August 24th, 2022 – Second Reading Podcast

Jim Henson: [00:00:00] And welcome back to the second reading podcast. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin. Happy to be joined again today by we’ll be a little more formal today by Dr. Joshua blank. Research director of the Texas politics

Josh Blank: project. Well, thank you. It’s taken years for me not to cringe when people say that yeah,

Jim Henson: well, it’ll probably take years more before you stop based on my experience, but, you know, we thought we’d talked today [00:01:00] about a very specific storyline in the gubernatorial race in Texas.

That’s been getting a lot of attention in the national press over the last week or two, and that’s. Beto O’Rourke’s expenditure of time and effort in rural areas of Texas, where Republicans are pretty much ruling the roost. Yeah. Um, you know, he spent a lot of time in small cities and towns and counties where Republicans dominate elections.

Uh, not the first time he’s tried this. Right. Um, got a lot of press coverage in 2018 and you visited for his 254 county strategy in which you know, which had people a little bit scratching their heads at that know in 2018 around. So we’re, you know, so we’re kind of. Revisiting something that we’ve seen before.

And I thought it was interesting that he’s doing this again. And, you know, just in terms of the warm up, I mean the big question here, not to be, you know, too indirect is your, our campaign wasting time seeking [00:02:00] a small number of long shot votes. Uh, that’s the wrap in the states least populated and most reliably Republican counties at the expense, presumably of drumming up democratic based turnout in Democrat heavy.

and hotly, contested suburb, democratic heavy cities and hotly contested suburbs, where the Democrats have made demonstrable inroads in recent years. And, and just from sheer population. Yeah. Point of view, where the votes are. Right. Um, now, so we’re gonna kind of drill into this and we wanna keep that question in mind, but we’re gonna try to dig up some stuff.

I should warn people even more so than usual. We’re gonna try to avoid drowning too much, and this will be a number.

But to start, there are a lot of vagaries and definitions here, and a lot of vagaries in the data that, you know, we should try to at least get out there ahead of time. First one, like you’ve brought up a lot and we came across this in some projects we’ve done is, you know, what is rural well,

Josh Blank: exactly. [00:03:00] Right.

And the thing is, is, you know, historically from a, from a, the perspective of analyzing data, whether you’re talking about like the census bureau or the government and. I mean, obviously if you actually go and I’ll tell you right now, if you search Texas definitions, rural, there’s actually a document that’s floating around, out there from the legislature at one point that gives 25 different definitions of morality and statute in Texas.

So there’s all, you know, so needless to say, you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s, there’s not a one definition. You know, somebody say it’s a state of mind, you know, or whatever. Um, But the thing is, is that actually, you know, as far as like from a, from a scientific, I’m putting quotes up air quotes now guys, from a scientific perspective, science, generally speaking, you know, what rural has been is not.

So, so, so most cases is that most of the time the government has been trying to figure out like, you know, how to deal with population densities and economic flows and things like that. And so really it’s about, you know, the level of urbanity of a place, you know, and whether that’s solely based on population density are other factors and there’s things that come

Jim Henson: up like yeah, the big one that could like distance from a.

Right. Well, that’s the thing I, music,

Josh Blank: certain level of density shows. Well, that’s one of the things that can’t just be [00:04:00] density because you know, even very dense places like have airports, for example, they have these parts that aren’t dense. And so for classifying things, this is just a, it just, it actually turns out to be somewhat difficult anyway.

And rural areas have prisons and rural areas have prisons. So, you know, and that’s the other thing too, economic flows are very important. So, you know, sometimes depend on what, why you care about it. You might say, Hey, this area is clearly rural, but because like the. Uh, interests of this area are tied to a city.

Let’s say that’s 30 minutes in. And most of the people are working, let’s say, in that area for certain definitions, then you wouldn’t count that as rural, as opposed to places whose economic output is totally like enclosed, but also very sparsely populated. So anyway, blah, blah, blah. I think, you know, practically.

You know what this means, and this is the real point here is that when we’re reading stories about better O’Rourke is in rural Texas, or even Lyes trying to sort of purport to show like, like we’re gonna kinda do a little bit of, of, you know, uh, the, the opportunities and costs of like looking at these different areas.

One thing to point out is like, It might not be using the same definition of rural, right. And one example of this that you brought up, uh, when we were looking into this is you look at the exit polling data [00:05:00] and for ex, and for example, you know, one set of exit polling and what what’s interesting about exit polling data besides the fact that it’s very variable and has very large margins of error, uh, is the fact that you know, what you get to do is, is you get to look at what the.

Both what the distribution is of the vote in different areas, among different groups, you know, races, ethnicities, obviously rural, non, rural, but then you also get to see what percentage of the state vote they estimate coming from those groups, which is useful. Uh, but when you go and look at like this question, we find like, I think in one set of, you know, exit polls, the rural and small town as they put it, part of the state is 30% of the vote in another set of exit polls.

The rural part, the rural composition or the rural contribution of the vote is about 13%. Right? Well, obviously it’s, it’s. It’s gotta be somewhere in there probably, but it raises this issue of the fact that just for, I think everybody to be careful with is like, when somebody says rural, it’s not gonna always mean the same thing.

And so just, just for what, just, you know, when we start talking about some of the electoral data that we looked at, just to be upfront with what I’m using is I’m using the definitions of counties because they’re fixed, uh, used by [00:06:00] Wayne Thorberg and his analysis of, you know, sort of electoral change in Texas.

Is this perfect. Partially because it’s constantly, you know, Texas has been growing a lot. Right. And we should,

Jim Henson: we should fill out that, that citation for our readers. When, when is a, a Repub, you know, former Republican’s retired Republican operative. Now I think he’s retired, but he wrote a book called state several years ago.

Josh Blank: Terrific. A perfect book. Well, he is a new book out now, too. Actually. I think he’s just coming out recently. So he’s, he’s active and you know, I, I, I just use that as one possibility, but the point is you could do other ones. So anyway, okay. So we can elaborate that more if necessary, but let’s, let’s, let’s move on.

Right, right.

Jim Henson: We should also tell, you know, we use polling data a lot too. And the polling data in our and most pulls is kind of self-disclosed right.

Josh Blank: So we usually urban kind of falls out. Yeah. We tend to have people tell us whether they live in an urban, suburban, or rural area and we take them at their word for it.

And I think, you know, I’m pretty comfortable with that for the most part, for lots of reasons, but it’s not important. We could go into, we could just talk about definitions of rally forever, so let’s not do it. Yeah. Let’s get back to this. This is just,

Jim Henson: caveat’s not the next a methodological [00:07:00] PPU cast. So, you know, The political math here.

I think you’ll elaborate that a little bit. If you consider the most general campaign arithmetic. Right. Makes sense to think that our work needs to find some more votes beyond the pool of reliable Democrats who overwhelmingly

Josh Blank: support him. Right. And I think that’s the first thing from, I think like the, the data just to take out of this, which is, you know, looking at the polling data.

I mean, Greg Abbott is a known quantity. Better work to a large extent is a known quantity at this point. Yeah. Republicans are lining up behind Greg. You know, in the numbers, we would expect them to Democrats are lining up behind better O’Rourke and the numbers that we would expect them to. Right. When we, when we’ve

Jim Henson: done trial ballots.

And I, I think most other pollings found this to, you know, the crossover voting and the gubernatorial, you know, preferences right now is in the low single digits.

Josh Blank: Exactly. And so, you know, you consider that you consider, we talk about negative partisanship and ultimately, I mean, I think to. Bring this point back around.

It’s just to say, if you know, all the Democrats show up, you know, who normally show up and all the Republicans show up who normally show up [00:08:00] Republicans win races, right. Full stop.

Jim Henson: So, and that’s been like the fundamental problem that has framed elections in Texas. Now, since the Republican, you know, as the Republicans were becoming ascendancy, ascendent and became.

Right. You know, the, the, the consistent majority party, you know, tech institutionally and in 2003 after the two, 2002 election.

Josh Blank: Okay. So then I guess, you know, in evaluating, you know, this sort of we’ll call it the rural strategy. , you know, if you will, or something, which feels funny, but in evaluating it, you know, I.

I think, you know, if you listen to this podcast, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt as you know, it’s one of, I like to think that generally speaking, I like to ask when I see something, why would they be doing this? If they knew what they were doing, and then we can kind of pick it apart. Right.

I think it’s really easy to kind of go in and just say, oh, well, you know, what’s the argument. What’s the argument. Yeah, exactly. And so I was thinking about, you know, let’s look at this argument from a couple different. Points of view. And the first is you might say, look, you know, maybe be, you know, O’Rourke being the fact that he’s a known quantity now, being that, you know, he is the democratic star in Texas [00:09:00] without really a peer.

You know, at this point, he’s almost universally known among Democrats and he’s continuing to raise money. Maybe he doesn’t need to spend as much time in those urban and suburban centers, right. Ginning up support. And there’s actually some evidence in the data that, that he might not. And so I went back and I looked at some of our polling data on job approval numbers for Ted Cruz in June of 2018 to compare it to Greg Abbott’s numbers in June of 2022.

So at the same point. In the election cycle. Right. And what sort of was surprising, I think is that even though cruise was considered in that election, you know, one of the factors that led to that close race, and there were a couple, I think that we could, you know, you could lay out, but one of the contextual factors, there’s a lot of contextual factors, but one of the factors that I think, you know, people pointed to in terms of Aurora coming close to Cruz and certainly his competitiveness in terms of raising money, all this was the fact that, you know, Democrats really did not like Ted

Jim Henson: Cruz.

Yeah. Cruz was the Republican that Democrats

Josh Blank: loved to. Yeah, he’s the arch nemesis. And also, you know, he’s a Republican that a lot of commentators kind of didn’t really like, you know, and so you see, you know, ultimately this idea was well he’s, you know, especially, you know, disliked having said that though, when you go and you look at these two [00:10:00] sets of numbers, what you find is that in June of 20 18, 70 4% of Democrats disapproved of the job cruise was doing for Abbott it’s 86%, 79% of de.

Strongly disapprove of the job Abbott is doing that’s five points more than disapproved of the job cruise was doing in 2018, right? Among independence, disapproval for cruises was 43%, which is also a big part of that race was the fact that independence broke probably for O’Rourke right now in June of 22, 22, 50 5% ha disapprove of Abbots.

So that’s a 12 point increase. Uh, Among, you know, urban voters, it’s relatively similar to, among both of them. Abbott’s doing worse among suburban voters. Cruz was at 41 approved 40, 41 approved 41 disapproved Abbots at 41 48. The only group that he’s actually doing a little bit better with is actually real voters.

Right. Which is, you know, just a little, but ultimately, you know, it’s sort of it’s, it’s interesting. So one thing you might say from looking at this is, you know, given that Greg Abbott is as disliked by Democrats, Uh, as really, almost any kind of nationally big, well known [00:11:00] politician, it might not necessarily be the case.

O’Rourke needs to put in the same level of effort to turn these voters out would be one argument, one could make. Right? Right. Especially given the fact that again, the only place where Abbot’s looking to be slightly better positioned than Cruz is actually with rural voters where crews wipe the floor with

Jim Henson: O’Rourke and this speaks to an interest.

I, you know, I think that that speaks to an interesting overall dynamic that we is being molded out there and that we’ve molded here, which is, you know, What had been, and, and this national conversation changed as of last night and today a little bit. Yeah. And we, I don’t wanna get too into it, but, you know, we’ve been thinking this was gonna be a very, you know, good Republican cycle.

And yet it’s been a very tough year for Greg Abbott or tough six or eight months for Greg Abbott. Depending on when you wanna start. But certainly, you know, as we’ve sat on here before going back to the power outages in 2021, right then the Aldi shootings, you know, abortion, you know, a lot of the things that seem to be [00:12:00] like, you know, sign, you know, a lot of the, the wind in the sales of the Republicans in Texas have kind of begun to blow the other way a little bit, so, well, it almost seems like, you

Josh Blank: know what, it’s out there too.

Yeah, no, I think so. I mean, I think part of it isn’t, you know, Add this, but it’s in there, but also, you know, the, the extremity of the legislative session in between those. Right. Right. And so, you know, a lot of political capital was expended, almost thinking, you know, in some ways, yeah. With, I think a reasonable expectation that there was a lot to expend and a lot of slack in the sales.

and so we should say, I mean, look real quick, you know, in 20 18, 18, O’Rourke also had Trump as a mobilizing influence in addition to Cruz. Right. You know, and obviously your point, you know, 22 is probably gonna have its own set of additional kind of mobilizers, whether abortion or guns or something going on the border.

Yeah. And you know, I’d also say in 2022, O’Rourke’s not the shiny new object. He was in 2018, you know, he certainly has the damage he’s taken on. You’ve got Biden, you’ve got the economy, you’ve got the border. But I think, you know, if one thing and I always say this, like I like to see what campaigns do is, is a, is.

Sort of a way that they reveal what they. And to me when I see, you know, at least, [00:13:00] and again, I wanna be clear, it’s not like a work isn’t campaigned in the cities. Like he’s not campaigning in the suburbs. Yeah. The reality is, is that, you know, he spent a lot of time out in real Texas in the

Jim Henson: summer. Yeah.

Fall. And then they just announced another leg of the tour that is gonna be a little more

Josh Blank: balanced it’s well, and it’s gonna be more balanced towards cities and suburbs. That’s what I mean. So about. Third is probably gonna, this is not a rule.

Jim Henson: The fall tour is not a rural

Josh Blank: tour, right. And the fall tour is really like, you know, this is kind of when, like the late summer leg of the tour, the campaign happened.

So I think we should be clear about this, but I think at the very least, it probably shows the order campaign feels at least somewhat confident that it can, you know, win the non-real counties, which he did in 2018 and Biden did. Uh, in 2020, but Hager didn’t right against, uh, corn MJ Hager was MJ Hager nor did Lupe Valdez in 2018, nor did Hillary Clinton at 16 nor Davis in 14.

So it’s not a guarantee that he’s going to win, uh, right. Win, you know, the non rural counties as I’m describing it. But I think what the strategy has to assume is that, you know, if Aurora can win the non-real county slightly, let’s say 52 48, which is about where he was with with Cruz. He recognizes that he still the non rural county.

Sorry, the [00:14:00] non-real county.

Jim Henson: Sorry. Yeah, you said that, but I just wanna, no, you said it right, but I just wanna really? Yeah, we were talking fast. I wanna underline the non-real.

Josh Blank: So it assumes that work is gonna win the non-real counties, you know, 52, 48, something like that, but it recognizes, they also can’t do that and then lose the rural counties, 75, 25, which has basically been kind of the split out there.

Right,

Jim Henson: right. Which elaborate. Yeah. Elaborates kind of where we started, which is, you know, You need something else. Mm-hmm , you know, the O award campaign needs a little something else, unless you’re gonna assume the thing, like I’d like to think Democrats have learned that they can’t just assert right. Or assume, which is a big increase in democratic turnout that comes from ever

Josh Blank: whatever they think the thing is this

Jim Henson: time.

Yes. Some, you know,

Josh Blank: yes. Some combination of pixie dust yeah. Some

Jim Henson: magic God, whatever it’s attributed to. Well, my God, um, you know, But it’s interesting. I mean, once, you know, we kind of go through all that and then we get, and I, in my notes, I’ve got it, you know, bolded, the only place where Abbott looks to be in a slightly better position [00:15:00] is with rural voters, you know, and that actually could feel the argument for either side, whether either they shouldn’t be doing this or they should right.

I mean, yeah, no, absolutely. Depending on what you think the, the potential for changing views is, I mean, I’m struck as we look at that data that while Abbott is in, you know, worse shape, Slightly in all of those area, you know, then in 20, in 2022, then cruise was in 2018. The only one of those that’s kind of really clearly outside the margin of those subgroups.

Mm-hmm is among independence. And as you were saying before the podcast, you know, we’ve, we land once again on independence and there aren’t that many independence. Anywhere, but there aren’t that many in, you know, the rural areas of Texas are not more independent. Yeah. Are not more subject to, you know, being, you know, having independence there than are the rest of the state.

I think,

Josh Blank: you know, if anybody starts telling you that they’re certain what rural independence think, I think you need to let grab your wallet. Just, just, just

Jim Henson: wait a second. Some [00:16:00] as, as we say, in the pretty small

Josh Blank: cells, pretty small cells, most likely. So, but this raises this question overall, which is just to say, you know, okay, so you’re looking for more votes in rural Texas.

Well, you. Does that make sense? I mean, let’s, now let’s flip the argument and go, let’s talk about rural Texas first, a right, right. And so one thing we can do is we can look at sort of the rural contribution to the state’s overall vote totals. Right? So like how much, you know, how much of the vote does rural Texas contribute.

And the one interesting thing first and foremost, looking back is that it’s been declining. Yeah. So it went from, you know, About 15 point a half percent in 2014. And it’s down to was about down to about 13.3% in 2022. Now ultimately you’d say, well, that’s just a little bit, you know, but ultimately in a place like Texas with millions and millions of voters, this does actually add up to some big numbers.

Even if the overall contribution is relatively small. Right. I think she should also raise the point here, which is when people say like, Hey, you know, nobody lives there and it’s not true. It’s not true that nobody lives there. Right. People live there. But when we’re looking at the electorate, we’re talking about a, a slice of the electorate, you know, relative to right.

Most of the urban

Jim Henson: areas. Right. Right. And if you start doing that [00:17:00] back of the envelope, math, I mean, You know, you start talking about shaving moving three or four, 5% of 13% and, and we

Josh Blank: will, yeah, just two more, I guess I just a couple more contextual things to know here for this audience. Right. You know, turnout is slightly, was slightly higher in rural counties, uh, than in non-real counties in 2014.

In 20 16, 18 and 20, uh, the non rural counties have had a slightly higher turnout in the rural counties, but the gap is re it’s. First of all, it’s pretty consistent. And the gap is relatively small. So 2018 had the biggest gap in turnout. Right. Uh, and it was 2.6, three points. So it’s just a little bit, a little bit more turnout in the urban counties, which again, it does add up to a lot of votes because it’s a lot of people there.

Um, but ultimately it’s not as though there’s a lot of wild fluctuation. So I think, you know, you kind. Set, you have a set feeling for look, how many voters are gonna turn out? I think pretty clearly based on past, uh, performance, you know, there’s a lot more variability in the non world turnout because there’s so many more people and the numbers.

I mean, basically the percent shifts turn into large numbers very quickly. And we kind of see that really quickly when [00:18:00] we start to do some back of the envelope calculating. So the question then becomes, okay, it’s a small, you know, it’s a small share. What’s what’s the potential, right. You know? Right. And this doesn’t look great for O’Rourke right.

So we, a couple different things we can look at. Right. We can look at our, our polling and we can look at election returns, for example. And you said, we ask people whether they live in urban, suburban, or rural environment, we’ve been doing this on every poll, you know, going back to O. Eight. Yeah. I decided just to look back to February, 2015, just for, yeah, no, that’s, you know, reasonable range of the

Jim Henson: modern era, very comparison of the two cycles of the, the recent

Josh Blank: cycles.

Yeah. Right. And so, and what we found is, you know, on average about, you know, 62% of rural voters identify as Republican, uh, but no less than 64% since June of, uh, last year in 2021, right. For Democrats, it’s about a little under 26% average, but it’s been 22% in each of the last four surveys. So, you know, close to one in five.

Uh, would identify as a Democrat and the Republican vote has shifted between about 73 and a half percent. And the Trump Clinton mat match up to 77, a little over 77% in Abbots, uh, [00:19:00] reelection over Valez. The Democrat vote has sort of fluctuated between about 22 and 25% of the

Jim Henson: vote, which also fits our, you know, the evidence that we have a somewhat more Republican electorate in midterm election years.

Josh Blank: Absolutely. Well, and I think it also, you know, what you see here. So we talk about all the time, which is, as you go from registered voters to likely voters to the actual electorate, you go from basically a 60, 20, you know, 60, 25 to a. 75 25 electorate. Right. You know, we’ve looked, we asked fave UN fave about O’Rourke and you know, this doesn’t, you know, in, you know, in all of our, in polls recently.

And when we look among rural voters, it doesn’t really show a huge potential , you know, to, to be honest, because the total favorability among rural voters seems to top out at about 25%, which is so, you

Jim Henson: know, which interestingly, if we look at the exit polls, Yeah, kind of matches pretty in the ballpark of what the baseline is.

Josh Blank: Right. So let’s, let’s,

Jim Henson: you know, allowing for all the stuff we started with all the caveats we started with. Okay.

Josh Blank: I’m gonna wrap up the math. Okay, good. I promise. I promise. Then we’ll go to sort of, [00:20:00] what do you know, what do we take from this? Right. So we like to do back of the envelope calculations from time to time, we

Jim Henson: even have a graphic.

How to, how to resurrect the graphic. You worked hard on that

Josh Blank: graphic. We might as well. It’s a, yeah, it’s, it’s a nice cause it’s like a French air mail one, which, you know, it has its problems, but it’s very clear what it is anyway most.

Jim Henson: Anyway, well, you can read the podcast while you’re crunching on some Crute.

Exactly.

Josh Blank: Well, if you can afford it, so. We’re just, if we take the 2018 Senate grace as sort of the, you know, the point at which we’re gonna make a departure, which is a very generous, and I think that’s fine. Yeah. You know, we’re making a very generous, you know, comparison point for O’Rourke because that was the closest Democrats have come.

You know, Cruise’s margin of victory was about 215,000 votes. Overall. His rural margin of victory was almost 560,000. So just doing a little calculation if Beto improved his standing among real voters to let’s say 30% from 24.93, which he got on that race. Right. Which would be a pretty big increase if you think 5% percentage wise.

Yeah. 5% of 25% is a lot. Right. So you, you know, increases to 30%, however so then he [00:21:00] nets an additional 57,000 voters approximately, and we could further let’s make it further. Let’s make another generous assumption. Right. Which is that all of those voters came from, from crews. They were gonna vote for crews.

And you know, in this case they, they would’ve been Abbott voters, but now they’re gonna be. O’Rourke voters. So then Beto net’s 114,000 votes. He’s still a hundred thousand votes. Of his margin, right? So, you know, all this has to assume even just to sort of really get something meaningful out of this real place that he’s gonna have to run at least five points better than his favorability numbers, at least five to points better than his par than party identification in these areas, which he might get a couple.

No, I did a little back the envelope math on this. He could get a couple points from independence, right. But I mean, why say a couple points? I mean, a couple points, one or two. Right. Yeah. And he’s gonna have to do about five again. That’s not very many votes. Yeah. And he’s gonna have to do about five points better than past democratic results.

If he’s gonna try to cut his law, his, his loss here, his deficit. Half now, obviously this leaves out a million things, right? There’s a lot of interlocking complexity here. Sure. What does turnout look like in urban, suburban and rural parts of the state? You know, how large is our work’s [00:22:00] advantage in the urban areas?

Should he have one, especially in the sub, you know, in the suburban areas is where most people are, you know, how did the state suburban voters caster ballots? What’s the split with Hispanics and dare, we even say rural Hispanics, right. And dare we say, rural Springs. And then I would say, you know, and, and then with, and then all the, then I say, and how much coverage does rural Texas provide Republicans?

Right. So all those things are gonna be related to each other. And so that’s kind of where we land on this. So what are what’s, you know, what are the takeaways ?

Jim Henson: Yeah, I mean, I, I think the O’Rourke campaign and, and O’Rourke, and his campaign functionaries themselves in a lot of the coverage that we saw. I think there was a, there were a couple of particular good quotes in the Washington post article, apologies to the writer.

Piece. I thought it was very well done. That came out last weekend. It was well done in the sense there was none of these numbers in it, but it was very closely observed. And I thought a very good yeah, on the ground portrayal of what these events that O’Rourke is doing in these rural areas. That’s what I think feels like.

And I, and I think that, you know, what, what the O’Rourke [00:23:00] campaign was and what they were saying there is that this is not just about the math and the rural areas. Uhhuh. It’s about a larger communication of. Or Rourke’s image and, and potentially as you’ve been pointing out, even perhaps a contrast with Abbott’s persona in image right now.

And I, I think in terms of the, the O’Rourke image, I mean, I, I think the idea is that it may help, you know, it could help with turn out, not only in the rural areas, but also in the non rural areas, in terms of, you know, the bank shot, you get from coverage and, and increases in enthusiasm. .

Josh Blank: Yeah. And I think it matches sort of, you know, some of the demographic patterns in the state where, you know, Texas, I mean, you know, we already kind of mentioned the fact that the share of the vote coming from rural parts of the state has been cons, you know, consistently, you know, declining in small numbers, but considerably.

Yeah. And that reflects, you know, I think what’s going on in Texas, which has gone everywhere, which is that, you know, sort of the urbanization of populations and people moving out of rural areas. But what this also needs to reflect is that, you know, you do also have a lot [00:24:00] of people living in and around the urban area.

In the suburban areas that you want, whose vote you wanna give, ’em get, who come from these rural parts of the state. Right. And that’s part of the sort, the bank shot. And this is very much kind of part of the brand that O’Rourke has put forward as being, you know, not, I wouldn’t say post-partisan in that, cause I don’t like that term and blah, blah, blah.

Jim Henson: Yeah. And I don’t, it’s not accurate, but I think they’re taking it pretty easy on that this time around

Josh Blank: no, they are taking easily, but, but the idea that, you know, he’s willing to go and, you know, talk to people I think is, you know, probably. Pretty important from just sort of a demonstration effect, right?

Yeah. I mean, if people feel like, you know, the state is, you know, the, the, that the, if the goal of the campaign in some ways is to make this a referendum on Republican leadership. And the fact that it’s too focused on, you know, sort of extreme minority within the Republican party, you know, for a work to make a credible case, that he’s there to govern for everybody.

He can’t just go to Austin, right. And Dallas and Houston then say, no, I’m here for everybody. And this is a way to demonstrate that actually. Well,

Jim Henson: and in a sense, I think you get, you get two benefits that are intention. Potentially. I mean, I think you get exactly what you’re talking about. [00:25:00] Um, you know, but you also get for younger urban voters, I mean, throughout this whole and, and, and democratic suburbanites that are in many cases, new, relatively new suburbanites, you get almost the opposite benefit throughout this whole conversation.

I keep like, waiting to say something about negative partisanship. Yeah. But I think. they can’t say this, but I think when you know, better O’Rourke goes out and throws an MF at a guy harassing him. Mm-hmm or challenging him. We should be fair away, challenging him, or, you know, laughing at him in a rural campaign meeting.

Mm-hmm . You know that I, I think a lot of his supporters like that and a lot of young supporters, like, yeah, they see it as you know, that that’s still a, a continu, a continuation of that combative unorthodox. [00:26:00] You know, he’s not one of, it’s not even so much just he’s one of us. He’s not one of them elements, right.

That I think he benefits. And that’s kind of, you know, that plays out a little bit of what I was saying earlier, but I think it’s probably a little bit of an underappreciate underappreciated aspect of, of him campaigning in these areas. But of course they. I mean it, you know, it’s too conflicting with the message you were talking about to come out and say it.

But I, I, I would be surprised if they didn’t realize that they get some benefit from their base voters, from him showing that he’s willing to go out and, and

Josh Blank: fight. Yeah. And I mean, I think, you know, this is, this is something I don’t think many people are gonna draw, you know, sort of make this parallel, but I, you know, someone.

Who sits here and follows us so closely. And I think, I don’t think this is for voters, but it, it was striking reading, you know, all this coverage about, you know, so he’s, you know, it works out there, you know, sort of these, uh, groups of people are showing up with the intention [00:27:00] of, you know, essentially disrupting the campaign event, you know, quote unquote, running him outta town or whatever.

And then, you know, you have these interactions where, you know, people who. Clearly hostile to his message, but also are, you know, hurling threats and, you know, insult and well I’m gonna get to and who are physically armed, right? Yeah. You know, in most cases, and you’ve got these videos of, you know, O’Rourke going up and, you know, basically talking to them.

Right. And I mean, I’m sitting here and thinking to myself and I, you know, I, I, I’m reluctant to say this, I’m gonna say anyway, about the, how long it took Greg Abbott to go back to Uvalde. And at the time we said this and that’s in recordings. So, but you know, The only read that we could kind of have of why he wouldn’t do that is cuz he doesn’t want to go and have video of grieving parents.

Hurly insults at him yelling at him, right. Asking him questions. He doesn’t want to answer. Right. And, and the contrast between those two things in the moment of, you know, again, like, you know, clearly hostile men with guns, yelling, you know, clear threats at you and him walking over and talking to them and the fact that Abbott, right.

It’s you know, in terms of the contrast and styles, I mean, to me, that’s one of those you. Ooh.

Jim Henson: Okay. [00:28:00] So let me ask you this. I mean, I, you know, and I don’t yeah, sure. I I’m processing it myself and I, I think I know what I think the answer is, but I don’t know, or what my answer would be. What’s the relative value of that and mobilization versus persuasion.

Yeah. I don’t know. Well, you know, to me, I think, I mean, I, I think it probably has more mobilization value than persuasion value. I think it’s Mo I think it’s all mobile. Again, we brings us back to, again, the pin. We’re gonna have to do the podcast. We’re gonna have to do the independent podcast pretty soon.

I think it’s

Josh Blank: about, I think it’s about mobilization and I have two reasons why, you know, more so than persuasion here. Number one. You know, a main issue that I think we’ve talked about before is the fact that, you know, in a lot of cases, in, in many of these rural parts of the state, there there’s no democratic party really to speak of.

Right. And so first and foremost, if you are a Democrat who lives in, in one of these counties, in which, you know, Republicans regularly get 70 plus percent of the vote. And in many cases you don’t even have a Democrat running for many of the offices, ultimately, without someone like. better. Oort coming out there and kind like Jining something up, you know, you [00:29:00] are gonna have mobilization problems.

Cause ultimately the vote does not count. I mean, it’s not gonna make, I mean, that doesn’t count. It doesn’t make a difference. That’s the way we think about from political science. You’re not gonna impact the election locally because there’s no election to impact locally in a lot of cases, right?

Jim Henson: Yeah.

Outside of an expressive vote, you’re not, you know,

Josh Blank: and so, and so to some extent, you know, I think there’s two, there’s a couple things going on, which is, you know, one is Democrats have become more competitive in the urban and suburban areas. You know, it’s less incumbent upon, you know, someone like Bero.

Coming to town to sort of gin up interest in this environment. And you have Democrats on the, and that is where

Jim Henson: negative partisanship is. I mean, if you assume a degree of, of negative partisanship in the urban and suburban areas, you know, you probably don’t have to push as hard to

Josh Blank: get people out. Exactly.

And you’ve got people there working and campaigning because they’re actually running for office there in these row, parts that say you don’t really have that. And really the only democratic campaign that’s kind of going on in all these places is better ROS and Mike Colliers. And so to some extent, there’s a little bit of a, a distribution of responsibility here that I think actually is a little bit about mobilization.

It does make sense. I think

Jim Henson: I, I wanna be able to, you know, I just don’t. [00:30:00] Yeah. Who knows who’s listening, but. You know, the only salient democratic campaigns. Right. I mean, you know, I mean, I think a lot of these other down ballot guys are out or candidates, you know, Rashelle, Garza and Jayla are out there a lot.

I think they’re, you know, they’re working. No, but I would’ve, but the salience is

Josh Blank: lower. Yeah. I, I agree with that. And I think the, and I think something else that’s sort of shifted a little bit and this will kind of relate to the other reason. I think it’s about mobilization and I don’t know what you think about this.

We’ve talked about this before, but I, I do wonder to what extent greater competition. In south Texas districts that are. Predominantly democratic, but are going to have, you know, more competition this cycle doesn’t change the calculus a little bit. You know, we’ve talked in the past about, you know, how a lot of times Hispanic Democrats who are representing, you know, majority, uh, Hispanic districts about overwhelmingly democratic don’t necessarily have, you know, a big incentive to gen up turnout, right.

And to really mobilize a bunch of voters. And I wonder if that calculus is changing a little bit, which so for O’Rourke maybe, you know, there’s less value to going to some of the [00:31:00] more denser sort of, you know, valley population centers, as opposed to spending a little more time in some of these other counties where again, there’s less of an infrastructure less going on.

Right. And this is my last thing that I’m done. The other thing about this, I think is this is part of, you know, in terms of, you know, this is about mobilization. Ultimately this is about narratives. I mean, cuz we’re not talking about a lot of voters here and we’ve talked before about, I think how Republicans are really, you know, pushing the narrative that they’re making inroads among Hispanics.

And we’ve really called into question exactly. What does that mean? And really for the most part, what that’s meant is meant that, you know, Republicans are seeking out, uh, Hispanics, especially in rural, they’re seeking out conservative Hispanics in rural parts of the state who generally would lean Republican anyway, but that Republicans have not been that interested in seeking.

Over the last 10, 20 years to me, as I’ve said before, that’s a reflection of the fact that, you know, they see a more competitive environment in which it’s valuable to go out and find these people, especially when they know their Republican voters are gonna turn out. You could flip that around and say the same thing about this Democrats feel confident that Democrats are gonna turn out even in a midterm cycle.

And so really now, if the states is competitive, as it, you know, needs to be, if Aurora is even gonna have a [00:32:00]chance of, you know, even being close, Well, now he’s gotta go and focus on these other voters and really kind of turning them outta the woodwork. And I think both campaigns are kind of saying the same thing with different versions of it.

And both of them also have sort of this bank shot effect of saying for Republicans, Hey, we are making inroad with this Hispanic. And for Democrats, I work say, Hey, you know, we are not just the party of the city. Yeah.

Jim Henson: And, and I, yeah,

Josh Blank: now I was gonna, is, is that gonna win? Is that, is that work

Jim Henson: for it in doubt?

Well, the takeaway, I mean, so then, you know, where, where does that leave us and where does all this leave us? I mean, I think that people that are opposed to this, you know, or that think that the strategy is not a good one, both Democrats and Republicans to my mind probably underestimate the degree to which this probably is a plausible.

Of the solution to the problem that Democrats have right now. Yeah. Which is there are just natural limits to their ability to increase turnout above [00:33:00] the trend line. Shall we call it? Mm-hmm in the, you know, demonstrated going into the selection of, of kind of, you know, the moving baseline of democratic turnout.

You gotta have something else. You know, in addition to the argument that, you know, this time we’re gonna really beat the bushes. And part of that goes to something that we’ve said before, that does speak to your, you know, the efforts and the, the thing about the Republican efforts on the valley, which is, you know, there’s always a Republican counter response to that.

Yeah. Right. That is not to be underestimated and better. O’Rourke does have an advantage. This. you know, that a lot of other campaigns democratic top of the ballot campaigns have not had in the past, which is he has a lot of resources and the opportunity costs of him spending time in resources in rural areas may not be as high as a.

As a lot of the, the common sense, the quote unquote common sense arguments would suggest. [00:34:00] Yeah. I

Josh Blank: mean, to go back to what you were saying about, it’s not like Rochelle Garza, you know, and Jay cer aren’t, you know, campaigning these places. But the reality is, is that they’re not known to anybody, so right.

For them, the cost of not focusing their efforts where the democratic votes really are concentrated is a lot

Jim Henson: higher, but also which, you know, but, but another point of that, which you also, you know, is that, you know, the oor campaign has the resources. Yeah. To have other, you know, to be beating the bushes in the suburbs.

Right. And in their urban areas. And, you know, I, you know, we’ll see, I mean, the, you know, one of the, the most conventional criticisms of O’Rourke in 2018, which has some fairness, is that, you know, they did not do enough media. They did not do enough television in the final, you know, in the, in the final, you know, weeks of the campaign and the high campaign season after labor.

You know, and I do suspect that’s not gonna be the case

Josh Blank: this time. Yeah. The other big criticism, I think that, you know, they’ve clearly internalized from what I’ve read is that, you know, they didn’t take the case to Cruz early enough. And part of this is to say, you know, he’s, I mean, there’s something, you know, you brought up the, you know, the, sort of the VI the, the viral moment, you know, with the MF for [00:35:00] comment and, you know, in some ways.

You know, I mean that actually, you know, when you say that kind of sticking with me, cuz that is something, you know, that O’Rourke has, you know, has this, you know, has had a pretty natural ability to create viral moments for himself. But the reality is in some ways, you know, by going out, you know, by going into these, you know, going into the, these areas where you are gonna have a certain amount of hostility, like.

you know, you may be just creating more viral moments when we’ve seen the Abbott campaign say, Hey, you know, don’t wear your Abbott stuff and go to the events and they can take pictures of you and say, you’re converted. And so they’re seeing something here. That’s a little bit of a,

Jim Henson: you know, well, and, and I guess what occurs to me is that, you know, those viral moments, or even just the moments that seep into coverage and into his image are a little bit more coherent overall.

Yeah. And a little more so far tailored to the moment. Yeah. Right. I mean, Think about all the conversations we had, including with friends of ours, you know, like, you know, about the VI, you know, him riding the skateboard and the Whataburger, you know, that was cool. It was viral. Yeah. A little bit of a [00:36:00] wash in terms of impact on, you know, perhaps, you know, played to some young people, but other people thought it was kind of stupid and frivolous.

Yeah. Right. it’s a little more focused to have a bunch of moments where you are having the kind of exchanges with people in small towns that are arguing with you about arguing with O’Rourke about guns and about his positions, you know, and, and it was, it’s been a pretty remarkably feature and this could be reporting bias towards conflict.

But nonetheless, I think it’s real that one of the common things is. People telling him we don’t want you around here and him going well, some people do and I’m gonna be, and I’m not going away. Right. Right. That’s a lot more focused. Mm-hmm and coherent with this combative image, you know, again, Coherent with negative partisanship, but also it’s just a little more politically meaningful and a little more on point [00:37:00] than I was in a punk rock band and I could skateboard.

Right. And I think there’s something to that. Um, so I, I guess where we land is, you know, the. In and of itself, the numbers are not going to tell, or, you know, the numbers in the rural areas are not going to be enough. Right. But there may be some external, you know, some externalities here and some other, you know, what we’ve called bank shots that may be more helpful.

And, you know, I think, and so we’ll, you know, we’ll. I, I think it will be dependent what, you know, of course like everything, what the final phases of the campaign look like. Yeah. You know, and these things don’t happen in a vacuum. Um, and what the, you know, what the Abbott, you know, counter move strategy is, you know, we’re getting now it’s, it’s getting to be late, you know, mid to late August.

We’re getting close to, you know, uh, uh, You know, we’re already seeing an uptick in tempo, which you’d mentioned, you know, Greg Abbott, uh, put out his first TV ad in the last week, uh, featured his wife prominently, a bio ad, basically. Yeah. You know, talked a lot about his, in case you don’t [00:38:00] know who he is, experience.

Um, well, I mean, I think, but it’s, but what’s seen is that it was, you know, we haven’t talked about that and we don’t have time to decompose it. Now, maybe we’ll come back and do a podcast on, on sort of what the media images are of both candidates. Yeah. Which we’ve kind of edged into, you know, but I mean, look front and center, put his, his injury and, and his response to his, to his injury.

Um, which was an interesting play. A couple of people in that inside of this and were very. To note that I would say so on that, um, we will do a post with a bunch of stuff on this. You know, some of the graphics will be a little, you know, working versions. There’s gonna be some cutting and pasting here from some of our working stuff, which we’ve done before, but some of our also more Polish graphics.

So I wanna thank Josh for being here. All the work you put into this. Thank a as always our crew in the audio studio, in the liberal arts development, uh, studio at the university of Texas at. Thanks to all you for listening, we’ll be back soon enough with another, [00:39:00] uh, second reading podcast. You can find the data here that we talked about on the Texas politics project website.

That’s Texas politics dot U, texas.edu. Again, thanks for listening. We’ll be back again soon. The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin.