republicans have won for 20 plus years and even counties where they’ve overwhelmingly won, you know, I can’t say where that goes, but it

doesn’t look good. Well, you know, look, we, I don’t know if you, I mean, I’m sure you remember this, if you remembered it in this context.

Yeah. I. , you know, we did an op-ed about a year ago, I think. Oh yeah. Saying, you know, all this talk, you know, we should that urging Texas leaders. Yeah. Not to ride the train on. DEIT and de-legitimizing the election process because it would lead to bad places. We are in a bad place. And that’s not a, I told you, so I mean, all kinds of, you know, that was in the air.

Yes. I mean, we’ve been talking about that, but I mean, you know, that’s where we are. I mean, a little point on the, you know, I mean, and you know, your guy Mattius this morning, I don’t know if you got to it. I didn’t read the whole thing, which I often don’t with Matt, but, um, he starts with a thing. You know how you can get too wound up about language, but the Lang, but linguistic differences, do you know?

I can’t remember what he was talking about, but in this case, this is, you know, I’m gonna, I want to thank more, cuz it just occurred to me in real time, this kind of terrorism, criminality, you know, I mean. It’s a fairly recent development that we think about terrorism so much. Yeah. In the historical sense, you know, where, you know, and I’ve been watching a bad TV, I’m not very good TV show about the making of the godfather for those view that are watching it, the offer.

But there’s a lot of stuff about, you know, the mob in there and, you know, there’s something about all this. That in terms of thinking about the political language of it, you know, I’m intrigued by terrorism, racketeering, criminal, you know, just in terms of how you communicate to people about this. Yeah.

Right. I mean, terrorism obviously pushes a big button, but it’s also, to me it’s a little, it’s a little big in a certain way. Now this is big, but that’s the thing I

think. But the, I mean, I would say, you know, to you, you know,

no, I get, I get, I mean, I get the point. Yeah. But I’m also like also from a tactical point of view, You know, I.

What’s the crime here. , you know, in terms of where, when people are calling and threatening

people and well, that’s why from a language per well, I mean, I think that’s why from a language perspective, and again, the terrorism thing, I mean the crime, the crime piece on this, I think you actually create a higher bar bar for yourself from a political standpoint, if you say, well, this is, this is, this is, you know, this is conspiracy, this is racketeering.

This is whatever you wanna say, using those mob language, because ultimately that requires some kind of an, you know, organized spirit. The only thing that is organizing this is the fact that Trump is such. Force in the, in the Republican party, he continues to make these false claims about the election.

These false claims continue to have, you know, a significant impact on the direction of Republican politics and the actions of Republican elected officials. And even if those Republican elected officials are figuring out that, you know, there’s a way to kind of like have it both ways and sort of, you know, push through on the same, you know, push the same buttons that Trump is pushing, uh, while not necessarily endorsing Trump.

The only thing is is that you. And I don’t know how to say this any other way, but Trump is so clearly, you know, his self-interest in this is so apparent. Yeah. And what’s not, you know, anywhere in any place that’s speaking about leadership is like any sort of any, so any person really pushing, you know, the interest of the country in any sort of, you know, and again,

notable way and that, and something we’ve talked about institution, you know, I.

At some point you have to own that you’re eroding institutions.

Right. And, and yeah, the institutional backs up the idea that, well, the institutions will, will be able to withstand this. Well, the, this is a direct attack on the institutions. And

while I don’t wanna Saint her in any way, this does lead to the fact that Liz Chaney lost resoundingly right.

In the Republican primary last, you know, last night in Wyoming as expected. Right. Um, but she’s framing her resistance in those terms. yeah, well and pretty, pretty directly. Right. But, you know,

yeah. And I mean,

I, you know, as we’re talking about, you know, elite modeling, if you will, right. And signal sending, I mean, she’s very much in the majority, in the minority, in her party right now.

Right. And if the polling is. To believe to be believed, certainly, as we’re seen consistently in our polling, she’s swimming against the tide of public opinion among Republicans right now. Yeah.

I think, I think that’s right. You know, so I mean, yeah. And so, I mean, and so what I would say is, you know, the things I would like, you know, I’m trying to surf turn, where do we land on this?

What are we, what, where are we taking away from this? I mean, for me, the things that I’m, I’m really thinking about is, you know, and for the sort of people who listen to this podcast, which I think, you know, in a lot of case, a lot of reporters and people are. You know, tied into this kind of stuff, is, is one, you know, to think about how much lumping and splitting we’re doing between a lot of actions that are being driven by the same sets of attitudes.

Right. Right. And by the same people, I think, you know, we need to be, and I’m not, I don’t know where I land on this, but I think we need to be, you know, either justified in thinking of these as all, as one thing, or, you know, clear about where they are and where they aren’t different. But even if we are gonna do a little too much splitting here, I mean, I think it is important to note that.

You know, whether you’re running for secretary of state of Arizona or whether you’re making a call to an election administrator, if the goals are the same here, I mean, we kinda have to start to ask how we’re treating this stuff. Yeah. And I think to your point, you know, how should we be talking about this?

I mean, I’m, I’m, I’m pretty comfortable saying, you know, if you’re calling up election administrators and threatening them physically with violence, if they basically engage in the conduct of elections, you’re a terrorist. I mean, I, you know, Come tell me, tell me I I’m welcome. You know, I’ll

welcome to, well, what I, I would say to that and, you know, we gotta close up, but I, you know, if you go back and you look at the language of what that committee report came, what right?

One of the points that they really wanted to make was that yes, there’s this kind of decentralized ATIC mm-hmm , you know, some guy you. Guy. There are a lot of guys, although women are prominently in this as well, but you know, sitting around like making, you know, nasty phone calls to, to election administrators, but they were key about saying the investigation UN uncovered coordinated campaigns, right.

That did link these things together. Mm-hmm um, and that does give you some, and that was clearly what they’re after. Yeah. Some surface area to begin to link these things together and think about them as organized efforts and, you know, engage them in that way. You know? And, and I mean, what’s tricky about that is that, you know, whether somebody’s saying, okay, you know, You know, person X, your job is to file a million open records request, you know, person, Y you’re on the phones tonight, calling, making nasty phone calls, person Z.

You know, whether that is exactly what’s going on or not. There is some. General awareness and, and this kind of comes out in the Draper piece in Arizona, that all of these things are going on and that they are mutually supportive efforts there. I, I agree with there are people that

realize that. Yeah. And see, and that’s the thing I think, you know, you know, and that’s, you know, that’s yeah.

In that messaging and that’s a Trump model. Yeah. And messaging, I would say, you know, the Democrats do themselves some service by trying to, you know, say this is coordinated if there’s coordination, because then it’ll sort of takes away the dismissal of, oh, well this is just some guy and is based on making calls.

Exactly. You know, you’re trying, you’re trying to be conspiratorial about just a few

cranks at the same time. I think you. You know, you’re not gonna, you know, they’re not gonna find, you know, smoking gun evidence of some kind of nationwide coordinate effort because you know, it’s not necessary. The point is, is that the point is, is that this is happening because elites are continue to push rhetoric, right.

That creates the, the, the environment for coordination, whether or not there’s explicit

coordination or not. You’re looking for a takeaway a minute ago. And I think that’s, to me, that’s one of the things that kind of comes out of this, right. You know, if you look at this in the longer sweep that goes back well before Donald Trump.

what we’ve seen is a series of signaling by elites that has been, those signals have been picked up replicated and haveta, you know, metastasized and are now feeding back on elite behavior. Right? And that’s part of why you have a diss, an Abbott, you know, several figures that are now going okay. I need to be, I need to position myself in this.

I can’t just wash my hands of it because. These are my people. Yeah. So I think on that, I’m gonna thank Josh for being here as always. Uh, thank our excellent staff, uh, in the audio studio here in the liberal arts development studio at UT Austin. They’re getting busy again. There are students on campus. I think they’re right now, they’re just rushing, I think.

Um, uh, but you can, you can feel campus stirring, I think, and they’re are busier in here. So it was always, we thank them for their steady. In a tolerance of our bad habits. Um, and remember, you can find all the data Josh and I were talking about today, much, much more at the Texas politics project website, Texas politics dot U texas.edu.

Thanks for listening. And we’ll be back soon with another second reading podcast. The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin.