December 16th, 2021 – 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 people on a regular basis, there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called Texas. The problem is these departures from the constitution.

They have become the norm at what the 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. Uh, I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin joined for the last podcast of the year today by Josh blank, not the last podcast of all time, but last of the year or of all podcasts, but the last version of this podcast for this year, I’m practicing being precise and I’m joined by Josh blank, restricts director of the Texas politics project.

So we’ve gone round and round about things we can talk about here. We posted a bunch of new content, uh, at the blog site, we put some pressure on ourselves. That’s the end of the year, right at the, you know, yeah. A lot of things that had been sitting around unfinished on my desk mainly, uh, we sort of have gotten out.

Two for three right now and may even get one more out. Um, so we urge you to go to Texas politics dot U texas.edu. We’ve got a post on legislative turnover that has, uh, the fruit of a lot of, kind of digging into stuff that Josh has done. And then we have a piece on negative partisanship, which we’ve been promising slash threatening to finish up and release for a long time.

And for those of you that follow Texas government politics, but even national politics, you know, we went back and looked at some of our data on. Uh, the approval level that the approval or disapproval that Texas grant Texans grant, the two political parties and constructed a view of how negative partisanship works along with definitions.

And again, with you listening to this podcast, we’ve talked about this a bit, but now we kind of produce the data and there’s a lot of interesting stuff in there. We may get circle back to that later today, but. I think we ought to kind of talk about in, in the spirit of a year-end Roundup and thinking about, you know, where we stand.

I mean, this happens all the time and some of it’s just manufactured, you know, let’s get some lists in the cans. So nobody has to work the last week, been listicle in the media and we’ve this isn’t quite that, but there’s a reasonable impulse to that, particularly where we are. The political trajectory right now to be thinking about what we’ve seen this year, what’s coming up in what in Texas will be, you know, a very interesting election year.

You know, I think two big themes have jumped out at me in coverage of politics and there’s a million things going on right now. Other things that could be picked, but one is, uh, at the national level. You know, resurgence of a discussion about democracy in the United States being in danger, how well it’s functioning.

I think that there was a lot of stuff written. During the Trump presidency about democracy being imperiled in the United States, we saw a little bit of a very S you know, slight, I went into a band slightly, but then the January 6th insurrection has really resurrected that discussion. But now given it.

You know, a different kind of tilt? Well, I think the thing that’s really what’s really brought it up. I think, uh, in, in national discussions in the last few weeks is as we get to candidate filing deadlines for the primaries, both in Texas and elsewhere, what you’re seeing is a lot more. I guess I’ll just put, I’ll just put it this way, you know, for now, you know, potentially let’s say candidates for offices that oversee elections in a lot of states and localities where, you know, the candidates are expressing what we could say are anti-democratic leaning, right?

The, you know, the idea that, you know, we’re going to take the, you know, the, the, there are efforts to, as we talked about in here, Affect the selection of these election administrators, which have here to, for been seen largely. And I don’t want to be naive about this, but, you know, largely, you know, administrative positions with pretty clear lane markers in terms of, and, and, and a degree of buffering from partisan politics.

You know, that seems to be changing. And also of course the January 6th commission, you know, has been, or committee has been getting, you know, a lot more internal looks at what unfolded after the last national election. You know, so all of that I think is feeding this discussion again. Uh, you know, we’re not going to overly dwell on that, but it, it is, it does have manifestations in Texas and it does seem to me to connect with the other big thing.

That’s been. More of a local angle story from the Texas perspective, but fueled by national coverage, you know, and S you know, metaphors catch on and media coverage, but something that’s really caught on, uh, is Greg Abbott is a weather vane. Now there’s, you know, that comes from the cover of the, the new issue of Texas monthly, which is their year-end bump, steer issue, which in which they.

Take the opportunity to poke fun at, you know, absurd, you know, you often mordantly absurd things that have happened in the state and they play it for laughs. And it’s usually a multiple person effort with both some Texas monthly staff writers, some contract writers. Um, but you know, they put a Greg Abbott on the cover is the bum steer of the year portrayed as, you know, a weather vane with icicles hanging off of it.

But this comes out. You know, two national stories, one in the LA times by mark bareback, who’s been a guest on the podcast before the other, in an article in the New York times by one of the new Texas course by I think it was by David Goodman. This notion of Abbott as following whatever way the wind blows recurred in both of those stories.

So all of a sudden you’ve got this notion, uh, that has, you know, we talked about in here and it’s certainly been a matter of discussion in internal politics of the state that Greg Abbott is kind of very focused on re-election and that his public positions and his policy preferences over time have changed according to that content.

Right. So, you know, we, we don’t want to, we could deconstruct this to death. As we were talking about this, going into this, we already have once today, you know, and you can, you can take the trope and, you know, deconstruct it to the point of, you know, people turning it off or it’s just not making any sense.

Are you devolving into like no real point, but it does raise some issues about some interesting issues about how Abbott is governed. Yeah. How he’s man, how he’s governed, uh, in terms of what the upcoming election and the political landscape, and it points to institutional factors that points to political factors.

It points to things that are in the political system, in the political economy right now that the weather. Captures well, in some ways, but not another’s right. Yeah. Just as a, is a, is an initial reaction and you know, the weather bang thing has a certain, I mean, like it has a, it has a resonance because I think people are aware if you want to play a drinking game with today’s podcast, I’d say weather vanes probably means a good word.

If you’re looking to knock off early dodginess okay. Yeah. And the weather thing, you know, trope as you put it as, right. I mean, sometimes it’s useful. And I think, you know, the thing about tropes and the thing about it in this case is that like, I think it lands well with people because what are you saying, oh, this is a politician who’s just kind of flopping around in the wind, but it sort of just ignores, I mean, all kinds of layers of complexity around this, and even just, you know, I think just some simple gut checks in that, you know, first and foremost, does the wind ever blow in the opposite direction for us?

Well, not really, right. Is it the case that, you know, within his party, you know, the wind is blowing in multiple directions. Not really. And so there’s this, I mean, you think the way you put it early, when we’re talking about the first time, it’s like, yeah, it’s like a, it’s like a weather vane in a wind tunnel, you know?

And, and that’s the thing it’s so it’s sort of useful, but it also, you know, it really buys a lot of complexity here, which is it’s not so much, or really just, yeah. I would say that the complexity or the nuance, which is that, you know, we were talking about earlier about the nature of the Republican coalition and the fact that what strikes me about it is it’s not so much that, you know, he’s.

You know, the weather has changed so much. It’s just that, you know, the, the ability to inflict, uh, I mean, I’m going to stop the car. We’re going to kill this frickin metaphor. You’re kind of already killing it, but the ability to, uh, you know, activate the weather Bain, I don’t know what the word is for activation of a weather vane.

Right. But the ability to have her wind blow through and it just doesn’t take much, it makes her sound like a digital one. I know, but it just doesn’t take much. Right. And so the issue here is that, you know, it’s not as though most Republicans in the state who are the majority party who Abbott is primarily.

Catering to which is not. Different than in any other state with any other partisan politicians? The thing is, is that there have always been a number of checks sort of on the most extreme elements of the party directing policy to like basically their desired end points, which in often case are pretty extreme for the state.

That kind of seems to have sort of gone out the window. Now that’s not a change of weather vane, you know, for saying what I was saying, there was overlapping coalitions and Republican party that probably. I almost certainly hold relatively similar attitudes. The difference now is that, you know, when you go and say, well, you know, does a, someone who boats basically solely on abortion, are they, you know, pro gun rights?

Well, you know, probably on average they are pro gun rights. Do they think that we should have permitless carry. Maybe not entirely, but the permitless carry sort of, you know, second amendment absolutists seem to be driving the discussion now in a way, same thing on abortion. Right. You know, the idea that we would ban abortion in the state was, you know, it was conceived.

It was conceived of as political suicide, I think for many. And that was the hook of the bear buck piece. Right. Right. I mean, I mean that this column in the New York times, that mark wrote, you know, and there was a gray, you know, I love the journalistic sidelight of this. Um, oh, LA times. Yes. Um, you know, which is that during the 2014 campaign, apparently, you know, per a per Mark’s column and per conversation with mark, you know, you wrote a story that characterize Greg Abbott as opposing abortion rights and except in the case of dangerous of the life of the month.

Right. And basically. Got a correction from the, you know, sort of a request slash pressure for a correction from the campaign, which the times ultimately printed, which said that, you know, to wit the now governor Abbott, uh, supported abortion rights. Prior to 20 weeks for any reason. Now I was thinking about this and going back to the context that is, you know, still when we were, there were efforts to just edge the viability standard down a little bit, three weeks was a little before that, at that point in time.

But, you know, the marks column, I, you know, hinged on the fact that, you know, they strong, armed a correction out of them. Uh, in 20 14, 7 years later, uh, governor Abbott seemed to be, you know, perfectly willing to sign legislation that would, you know, outlaw, you know, that would outlaw abortion. Should Roe V.

Wade be overturned, the trigger bill and this now infamous SBA with the second. And sort of saying, and then that became kind of the vehicle for, for the column to be about, about governor rabbit, being flexible in his positions and, you know, On one end. That’s, uh, you know, it’s an utterly fair characterization.

There’s a lot of distance between those two positions. And I think, you know, the typical kind of candidate response, and I don’t, I haven’t seen any response to this. Um, you know, I think that that column got a little less attention in Texas than I would’ve thought, frankly, but, you know, people can go back and discover.

But, you know, it also, you know, sort of underlying the degree to which Abbott is willing to move, but also as you were saying within, you know, some set of parameters within a particular universe. Yeah. And that’s right. And I mean, and then the idea that like, you know, Abbott’s actions are somehow happening.

You know, in a vacuum, not a wind tunnel right on its own. I mean, I think he, all you have to do is look to the Senate and say, you know, and we talked about permitless carry earlier in the session. Patrick’s first response to it was, well, we don’t have the votes for that until it turned out that he did.

And then they found the votes and then they went and they passed it. And that was based on, you know, a similar characterization that he had, you know, portrayed or, you know, in previous legislative sessions around permitless carry or constitutional carry or whatever you want to call it. And so clearly there’s, there are, you know, there’s something going on here.

That’s not just. About, you know, Abbott and Abbott’s positioning avid being, you know, a weather vane to this. I mean, there’s a change going on in the political landscape in the way that we think that we’ve, you know, I’ve said this before. I’ll say it again real quick. I mean, I think one of the big factors just from an electoral standpoint is that, you know, Republicans, aren’t going to win elections in this state at this point by 15 to 25 points.

And that was not a reflection of, you know, the fact of their advantage in the electorate as a reflection of a lot of things, a reflection of, you know, lack of democratic candidates, you know, Uh, asymmetry and, you know, the organization and the, and the resources of the two parties. There’s a lot of stuff going on there.

But I mean, if you think about the generally speaking, you know, Abbott was Abbott and other Republicans repair go back, you know, they could get some support from Democrats. They could get a lot of support from independence and even, and even in some cases, Democrats just not. Right. It was fine. I think those days are basically over at this point.

I mean, as long as Democrats can at least put up a good candidate in some good campaigns, they’re going to turn out, uh, they’re going to turn out their partisans. And so at this point, you know, Abbott’s universal voters have changed. I mean, over this time period now, is that him being a weather vane or is that him saying, look, I don’t win elections by getting.

10 bird, you know, 5% of the Democrats and, you know, the majority of independence at this point, I win elections by turning out every Republican voter. And I think that a, you know, a piece of, you know, the historical context here that does, I think provide a little more subtlety than just saying, Hey, look, this guy, all he does is panders.

I mean, Hey, there’s a, you know, there’s a broader question about, well, you know, doesn’t the system invite you to pander to some degree, you know? And I think so the pandering piece has always been a little, but, but also. You know, one of the things I was, you know, and obviously I was really struck by the spare about column, but it’s because of it really invites a revisiting the trajectory of things.

Right. I mean, in many ways, I mean, you know, Abbott came at kind of a watershed in terms of. This discussion of, you know, how much do you have to appeal to the center slash center? Right. As a Republican, in a period of Republican dominance. And remember in 2014, I mean, Republicans have been in charge for a decade.

The Perry governorship had actually seen the transition that really started what we’re talking about. Right. Which is, I mean, I think, you know, there was a lot of attention paid when Rick Perry began in the late, mid to late two thousands after his, you know, First full term after his first term and a half where it became clear that the political economy in the state, the rise of, you know, more organized, more powerful right-wing and conservative interest groups.

You know, the continuing attenuation of the democratic party in the ways that you’re talking about the weakening of the democratic party interest group universe, in which, you know, the trial lawyers by this time had been decisively defeated, or beat back by the tort reform forces and their allies and the business community.

You were beginning to see more money pouring into oil and gas as a result of fracking, declining union membership and Laura. And all those things were really converging in, you know, a new kind of moment in which increasingly in, and again, Perry was the person who really innovated this. There was less attention to appealing to the middle or even trying to be bipartisan.

I mean, people would use the word bipartisan in the late two thousands, but they didn’t really, it was, it was window dressing and it was pretty clear that the kind of appeals that statewide Democrats and increasingly legislative Democrats were making. It was less key to this, you know, pragmatic, Texas, you know, golden age of Texas politics middle.

And I think that is why, you know, when we look at this, now you have to think about, you know, the context and, and it goes back to, you know, now we find ourselves with the move with the usual suspects. As we explain this, you know, more polarized, more ideologically sorted parties, negative. Yeah. And I guess that’s what makes me a little bit, you know, an uncomfortable is even too strong, a word.

Yeah. You know, we were talking about political theory this morning on our walk to get coffee. I don’t tell people that you guys were in the studio. You see Josh, he’s cringing a little bit waiting to see what I’m going to say next, but there is a sense that you kind of said this in a very concrete way when we started, but I mean, this guy, to me, fleshes it out a little bit, you know, a real app, the metaphor always obscure some.

Yeah, right. And in this it’s that kind of sense that, well, you know, and I’m not making excuses for anybody, either the columnists or the governor, but there is a sense in which when people go, you know, the governor is pandering to the Republicans. I’m like, and you know, the most extreme elements of his party, I kind of want to shrug and say, well, yeah, what are you?

You know, you expect something different now to be fair, I would say. We’ve certainly expected something different. I think during the early days of the pandemic, You know, I think mildly or to guardedly critical of the response to COVID once it’d be seemed to be driven by politics inside the Republican party.

And I would still stand by that critique. But I also think that, you know, we shouldn’t be shocked that in this environment where, as you say there no democratic party or the democratic party is, is more viable and this, the state is more competitive overall, but there’s still not much of a. That the, that the Democrats can stand up to the Republicans in 2022 and trade blows on it even basis.

Right. That’s just not going to happen. Nobody thinks that’s going to happen. Even if the Democrats did wind up drafting, uh, Beto O’Rourke, who’s probably, you know, the best they got to offer at this point. Right. Um, so, you know, this is going to have. Yeah. And I think, I think, you know, thinking about the broad trajectory, I mean, you’re bringing up the Perry years and you’re thinking about, you know, I sorta, I started much more closer to, to the transition there.

Right. And what I think of that as sort of two things is one, I think, you know, you can’t discount the impact on Abbott of not coming up through the legislative process like Perry did. So I mean, to the extent of like golden age of legislative study of bipartisanship, whether it was true or not, or whether, you know, the nostalgia really accurately reflects it, ultimately, you know, Perry did come through the legislative process.

And if you talk to people in legislative process, there is kind of a sense. You know, Abbott doesn’t really, I want to say care, but grasp, you know, some of the constraints and the difficulties they face in that process, but also over the timeframe, you know, the relationship between the big three has changed pretty dramatically.

Right. And so there’s that also, and it’s interesting watching the way that, you know, I would say Abbott has really, you could say he’s pandering, but also it’s like, he’s really growing. I mean, we talked about this back during the transition, the idea that, you know, Abbott’s coming in, you know, given the, sort of the marker that Perry’s laid down for how powerful a governor can be in Texas, even though that’s kind of against the historical norm, you know, the expectation was Abbott was gonna try to fill those shoes and really, you know, he has in each consecutive session save with like, I would say a little bit of a step back, maybe in 2019 after the close elections, he has taken more and more of a role in each session in terms of sort of exerting himself.

And the reason I bring up, you know, his lack of legendary. Excuse me. We always talk about this more, but you know, when you’re the attorney general and you can see the Paxton, you get a lot of choice, you know, you get a lot of choice in picking your issues in defining yourself for voters. And when you go out and, you know, drop a big lawsuit and press release and.

And, you know, in a way that in some ways, you know, you don’t really get to do that as the governor, you know, a lot of the times you see, like with COVID, you have to deal with this. So to some extent, is this, you know, sort of, I mean, to me, it’s not the idea that all of a sudden, you know, we’re talking about Greg Abbott is whether, I mean, there’s something that keeps coming to my head and I’ll just put it out there and say, I remember when he was running for that position and we had done a.

A panel with a bunch of journalists. And I mean, you know, I think Ave again is attorney general. He, you know, gets to really control, you know, that was the, I wake up in the morning. I see the Obama administration, you know, very good brand at that point. And I remember asking this question like, well, how conservative is Abbott?

And I remember, I think grammar Jeffers was their color. I was like, oh, he’s concerned. Yeah, he’s extremely conservative. Now in this first couple of sessions, you know, Patrick came in, he consolidated power, ultimately, you know, Strauss was in charge of the house and that was sort of a cooling mechanism.

And you seen these dynamics change over time and it’s hard not, I mean, from my perspective, it’s hard not to look at like where we are now. And I’d say this guy has, you know, kind of running the show at this point as much as we talk about Patrick and his control over the Senate. I mean, average just should, I can keep you at the legislature in session.

For the entire year and tell you exactly what I want you to do. It’s hard to say that he’s not the main player. And then going back to the institutional side of this again, you know, even if legislators are sort of unhappy with the direction, I’m not saying they are, he has such an infrastructure that he can lend them with his campaign account, with the research they do that.

Ultimately there’s no reason for anybody to say booed him in the party here because you know, he’s kind of, he’s expressed his power pretty clear. And I think, you know, some of this has been, you know, uh, you know, and I don’t know. You know, it would be an interesting question for some of the people there, but I mean, I think it would be interesting to know.

I think you’re not giving the Abbott team too much credit to consider this strategic that, you know, as Patrick consolidated control of the Senate, you know, and basically, you know, apologies to my friends in the Senate, you know, brought the Senate to. Um, it made sense for the governor to have more in, you know, try to make more inroads in the house yeah.

Through the things you were talking about. And I think, you know, I mean, there’s a general sense out there. I think in, in the Capitol community that, you know, a lot of house members do feel. You know, Allegiant beholden to oil, to wherever, you know, whatever the Venn diagram of some of these very different kinds of aspects are to the governor and, and the, you know, the governor has done a good job of playing.

You know, the, you know, take taking advantage of the house Senate, you know, the baked in house Senate dynamic that has gotten more baked in as, as the Senate has become perceived. As you know, the Lieutenant, the Lieutenant governor’s. Here we go Gary to drink, and this is why the weather vane thing is just, it’s just, you know, you’re like, well, I’ve actually stayed away from it for a few, for a few minutes, but this is where this idea froze you.

They were looking forward to more drinking. I’m sorry, but you just said the thing that I think is key, which is, you know, I mean, I, it’s hard not to look at all of this and they look, look, this is, this is strategic. I mean, you might, I mean, look, you know, he’s a strategic politician. He has a very strategic team around me is a lot of information at his disposal.

It’s a lot of reef resources that he can deploy to his ends and, you know, The idea that, you know, he’s being thrown around by the winds within the Republican party. It’s like, you know, It’s not a wind, it’s a, it’s a Gale for us. And if he weren’t, then he wouldn’t be in office. Yeah. I mean, just, you know, as a, as a general and again, one of the, you know, I mean, I, and I think that’s something that, and the margin for error that, for that I think has gotten smaller.

I mean, we’re talking about this this morning too. I mean, I think, you know, to the extent that Donald Trump. Mobilized grievance is sort of a fuel for campaign, especially in 2016, but even really throughout his presidency. I mean, what you kind of see now in some ways is that that grievance can extend not just to Democrats, not just the institutions, but within the Republican party, towards other Republicans who are not seen as, you know, sufficiently, I always say conservative this point, loyal to the cause as it is being defined in the moment, which is very inflicted by Donald.

And that kind of brings us to the democracy piece of this does because, you know, I think that, you know, one of the factors that’s hovering that we’ve touched on a couple of times, but is, you know, and I think I said this last week, but I’m gonna use the line again. The weakness of the democratic party has gone from being kind of an electoral condition to a structural feature of the system that is having structural consequences.

Yeah. Say more. Well, I mean, I mean, is that a little dead? Cause you know, look, I mean, I, I know what you mean. It’s one thing to say, well, the Democrats, they came close, they didn’t, you know, but I mean, when, you know, they, they almost won maybe next time and they’re growing and the state’s getting competitive and the state becoming competitive at the state level.

True enough, but you know, part of the long-term ineffectual reality of, of the democratic party as a political force and as an institutional force is that it has skewed the perceptions of B the Democrats have helped build the wind tunnel. Yeah. You know, and they’re not. And that’s not blaming any individual Democrats, but to the scent that, that is now an assumed part of the feature of the system is what I mean by it’s now become a structural part of the system.

And it, you know, that’s what enables us to talk again and again about the fact and for people to raise the point again and again, they look, there are all these policies that got passed in the last year in Texas that don’t enjoy that. There’s no evidence that they enjoy majority. Yeah in the population at large and the electorate at large, and yet Republicans are pursuing these policies, you know, Republican incumbents with great Gusto.

And that’s not a, I mean, we’ll see, it may turn out to be a mistake, but also I’ll be surprised if the day after the election on, uh, in November of 20, 22, everybody wakes up and goes, wow, the Republicans really dropped the ball with all that conservative legislation because the Democrats just made a bunch of games.

Yeah. I don’t think anybody expects that. Certainly not after redistricting and redistricting and the other institutional piece and that’s, and that’s the other, that’s another structural piece of it. That’s exactly right. So, you know, it’s not, you know, you’re not effecting public discourse or you’re having, uh, not much of an effect on public discourse.

You’re certainly having institutional leverage and that absence of institutional leverage. Has provided Republican incumbents and the Republican party and in the Republican coalition behind the party. With more means of perpetuating their rule and increasing the probability that you’re going to see more of these policies that people say, you know, and again, going back and tying it to the pandemic.

I mean, this is very practical. We’re not just talking about the principle of democracy or little erosion around the edges. We’re talking about real policy consequences. You know, when you don’t have, when you have such a stilted discussion, That is, you know, that is driven by that. I buy these kinds of horses.

I didn’t think we’d get anywhere with this conversation, but I feel like maybe we are, because I mean, the way that I’m now I’m thinking about this as you know, the problem. Well, yeah, the problem with, I mean, through the weather vane argument again, you know, I mean, one of the things here is, is you can say, well, no, I mean, I was always super conservative, but there were constraints that were clearly placed on him, whether that was, you know, a more moderate house that ended up sort of cooling.

Then he used that very strategically to his advantage, through some debates, whether it was, uh, you know, basically his ability to affect the legislature, which he’s, he’s definitely, I’m better. With each, you know, six episodes as governors knew. Right. And, you know, he’s consolidated his power in the governorship, which takes time in Texas for a lot of, you know, institutional factors.

And so really, I mean, in some ways it’s not so much, I mean, I guess one thing is like, it’s not so much that he’s a weather vane, it’s that, you know, essentially the constraints that didn’t allow him to sort of, you know, operate within sort of a full strategic, you know, uh, within the full strategic space available to meet.

They’re gone. And so, you know, he’s not worried about independent voters leaving them cause they left, you know, he’s not worried about, you know, the fact that like, he’s not going to get some passive democratic support because it’s gone. And so all these things that were kind of, you know, he’s not worried about Democrats making big inroads because they haven’t.

And also because now that we don’t redistrict. It reinforces all this stuff, both for him, but also for all the other actors around him, in terms of the fact that, you know, now, you know, you were running in a district that was, you know, 60% Trump and now it’s 78% Trump, you know? I mean, that’s just, that just changes the calculations, you know, and the, you know, and I don’t want to leave the impression that this is all, I mean, oh, it’s all over.

I mean, we just saw in the past week, the, this. Court of appeals, you know, push back on tourney general Paxton’s desire to get directly involved in election enforcement without being invited. Yep. Which I think, you know, frankly probably surprised I’m surprised me that they went in that direction. Um, given recent decisions, it would seem to.

But I mean, but the thing is to go back to this discussion about Texas and Abbott and democracy and all that. I mean, I think, you know, the voting stuff is, is particularly interesting because to the extent that, you know, Abbott seemingly feels no constraints, you know, on his actions and Republicans, you know, around him seem to at least tacitly.

Actively, you know, engage in that, you know, that’s where I think, you know, the other discussion this week was, was, uh, you know, get around democracy was, you know, are Democrats going to figure out a way to get mansion to come along in this voting stuff? Because it seems, you know, again, that’s a whole other thing, but it seems an increasingly dire for Democrats.

I think part of the reason honestly, is Texas. I mean, there’s a lot of states that are doing this. A lot of battleground states their dues, but if a state is big, is urban as diverse as Texas can basically. Kind of, I’ll just say, you know, willfully engage in discrimination, which, which it is in terms of, if you just look at the composition of the electoral districts that have been created in the race and a state that there’s some centers that would be very offended by that language.

Well, I, you know, let’s have a conversation invite them to the podcast. I mean, I just, you know, explain how this works. So, I mean, I think, you know, I think the people are looking at texts and thinking, okay, What’s next is probably going to come out of Texas. And as of right now, when you look at Abbott, who seems to be completely unconstrained, I think that probably scares a lot of Democrats, both, I think in Texas, but even at the national level at this point.

Yeah. No, I think that’s right. And I, and I think that, you know, I understand why people are alarmed. I mean, I think, you know, we haven’t, there’s the whole. Peace out there about the coordinated efforts. You know, you mentioned, uh, the election officials, you know, about what this looks like as an ensemble of things, you know, how worried we should be.

And, you know, I mean, I think there is, there is reason to worry, but I would also, but, but I think that, you know, we’re going to learn a lot about that. As you say, Texas is going to be important in this, and we’re going to learn a lot about. How that all ultimately looks next year, you know, next year, I mean, I was a.

I guess we ended the podcast this way last time. So I won’t go back to the, you know, you thought this year was bad, you know, but it’s going to be a very interesting year next year. Um, and we will be back with the podcast. I don’t know exactly when look for us probably second week of January, if I had to guess.

Right. I don’t know what the calendar looks like. So what the days of the week fall back. But, um, thanks for all the support, both on the ground. And when we were doing this virtually from the audio crew in the liberal arts development studio, um, they’re the best here at the university of Texas. Uh, thanks to Josh for spending so much time on this.

Thanks to you for listening. And we will be back. Uh, next year,

the second reading podcast is a production of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin. .