Feb 27th, 2024 – Democratic shifts on border issues and Trump endorsements in Texas House Races

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to the second reading podcast from the University of Texas at Austin. The Republicans were in the democratic party because there was only one party. So I tell people on a regular basis, there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called Texas. The problem is these departures from the constitution, they have become the norm. At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized? over the male colleagues in the room.

[00:00:33] Jim Henson: And welcome back. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Happy to be joined today by Josh Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project.

Top of the morning. Top of the morning. So to get right to it, we want to focus today, well, in a way, we’ll get right to it. As much as ever. They know better. Eye roll emoji. We want to focus today on Starting to dig into some of the results from the extensive set of immigration questions that we included our February poll and, you know, as always, results from that poll, which was conducted earlier this month in Texas are available in the polling section of the Texas Politics Project website at texaspolitics.

utexas. edu you But before we get into all that, a little bit of a news peg. So yesterday, Donald Trump endorsed another 12, as I read it, Texas House candidates via Truth Social, mostly challengers, but, um, a few incumbents too, including, uh, Steve Toth, Gary Gates, and John Smithy. And this is in addition to, I think about another.

I’m not sure what’s going on there. I would love to hear from you. Votes and we won’t rehash all that but the Trump endorsements in these races Um, you know kind of resonate with the results of an open ended question on the on our February survey in which we asked potential primary voters Who you know among those who said that endorsements mattered at all, which was most of them, right?

Yeah Who’s endorsement was most important now in that question among primary among Republican among potential Republican primary voters, 24 percent said Donald Trump, which was the most frequent response by far, by far runners up it at some distance where Greg Abbott and Ted Cruz is 7 percent each. And I think this is where we’re somewhat obligated to mention that that Ken Paxton did not.

Yeah. Up here on that list. I don’t want to over interpret the results, but they seem worth mentioning.

[00:03:06] Josh Blank: Yeah. I mean, look, Trump is going to be in Texas this week, later this week, you know, which is probably going to reinforce in a lot of ways, the themes that are actually, you know, that are actually playing out in Republican primaries, which are sort of the, again, continued focus on the border, which we’ll get back to.

And, you know, Trump’s gravity within the party. But, you know, this will be real interesting. I mean, I gotta, I gotta be honest. Like, it seems to me that, you know, in a house race, on the one hand, I think, you know, you could kind of go down two routes, right? You could say, well, on the one hand, you know, these are low, low turnout elections.

I kind of, I kind of have the feeling that most of the voters who take the time to show up. Know what they’re going to do, you know, in most cases at the same time, it’s Donald Trump and he exerts some sort of center of gravity, you know, whose limits are not boundless, but certainly still undefined.

[00:03:53] Jim Henson: Right.

And, and, you know, the Trump endorsements are showing, you know, are showing up in, in at TV ads and mailers and social media and, and in these campaigns, I mean, you know, campaigns certainly seem to think it helps.

[00:04:05] Josh Blank: Yeah. It’s, you know, the timing of it is interesting to me though, in the sense that we were already a week into early voting.

And so, you know, it’s sort of, it’s tough. And we know that a lot was going to happen in the last stretch here, right? I mean, that was, that was apparent. I mean, you’d made this point a bunch of times, you know, to the extent that like we hadn’t seen a bunch of money drop, like that’s going to happen when it’s going to matter most, which is like probably when people just start going to the polls.

I mean, I do think, you know, if I wanted to be skeptical, right, I could make the argument and I’m not making this, I’m just thinking out loud that. Well, I’m not. I

[00:04:34] Jim Henson: really walking right up to the edge of making

[00:04:36] Josh Blank: it. But well, no, because I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know. But I mean, I could also say that, you know, who would elicit Donald Trump’s support in these primaries at this point, right?

A week of early voting are more than a week of early voting has already happened. And then why? You know, you could make the argument that, you know, looking at the early voting numbers, looking at vote targets, who’s turning out where based on their models, based on polling could lead some to say, Hey, you know what?

These challengers might need a push. Yeah. And that could be the argument because honestly, you know, if this were, I mean, if this were two, three weeks ago, I’d say, Ooh, okay. You know, cause then you’re running those ads constantly. Right. I mean, if I was, you know, I mean, right now I’m thinking to myself, if I’m a challenger to one of these house incumbents and maybe I feel like I’m having trouble gaining traction, like, yes, I want.

Trump’s endorsement. I’ll take it when I can get it. But boy, would have been great two weeks ago when I could have put it on every single mailer, every single ad say I’m the Trump supported candidate. Like, so there was a little part of me that wonders about the timing of it and what it was before the election and about what it means.

But you know, that’s maybe splitting hairs in terms of, yeah,

[00:05:40] Jim Henson: I mean, you know, it’ll be interesting to see, you know, you probably have time to insert this into social media stuff. Absolutely. But it’s probably getting kind of, you know, it’s getting pretty close for some of the other, some of the other mechanisms,

[00:05:53] Josh Blank: right?

Yeah. And I mean, and that’s the thing you’re really talking about. Like, is this, is this, yeah, I just, that’s just a sort of just another way

[00:05:58] Jim Henson: to think about it. Look, unless you knew ahead of time. Sure. So, you know, which is also not out of the question, but, you know, given that we had that question on there and I, you know, I think when we got that result, I mean, it’s not like it was surprising to the extent that, you know, Trump is obviously, you know, by a long shot, the most well known, the most influential Republican leader in the country right now.

Right. So, you know, we didn’t look at this and go, well, you know, Donald Trump’s shocking that he’s at the top of the list, but I think it does, you know, I mean, I guess what it was, it was a reminder of how large Trump looms and even down to what, you know, to down ballot races in the primary.

[00:06:37] Josh Blank: Yeah. And I think it’s also really important at this point, just to say that, you know, These questions aren’t determinative of behavior.

[00:06:43] Jim Henson: I mean, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s where we flagged the, you know, we don’t want to over

[00:06:47] Josh Blank: interpret this. And, you know, we’ve talked about this before and now interpreted it for five minutes. Yeah. Well, in different contexts, but I mean, you know, there is a pretty reasonable, you know, set of literature and, you know, and, and honestly, like history that shows people don’t necessarily.

Forecast their own behaviors or the reasons for their own behaviors, whether in the future or retrospectively that well, and even though we wrote this question, and I think it was useful, and I mean, part of is the real use in some ways is to see the relative weights of ideology, you know, issues and endorsements as far as you know, again, voters tell us, but ultimately, once we get to that point, You know, when they, when we say, okay, well, then who matters, there is a party that says, you know, yeah, Donald Trump is the most prominent Republican in the country by a long shot.

So for at least some of that 20, you know, 4 percent of people who said Donald Trump, you know, that’s just sort of like, well, Donald Trump, I guess. You know, I kind of, I mean,

[00:07:42] Jim Henson: I think, you know, the other thing we get out of this is you’re kind of implying there’s, you know, we do get people’s top of mind associations when it comes to who’s out there in the political universe.

And we did contextualize this in the context, you know, put this in the context of the primary vote. So, well, and also

[00:07:57] Josh Blank: I’ll say this too, you know, just to be naked about it, cause I don’t have any problem with this. I mean, the real reason to ask the question and are, I think in my mind, certainly, I think in your mind, not to.

Talk for you is like, how much does Greg Abbott come up? How much does Ken Paxton come up given, you know, the fact that they’re, you know, and maybe

[00:08:11] Jim Henson: that, and maybe that’s what I’m kind of recalling in terms of the Donald Trump and Nick, not a surprising result, but kind of not, not what we were most interested in engaging.

I think that’s a good read

[00:08:21] Josh Blank: in terms of, and it’s important to know just for a methodological pieces, you know, people could list more than one person. We included them. So it’s not as though someone said Donald Trump and, and, and, and we didn’t. Consider all those other options. Uh, so, you know, just to say, it’s not like we’re excluding other people for the sake of Donald Trump.

And, you know, if you’re someone who has wants to talk about coding open ended, you know, send me an email, I guess. Right.

[00:08:41] Jim Henson: And we did, and we did explicitly in the question say, you know, and as I look at the wording, I mean, we directed people to list a person. But that doesn’t mean that people will not listen more than a few several dead.

Oh, yeah, for sure All right So, you know anyway that an interesting thing is Donald Trump’s and you know And I it’ll be interesting to see how many more people he endorses before between

[00:09:01] Josh Blank: now and Tuesday Yeah, I mean basically, you know, if you’re sitting here keeping score at home You need to go update your spreadsheet, you know Just for your endorsements and see who got what where and those races, right?

but soon that’s gonna be real important obviously after the you know, I’m it’s gonna be the thing that I think a lot of us Are looking at directly after this

[00:09:17] Jim Henson: And credit where credit is due, I kind of pulled, this kind of came to our attention through Brad Johnson’s Twitter account. Not Truth Social for you?

Uh, Brad Johnson at the, uh, I have not bought, I have not done a Truth Social account, I have to admit. I was going to say, like, if a tree falls in the woods. You know, there are methodological reasons why maybe I should, but I, you know, I haven’t, I have not. Well. Um, so thanks to Brad for that and, um, you know, I guess thanks to Kathy Grant for pointing that out to me, who is a, follows Brad’s Twitter account quite closely.

Um, big fan of the

[00:09:48] Josh Blank: podcast, big,

[00:09:49] Jim Henson: big fan of, um, so. To where we, you know, sort of the main sort of topic for today is, you know, border policy and immigration responses in the February poll. And, you know, we are going to talk about this no matter what, but as, as Josh mentioned, um, you know, Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be in Texas, albeit in different.

Cities this week. I believe the, the current president is going to be in Brownsville. The former president is going to be in Eagle pass, uh, having campaign events, but both on the same day, uh, on Thursday of this week, we’re recording Tuesday morning. So it did seem like. You know, a good time to at least start talking about this pretty extensive, uh, battery, uh, of questions that we did on border policy and, and, and immigration in the February poll.

Various points to be made. We’ll just, you know, we can start with the most general old saw one continued salience among Republicans, uh, of border and immigration issues, um, shown up at this poll. But also we noted that, you know, this has been accompanied by. You know, interesting developments, shall we say, in democratic perception of problems on the border.

[00:11:05] Josh Blank: Yeah, that’s right. So, you know, as, as usual, you know, 68 percent of Republicans said that immigration or border security is the most important problem facing the state. Among Democrats, it was only 14%, but I say that with a little bit of emphasis because 14 percent is actually relatively high. I think regularly in our polling, we find, you know, in the neighborhood of like 4 percent of

[00:11:24] Jim Henson: Democrats.

Yeah, definitely single figures even

[00:11:26] Josh Blank: combined. Right. And so, you know, we definitely noticed an uptick there, but then, you know, we wanted to dig in a little bit further and we asked, you know, again, our survey of registered voters, whether, you know, the number of migrants attempting to cross the U. S. Mexico border is a crisis, a very serious problem, and not much of a problem kind of on down.

And, you know, again, um Not surprisingly, you know, Republicans overwhelmingly see it as a crisis. 74 percent said it was, another 11 percent said it was a very serious problem. But this is where we want to unpack this a little bit because it’s sort of, you know, again, when the, with the MIP, we say, pick one.

And for Democrats, it can be, you know, there’s a lot of stuff that Democrats are concerned with. So we said, well, let’s just ask, what about the situation at the border? And among Democrats, when we asked this, 20 percent said it was a crisis, but another 37 percent said it was a very serious problem, which means, you know, 57 percent of, of Texas Democrats.

See a policy problem when we’re looking at the situation at the border. So it’s not as though, you know, you could say the Democrats are ignoring the issue or, you know, just honestly, I think, you know, don’t see it. I don’t want to say, you know, for what it is, but I think in our in our previous polling and prior point that we’ve done over a number of years, if someone were to say Democrats don’t see the border as a crisis, but maybe a political issue that Republicans are trying to exploit, I would say I think the data probably more or less.

You know support that notion and this pushes against that i mean i think we’re talking and i was talking to a colleague you know last week and i you know he said oh you know what was interesting the poll and to me this was one of the more interesting things because it’s almost like something has changed you can see it in the data and he kind of said oh yeah well sure and it’s like.

Yeah. Okay. But, but we’ve been doing this poll for, you know, over a decade now we’re doing. Let me think of

[00:13:02] Jim Henson: that. You know, you were telling me that story. And I was wondering if that colleague said, Oh, sure. Because he had read about it in the paper from the poll, but I, you know, yeah, I digress.

[00:13:10] Josh Blank: You digress.

But, but it is one of the things, you know, you kind of see that. And again, it’s, it’s, you know, I can’t sort of make this clear enough, like having done this for over a decade, pulling these attitudes on immigration, you sort of have this issue that is clearly front and center for Republican voters, clearly like a major driver of.

Politics, policy and everything else and Democrats kind of like, no, it’s, it’s gun violence or no, it’s abortion or no, it’s the climate or no, it’s healthcare. And this is the first poll where I mean, like to my mind where I say, no, the Democrats see this as a problem, right? I mean, I think my initial reaction was, you know, because obviously the Biden administration has made some, some, some major pivots in the last few weeks on, you know, border issues.

It’s sort of easy to look at this and go, oh, they got some polling about four weeks ago that said something similar, right. Not to be, you know, It’s like,

[00:13:57] Jim Henson: well, I mean, you know, critical and look to be fair to your colleague, that could have been kind of what your Yeah. I think colleague was alluding,

[00:14:03] Josh Blank: our colleague was alling to a hundred percent.

I think that’s what he was alluding to. And nonetheless, you know, we still need to measure things.

[00:14:09] Jim Henson: Yes. And, and this is somebody who d does a lot of measurement themselves, , um, right. Yeah. It seems to me, um. So, you know, the other thing, you know, and so to develop that, we also saw, I mean, it’s one thing for along the lines of that discussion and thinking about what was going on in national politics and the Senate bill and all of the Senate border bill and all that.

It’s one thing to say, okay, Democrats are recognizing it’s a problem, but you know, when we tested the state policies, you know, we also saw Democrats. Surprisingly, I, you know, as I’ve talked to reporters, you know, I’ve had to phrase this carefully. Yeah. We saw a surprising level of support for state policies, even if, writ large, Democrats are still, as a group, opposed to most of these state policies.

But the numbers that, that support them have risen, it seems to me, but certainly are higher than I, you know, I think people would

[00:15:05] Josh Blank: expect. Yeah, I mean, so, you know, we had a whole battery of, of of basically state level policies. Right. And, and, you know, and for the most part, I mean, the kind of top headline is, let’s see, one, two, you know, five of the six had majority support overall.

The only one that was basically that had plurality opposition was basically preventing, you know, U. S. Border Patrol from accessing. Yeah, we’ll circle back. We’ll circle back to that one. Yeah. But but across the board, you know, basically, essentially, you know, the increase in sort of police military presence on the border as part of Operation Lone Star, you know, two thirds, you know, supported that 55 percent support the state’s busing program, you know, moving migrants to other other parts of the country, 57%.

So they support buoys and barbed wire, you know, being placed all around the border. 65 percent supported, you know, the construction or repair of walls or barriers. And, you know, most recently, sort of making it A state level crime to be undocumented in Texas had the support of 60 percent of voters now, obviously overwhelming Republican support, nothing less than setting aside the Border Patrol one, which we’ll come back to no less than 81 percent support among Republicans, but among Democrats, you know, again, we take out that one item, you know, the support range from 30 percent all the way up to 44%.

And so that’s not really, you know, I think the picture that’s been painted of, I think, you know, democratic attitudes, you know, towards the border, you’ve got, you look at some of these, you know, sort of the, you know, let’s say the main kind of. Effective Operation Lone Star to sort of militarize the border in some ways, you know, Democrats on that 144 support 48 oppose, you know, building walls or physical barriers or repairing them, which, you know, was a no go territory during the Trump administration, obviously, with the idea of building the wall and all that, you know, we asked about this 40 percent support 52 percent support Uh, the other ones were a little bit more split, but we’re still looking at about a third in favor, favoring about two thirds opposed.

And I mean, in general, you know, again, if you study politics or for fun or professionally, you’d say a pretty good issue. You know, that’s especially for Republicans. If you basically feel that, you know, this is something that’s going to lob off about a third of the Democratic majority. Vote up to about, not that those people are gonna go vote for Republicans, but to the extent that this is the issue, you’re making it difficult for Democratic candidates to talk about

[00:17:18] Jim Henson: it.

And again, I mean, I, I, you know, I don’t want to either over interpret the results or overplay the newness of them. I mean, we, Mm-Hmm, , you know, we’ve talked about this without, you know, reoccupying already occupied ground, I mean. The idea that, you know, Democrats were going to be more likely to be less intensely opposed and maybe even supportive in the kind of ways we’re seeing here of border security measures versus immigration restrictions.

You know, it’s an old political insight, quote unquote. I mean, it was, you know, as we’ve said in here before, it was kind of. a central piece of kind of first generate first and second generation Republican leadership in the state and their electoral strategies. But, you know, as you said, I mean, I think those are pretty big numbers.

I mean, you know, the minority numbers among Democrats are pretty big and they’re, you know, they’re not day and night to where we’ve been before, but

[00:18:12] Josh Blank: they’re higher. Well, you look at it, look at it this way. I mean, another way to look at is to think about like flip, you know, flip the parties and look at sort of The state’s policies on abortion and sort of the political response or lack of political response there, where you’d say, you look at where the state has moved, you know, in terms of its abortion bans and you essentially see issues that are basically 60 30 issues among Republicans.

You know, you’ve got about a third of Republicans who think there should be some level of access across a range of scenarios ranging from, you know, again, Basically severe health threat to the mother to essentially, you know, you know, serious chance of a fetal abnormality, kind of the space that we’re talking in right now about, you know, where you might see changes to these laws.

And the response from Republicans largely has been to not talk about this. Yeah. Just like, let’s just, you know, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve succeeded and now we’re not going to talk about it anymore if we can help it. And in some ways, you know, so flip this around and you’ve got an issue that’s sort of, you know, kind of like that for Democrats.

Yeah. It was a degree

[00:19:02] Jim Henson: of that in the Democrat, you know, probably not, I think not quite as stark, but I think I take your point. I mean, similar to. I mean, you avoid talking about things that are bad issues for

[00:19:11] Josh Blank: you. Exactly. And this is becoming an issue that’s increasingly difficult for Democrats, you know, on, you know, again, in the current space.

I think it’s a very dynamic space, obviously, which we can talk a little bit more about because of sort of, you know, I think some Republican difficulties and manifesting policy that matches their rhetoric, uh, at least at the congressional level. But you can see why, you know, this really puts Democrats in a bind now in some ways.

[00:19:34] Jim Henson: Yeah. And I, and I think so, you know, uh, And so having, you know, kind of laid that out, I also do want to talk about, let’s talk a little bit about that border, about, um, Border Patrol item. So talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, sure.

[00:19:46] Josh Blank: So one of the things we wanted to look at was, I mean, I think one of the big sort of flashpoints over the last at least, you know, a couple weeks or month is, uh, essentially state DPS preventing DPS and I guess the guard preventing border patrol from accessing a parking Eagle pass.

And there’s been some questions about the consequences of that. We don’t need to go into all of that. Right. But essentially, I mean, in short, it’s saying we’re just not going to give border patrol access to parts of the border and

[00:20:13] Jim Henson: the spin and the spin off issue that was partially in that area, but I think was also happening in other places where border patrol seem to be making kind of tactical decisions at certain points to cut some of the barbed wire and to allow, you know, for safety reasons, right?

In areas where there were migrants trying to cross

[00:20:29] Josh Blank: over. Right. And that’s not, you know, and even that I’m not entirely clear on whether that was, you know, for safety reasons or also that was just like they were trying to get onto the other side of the barbed wire themselves to access the border. Yeah.

Ultimately, that was a huge political win for Abbott, I think, because, you know, basically the court ruling was, yes, the federal government can cut the barbed wire that Texas is putting down to keep out migrants. And then Texas can say they’re coming to cut the barbed wire, right? We told you, you know,

[00:20:56] Jim Henson: they could and, you

[00:20:57] Josh Blank: know, did.

And as this discussion should illustrate, you know, asking a question about this pretty challenging. So we did ask, you know, essentially about whether or not, uh, you know, voters supporting us in the state policy battery, uh, sub Port preventing us border patrol agents from accessing accessing parts of the texas mexico border overall This was sort of the most this was the only one that had plurality opposition 41.

So they supported this 44 opposed it Republicans it was 59 28. So again, that’s one of those issues that you know, not ideal And Democrats, it was twenty five, sixty two. Now, not surprising. I mean, I think overall this is the I mean, I don’t want to say this is the most controversial policy because I think that’s a judgment call here.

Right. But it does sort of, you know, I think it creates political problems just because obviously the idea is, you know, first of all, Border Patrol has been. Kind of in the republicans corner for a while. I think the border patrol union endorsed donald trump You know one point the idea was we’re standing with these guys So I mean the idea is we’re we’re friends of border patrol and I was like, yeah We’re trying to keep them out of there.

So it’s a difficult well I think the way

[00:21:56] Jim Henson: I would put it, you know, I mean in addition to that is you know, you’re This general area activates a lot of strong attitudes, right? Those attitudes make manifest in responses in ways that I think are with all the usual caveats relatively straightforward and interpreting.

You know, this introduces another dimension, you know, that has to do with, you know, I mean, if you know, if you’re a poll respondent and you know enough to know that the border patrol is kind of the national government. Yeah, you know, you’re, there’s another, there’s another thing being activated here, right?

For some people, and that’s what makes it tricky. That’s what makes

[00:22:35] Josh Blank: it really. So this is a really tricky, I mean, to get to this point, this makes us a really tricky question. I mean, I think, you know, we, we, we acknowledge that and accept it. I mean, our. Our colleague, Darren Shaw, you know, pointed out that there’s, there’s negativity in the stem.

Do you support preventing U. S. border patrol? Also

[00:22:50] Jim Henson: probably creates a little noise.

[00:22:51] Josh Blank: Yeah, which I think creates a little noise. It’s hard to think about the way that you would write the alternative of the question, which is essentially almost to write a normative statement about what you think is supposed to happen, right?

Which is that they’re supposed to coordinate with each other. And if you say, do you think, do you support, you know, Texas DPS and the National Guard? Coordinating efforts with border patrol to my, I mean, who is going to say no to that? Right.

[00:23:14] Jim Henson: And I think, you know, we actually, as I recall, we actually kicked around a notion of a question that was kind of like that.

And it just didn’t seem to be revealing enough of what we needed to get at. Exactly.

[00:23:23] Josh Blank: And it really isn’t revealing of, you know, people’s reaction to the policy of preventing the board. So look, we, we, we take the noise with the fact that it’s a difficult question and we acknowledge the fact, I think, honestly, that you said this is right, which is, you know, for some people.

You know, they are reacting to the thing itself for some people, you know, and I think it’s a smaller share They’re saying good because all they do is release them out Anyway, it’s kind of and that’s sort of the secondary argument. I would say oh,

[00:23:48] Jim Henson: yeah, that’s yet another you know It’s another manifestation of this other dimension of

[00:23:53] Josh Blank: And I mean, and I think we’ve talked already and yeah, and we’ve talked about this before.

And, you know, I think, you know, the, you know, the cognitive roots of a lot of things are pretty shallow here. And, you know, just in general in politics, I think once you start getting to the second and third order arguments, you know, you’re losing a ton of people having said that you’re picking up some of them.

Yeah. And so look, to the extent that this was messy, I think it’s because it’s probably, you know, the biggest stretch in the, in this, in this state basket of policies, you know, that they’ve engaged, which I think have been. largely successful politically. And I think and I say that I mean, because overwhelming support among Republican voters, majority support among independent voters, and you’re splitting up Democrats pretty significantly, right?

The busing policy in particular has taken this discussion, you know, to sort of to liberal Democratic cities far, far away from the border and really change the dynamics. You can’t say from a political standpoint has been successful. This may be the one that’s a bridge too far because it’s relying on sort of a really deep seated a couple deep seated set of attitudes that may or may not exist.

about, you know, attitudes towards the federal government attitudes towards, you know, like immigration policy as you see it in the role of the border, which is not going to be

[00:25:00] Jim Henson: widespread when we’re trying to write about this for general audience. You know, you sort of start using phrases like, you know, strong cross currents.

Yeah, exactly. You know, which is not, you know, analytically precise, but I, you know, conveys, I think, to some degree what we’re talking about here. Um, so that was a, you know, and I, again, I would urge people to go to the, you know, go to the poll and you can find the summary document in the polling section of the website at texaspolitics.

utexas. edu and you’ll see a link to the summary document and lots of tabs for all of these results in the, you know, thousands of graphics that we put out for, for every poll. Now, you know, I mean, I think before we talk a little bit more about implications, I think, you know, the other thing that we did here was to rerun You know, what, what we have thought about is our kind of attitudinal undercurrent questions.

And so, you know, we ask people about their views of, of legal immigration and of undocumented immigration. Again, I mean, these results are very consistent. We saw an underlying attitude about immigration that I think is also part of the political tactics that we were talking about before, particularly among Republican respondents, but also saw some.

Again, some movement among Democrats, even in responses to these underlying attitudes.

[00:26:18] Josh Blank: Yeah, so let me lay them out and we kind of talk about it a little bit, right? So when we ask about, you know, and I think this is really, I mean this, you know, again, if you want to say like, Oh, yeah, what’s the news? This is really important.

I mean, I want to say, you know, and we’re talking about state level policies Related specifically to the 1200 mile stretch that Texas shares with Mexico, you know, you could Understand Texas Democrats or some Texas Democrats looking at the situation, and it’s kind of like a lot of other possible. Well, at least they’re doing something right.

That makes sense. But then, to the extent that we ask these more general questions about immigration, legal immigration through the Asylum process. Well, now we’re kind of taking a step back. And when you see again, some movement there, and especially among Democrats, this is, we don’t know the answer to this yet, but it does raise a question.

Is this the beginning of a movement? Or is this a blip related to what’s going on right now? Regardless, though, the point is, is that, you know, the, the, you know, the, the sort of state level border attitudes are not compartmentalized. Right. Ultimately, we look at Democrats and their general attitudes of immigration.

It is clear that there is something going on here that’s a little bigger. So when we ask about, you know, legal immigration and whether the U. S. lost too many, too few, or about the right amount of people, uh, to immigrate here legally, because again, you know, there’s a lot of time. Well, we’re talking about a legal and we’ll hear now we’re talking about legal immigration.

49 percent of Texans say too many. among Republicans, that’s 68 among Democrats. It’s 28. The plurality is 39 percent say that we allow in the right amount. 20 percent say too few, but that 28 percent was the highest share of Democrats saying too many in six years, which goes back to June of 2020. I think.

Yeah, I have to look. My notes are a little off there, but yeah, they go in at least six years. That’s the highest share of saying too many. It was also the highest share of white, Hispanic, urban, suburban and rural respondents saying too many. Too many. Yeah, that’s legal immigration. Notably, and I thought I didn’t, we haven’t talked about this, but notably in the sort of interesting within the sort of poverty dynamics, the sort of the attitude on that by college or non college is a big gap.

So when you look at those without a college degree, it’s 55 percent say too many 38 percent of those with a college degree among Republicans, there’s a 14 point gap. 59 to 73 for those who have college degree who don’t have country among Democrats. There’s a 14 point gap And

[00:28:29] Jim Henson: see that and that doesn’t always show

[00:28:31] Josh Blank: up, right?

That doesn’t always show up 20 percent of those among democrats of democrats with a college degree say too many 34 So again, a third shows up again of those without a college degree say too many So, I mean that sort of you know again those sort of both the trend line on that Where it’s the change is taking place like that is very noble and it fits into the political dynamics We’ve been talking about now for the last Eight years, right?

Well, of course. Thank you. I don’t. They almost had to bleep me. Okay. And so you can see that. And I mean, again, you know, easy enough to say, well, yeah, but now it’s like, ultimately that is manifesting. We’re, this is, this is a porn set up, I think, for the discussion we’re going to have about this, about what this really means.

Yeah. This

[00:29:09] Jim Henson: is the discussion, I think. Well, we’re

[00:29:10] Josh Blank: getting, well, we’re getting about the interpretation of this, right? Because I mean. We have some questions here. But then the other question that was sort of about this, that was a new question, was asking people whether or not they support or oppose basically making harder, harder for migrants to seek asylum.

We just find, you know, they’re fleeing violence in their home countries. And here we found 59 percent support making it harder, you know, to basically seek, you know, for migrants to seek asylum. 32 percent were opposed. But here was one of the big surprise, not surprising 71 percent of Republicans in favor, but a plurality of Democrats, 48 percent were in favor of making it harder for migrants to seek asylum in the United States.

This is almost a. Down the middle 50 50 issue for Texas Democrats, which is really interesting. Cause again, you know, I mean, it’s kind of like sometimes we hammer Republicans on this because they’ll say, Oh no, no, no. We’re just talking about illegal immigration. We’re not talking about legal immigration.

Then we go and we look at legal immigration. The attitudes look exactly the same. And for Democrats, it might be easy to say, well, no, no, we understand asylum is legal immigration. These people are looking for protections. This is especially at the elite discussion. So yeah, the system needs fixing, but like, you know, we’re, we’re for asylum.

It’s a, well, who’s we. Yeah, because it’s not necessarily apparent in the data right now that this is something that this is viewed that way So, what do we what do we worry to make of this? I guess

[00:30:20] Jim Henson: yeah I mean, I think you know We were talking, you know We’ve talked about this a bit since we got the results and have been talking about it as this has been kind of bubbling along So when we look at this, you know, and look, there are, you know, as you were pointing out in, in a couple of the things you talked about in the, if people look at the write up on the, when we released the poll, there’s kind of more detail on this, but there is evidence of change among Democrats.

Right. Right. And so I think, you know, the, the question that we’ve been talking about is, you know, what to make of this, you know, is it durable? Right. Right. And, and, you know, it just speaks to questions that we’ll just have to continue to probe on because we don’t, you know, we don’t know what the why is here.

Mm hmm. In terms of these changes. And so, you know, I mean, the most obvious candidate is that, look, we have a, you know, there’s pretty clear empirical evidence that is getting picked up in most media that there is an increase in migrant crossings at the border, right?

[00:31:18] Josh Blank: It’s a fact. I mean, I just like look at the data.

It’s there.

[00:31:21] Jim Henson: Yeah. Yeah. The match between, you know, resources and capacity in places on the border and the flow of migrants to be processed, you know, however you process them is just incontrovertible. You can’t really argue about that anymore. It doesn’t seem to me in any reasonable way anyway. You know, so is it, you know, is it just that?

Right, right. Is it a composition of the population of migrants? And I think this is, you know, probably a relatively underexplored explanation or, or factor here in that the more recent waves of migration, and I’m not, frankly, not enough of an expert to answer that question. in a reliable way chart when that really started changing a lot or when we crossed the threshold, you know, but certainly, you know, the, the increase in people that are fleeing political violence, you know, outside of the Western hemisphere, sources of migration inside the Western hemisphere, there’s been a lot of change in the composition of this.

And as you were pointing out, or, you know, it was kind of implied in the comparison, the question of asylum is. You know, different than the question of simply how do we respond to undocumented immigration or how do we respond to people wanting to get in? So there’s, there’s a lot of candidates here, and I think we don’t, we don’t know yet, at least in a, in a, in a evidentiary way, what’s driving these changes, I think.

Yeah, I think that’s more, there are other candidates as well.

[00:32:47] Josh Blank: I mean, yeah, I think, yeah, and I agree with all that. It’s sort of, you know. That’s a good, that’s a good summary of it. And then, you know, the sort of thing that kind of comes to my mind in this and just thinking about sort of the coverage of this, because this, this did generate, you know, a fair amount of coverage is, you know, is this a, is this a change of direction for Democrats or is this like the manifestation of a new set of attitudes as they, as again, as, as they come to face a variation

[00:33:11] Jim Henson: in conditions.

Yeah, the

[00:33:12] Josh Blank: reality. Yeah, the reality of the policy problem, right?

[00:33:15] Jim Henson: Yeah, not to be, you know, to, you know, the attitude object is You know, the, the subject of the, I have the attitudes is

[00:33:21] Josh Blank: changing. Yeah. And so I think as I’m sitting here kind of thinking about this, I mean, one of the things that’s sort of interesting to me is sort of considering whether, you know, and you’re looking at sort of Biden’s movement on, you know, increasing attention to the border.

Right. You know, and I think if you were to go and let’s say, You know, let’s just say two years ago, four years ago, whatever. It doesn’t even matter, but just, just put Biden in some other time and context. And if he were to say he was going to crack down, you know, let’s say, you know, on the border broadly, you know, whatever that means, you know, I think there was probably an expectation.

A lot of coverage would have said, Whoa, wait a minute. You know, what’s the progressive base going to think about this? And I, you know, and what I’m wondering is, is, you know, did the progressive base to the extent that exists at all ever really have concrete views. On what this policy should look like and there’s a lot of assumptions about and I was sort of comparing it with you You know, we had this we wrote a piece a long time ago now But you know there was sort of this almost trope kind of at some point whenever we wrote this it was like well You know surely Hispanics in Texas or have you know, quote unquote liberal immigration attitudes, right?

And you kind of are like, okay, you know for some of the reasons you’ve already kind of laid out like Why? You know, why would we think that? And we go and look at the data and you find, well, that’s not really a fair description. It’s not to say that they have conservative immigration attitudes, but they tended to be mixed.

You know, it tended to be a lot more nuanced than you think. And generally, it wasn’t the case that you had, you know, you looked at it and say, Oh, you know, every Hispanic voter thinks that, you know, all, you know, basically, you know, we should give in state college tuition to undocumented immigrants and we should, you know, open.

That was just not ever evident. Okay. Anywhere in the polling data, right? And

[00:34:59] Jim Henson: there was plenty of, you know, academic work, you know, to that effect, right? You know, is this discussion has ebbed and flowed that, you know, people have but those like intermittently tried to get into the public

[00:35:09] Josh Blank: discussion But that like that idea of this You know, and I always say like, what are you comparing it to?

But you’re comparing it to an expectation that’s not really supported in the data, which is, well, all Hispanics are in favor of basically unchecked borders. And it’s like, well, that was never true. But if that’s where you’re starting from, then everything starts to

[00:35:24] Jim Henson: be colored by extension, you know, all, you know, if you’re a liberal Democrat, well, you’re just.

Yeah.

[00:35:28] Josh Blank: If you’re a liberal Democrat, you’re just for open borders and asylum for everybody. And it’s like, well, you know, I don’t want, I don’t think it was on top of mind. for most democratic voters, but also I don’t think there’s much evidence that that was necessarily the case. And so

[00:35:43] Jim Henson: I, I think that, you know, the, the way that I would put that in, in my own sort of sense of caution is, you know, there was never evidence that that was the consensus position among Democrats, the way that, you know, as you were talking about the state policy questions among Republicans, you know, when you asked about immigration policies that were more open, you know, more, you know, Tolerance, Pathways to citizenship, pathways.

You know, that were more receptive to immigrants and, and less punitive of undocumented migration. You weren’t getting support for those policies in the 80 percent and 90%, right? Right. You were getting support for those policies in the fifties and sixties. I think that’s a rough, you know, approximation. We could go back maybe in some cases, you know, high sixties.

[00:36:33] Josh Blank: Yeah. So what’s interesting. I mean, I think, you know, just cause we care about politics here. Right. And I think this matters just in terms of thinking about the politics as we go forward. Like this issue is not going away. It’s certainly going to be part of the 2024 campaign. And I think the question is sort of, you know, unpacking again, something that we’ve unpacked, you know, for years now among Republicans.

Now we’re trying to look at it among Democrats. And I think it really does condition how you think about it, because you might say either On the one hand, you’d say Biden is turning his back on the base, you know, on the other hand, or this is going to be the development of what the new sort of democratic position is on the border.

Right. And those are different things. Yeah, exactly. We don’t know yet. And we don’t know yet, but they’re very different, you know, again, ways of

[00:37:15] Jim Henson: thinking about the politics of this. Well, you know, what’s emerging from this discussion is something that, you know, I probably should have put in the initial setup, but that I think is, Important here and comes out in the discussion is the role of at least signaling, right?

Right, for sure. Which is, you know, and, and I think it speaks to your, the point you’ve made a couple times in different contexts that, you know, whatever democratic attitudes were, it was not something that was a I’m John Mellot. And for listening to the podcast. And if you’re new here, this is the podcast for people who are subscribed to the channel.

And as Derek says, the podcast is a literary art. I think everybody who’s subscribed to the channel knows that those of you who are subscribed And this is a podcast that has been a topic of the segment the entire time. It’s called, The Pilgrim’s Guide To Democracy, where we’re talking about its audience, how they feel in a nation of polarized communities, and how they feel in a nation of underrepresented Yeah, I

[00:38:01] Josh Blank: half expecting, yes, a Democrat about this, like, let’s say an elite to say, well, you know, wait till climate change really starts kicking in.

It’s like, it’s like, well, great, but,

[00:38:10] Jim Henson: you know, and so the mechanism may be that we’re kind of, you know, stumbling around here for in some ways are kind of exploring is that, you know, as the issue as, you know, as the issue becomes more prominent. And the actual manifestation of these, of these issues on the ground begins heart comes harder to ignore the differences among democratic elites come out and the political responsiveness of some elites like Joe Biden and his team.

Become more public. You do get an elite signaling that begins to activate some of these attitudes that, you know, I mean, I suspect that what we get is some of the some of the don’t knows are now moving into our beefing up the minority. Demo. What has been historically the minority democratic position when I

[00:39:00] Josh Blank: think where you really see that is in the establishment.

We just need to look at this in the asylum question, you know, I think in a lot of ways, you know, what elites do is they allow Democrats who maybe had not thought about this issue as much before, who would have leaned on some other sort of, you know, normative kind of, you know, whatever, let’s say inclusivity, you know, other sorts of part of, you know, what it means to be a liberal or progressive or whatever.

To inform something that they’re not really thinking about much. Well, now they’re thinking about it. And now the question was, okay, well, if there is an issue at the board, And they

[00:39:29] Jim Henson: look up to see what the

[00:39:30] Josh Blank: elites are saying. Yeah. And then binds, well, you know, the asylum, you know, if he says like, Hey, you know, we’d like to work on the asylum process because it’s a problem.

Well, all of a sudden it gives a lot of people who see themselves as progressives, who see themselves as liberals, as good Democrats licensed to say, Oh. That’s reasonable. I’m not, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but I’ll just do it anyway. I’m not a racist if I think that I want to tighten the asylum laws.

Yeah. I’m not a bad person. I, it’s just that this isn’t working. I’m not, not a Democrat, not, not a Democrat anymore, because look, there are Democrats. In fact, the highest elected official Democrat is basically saying we need to do something

[00:40:03] Jim Henson: differently here. You know, and you know, and there’s a lead into that to be fair to like, you know, lesser elites, shall we say, or lesser opinion leaders, you know, and then if they turn around and look at other people, you know, there is.

You know a henry cuellar or you know pick other examples that are talking about this in a different

[00:40:22] Josh Blank: way Well, and it’s interesting. I mean I was going to say I mean that’s and that’s where the that’s where the difficulty I think comes for democrats is. Yes. There’s a henry cuellar. There’s also a quayer is an outlier

[00:40:30] Jim Henson: Not the best example.

[00:40:31] Josh Blank: No, no, but that’s a great example. There’s a henry choir and there’s also a greg kazar Right. And it’s serving. They may be kind of and they’re kind of working out where they are on this kind of stuff at this point. But in some ways, they don’t have the voice. They don’t have the megaphone. The president has, you know, this is going to be an interesting development.

I mean, this is really to me. I mean, I was talking a lot during the Uh, the last election cycle with, you know, sort of better work silence on the border and what a damaging sort of position it was for him to not sort of have any sort of clear statement about what a democratic governor’s office in Texas would look like with respect to the border, given the concern.

Well, at this point, like, you know, horses out of the barn, like you got to figure out where you are on this. Yeah. And

[00:41:13] Jim Henson: with, you know, I mean, look, to be fair to O’Rourke, but more or less, but I mean, you know, it, during, in a, now in a different situation. You know, in terms of like, you know, your sort of read of O’Rourke, you know, Colin Allred is going to put that to the test pretty clearly.

Colin Allred is definitely going to

[00:41:28] Josh Blank: By all appearances. For sure, exactly.

[00:41:30] Jim Henson: Now, again, under more propitious circumstances for doing so. If Colin

[00:41:35] Josh Blank: Allred

[00:41:36] Jim Henson: ends up being the nominee. If Colin Allred ends up being the nominee, so. Um, you know, well, he’s putting into the test in the primary,

[00:41:43] Josh Blank: but in some ways, you know, that’s actually the hard test, right?

Because to the extent that there are, you know, progressive liberal, whatever you want, what the actual

[00:41:51] Jim Henson: primary

[00:41:51] Josh Blank: electorate looks like, you know, if you think about where there are going to be more progressives, more liberals to the extent that, you know, this idea floats out there that, you know, those voters are essentially, I don’t want to say for open borders, but are just significantly less inclined towards punitive measures.

Yeah. Less inclined. We shouldn’t say poor open borders. Yeah. Yeah. Therefore, therefore. Well, I didn’t say that. I said, that’s not what I’m saying. I just want to be clear. Well, that’s what some people might say. Yeah. But to the extent that they are not, let’s say, in favor of the most punitive policies, is that going to, you know, manifest itself in the primary much, you know, we’ll, we’ll see.

[00:42:25] Jim Henson: And then, you know, just to go back to, to Republicans for a beat to close it out. I mean, You know, the, the Republican manifestation of this right now, I think, is, you know, something we talked about in the podcast last week, but just to tie it to this is that for all the, you know, internecine talk about, and then the, you know, inside baseball talk about Abbott endorsements and Paxton endorsements and the hit list of people that voted against Paxton and the hit list of people that voted against vouchers.

We’re not seeing a lot about either one of those ads in. But either one of those issues in the ads and the social media, we’re seeing a little bit, you know, in micro targeting. But for the most part, what we are seeing is border security. And, you know, whether it’s incumbents saying, you know, I voted for it.

I was fully on board with all the things the legislature’s done in the last session or last couple of sessions. Or it’s incumbents trying to mount an argument of, you know, the ones I’ve seen have been of varying degrees of accuracy and truthfulness. Challengers. Or I’m sorry, challengers that You know, incumbents have not done enough on border security, you know, border security is the coin of the realm right now in the Republican primary.

And you know, however, you’re going to, you’re, you’re going to massage that as all of these numbers that we talked about this week and last week suggests that’s the magic bullet. If you can fire it and hit the target, yeah,

[00:43:51] Josh Blank: the metaphor, yeah, which is interesting now because it’s really requiring, you know, in some cases Abbott or, or Paxton, but more so Abbott to go out and basically say, This challenger would be better in the house on border issues than the incumbent.

And you’d say, what did the incumbent do wrong? It’s like, well, nothing really not related to the border,

[00:44:12] Jim Henson: right? Or there was some procedural voter. There was some weirdo thing that, Oh no, they, that in most cases, I mean, those were very party line votes on, on border security. Easy votes. And yeah, I mean, You know, as we were talking about the time during the session, I mean, for all the other issues that were must pass, I mean, anybody that any doubt that we weren’t going to see more border security spending or efforts to, you know, provide some displays of being tough on the border was not paying attention.

Right.

[00:44:43] Josh Blank: So this is what’s going to be interesting though, right? Not paying attention. Doesn’t really describe like the Republican primary electorate, right? You know, so I mean it’ll be it’ll be interesting to see the effectiveness of that stuff But I mean, this is the point and you made this point I’m just gonna give you crap and you made this point weeks and weeks ago You’re like, well, you know, I don’t think Abbott’s gonna necessarily be highly in vouchers in these primaries and it’s true I mean you look at it like

[00:45:05] Jim Henson: yeah, I mean, yeah, I think I just cuz you Got money from voucher proponents.

Doesn’t mean that you have to put, spend that money on ads that have vouchers up front. It’s the target, not, you know, not the arrow. Right. So on that note, Josh, thanks for stimulating discussion as always. Thanks again to our excellent production team in the dev studio here in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

You can find all of the data referred to and much, much more at Texas politics dot u texas.edu. Thank you all 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.