February 16th, 2022 – Second Reading Podcast

Welcome to the second reading podcast from the university of Texas at Austin, the Republicans were in the democratic party because there was only one part. So I tell people on a regular basis, there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called the problem is these departures from the constitution.

They have become the norm at what. Must’ve female Senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room.

And welcome back to the second reading podcast. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin. Today, we’ll be talking about a new university of Texas, Texas politics. Pull that we just released to do that. I am happy to be joined by my co-principals and collaborators in this project.

Uh, Daron Shaw professor of government at UT Austin. Daron, how are you this morning, dude? Well, good to see you, Jim warmed up as we were saying, I think, uh, and Joshua blank research director of the Texas politics project. Josh. Good to see you in the studio. Very warm and he’s very warm too. Um, we’re going to talk about the poll that we released this week and we’ll go roughly in order of probably at least immediate interest for those of you out there that are interested in and not operating any heavy machinery while you’re listening to this, you can browse along the polling results at the Texas politics project website at Texas politics dot U Texas.

EDU, you can see the latest polling section or pop over to the blog link in that section on the page to see the overview posts that we rolled out earlier this week. Well, shall we start with the most in demand material and we might as well. So economic evaluations and household welfare. Um, uh, so let’s start with the trial balance and election match-ups of course, the two races getting the most attention in the primary elections on are the GOP races for governor and attorney general.

Josh, could you maybe just start by giving us a summary of what we found on those races? Yes. Sure. So looking at the race for governor, I should say this is among likely Republican primary voters here. And for this case, we define the. As those voters who have voted in at least one of the last three party primaries, and then indicate that they plan to vote in the primary, uh, this time in the Republican primary.

And so here, when we look at this, we find Abbott, you know, with, I would say a solid though, not commanding lead at 60%, uh, Allen west at 15% former state Senator Don Hoffman. Teen and the remaining candidates at less than five on the ag race, we find Paxton just below the runoff threshold at 47%. But within the margin of error, uh, George P.

Bush at 21, Eva Guzman at 16 and representative Gohmert at 15%. So a pretty even spread there, uh, below, below the top, let’s start with the governor’s race. I, you know, the race on the GOP governors side. What do you make of this? Well, I think people are going to read this as I think indicating that a there’s some considerable sentiment in the Republican party, that Abbott is not missing necessarily the, the ideal candidate.

I, I just don’t actually see that here. I think you’ve got two, well, one fairly well known, at least in Texas GOP circle’s candidate in west, and then Don Huffines who. Uh, for those of you been watching the NFL playoffs seem to have a commercial every 10 minutes, some of them in very high profile games, money to spend.

Yeah. Uh, so, right. So I think, you know, amongst ourselves, we’ve had this, I think sentiment for a while that you know, about two thirds of the Republican party is unified behind some of these establishment type figures, whether that be Rick Perry or, um, you know, in this case, gray gap, not to question anybody’s ontological status.

The Rick Perry that everybody knows, correct? Correct. Not the Rick Perry. That’s on the back, surprisingly up here in the ballot. Um, so that leaves one third of the Republican party that is, uh, open to challenges that, uh, is anti-establishment, uh, however that establishment is defined or embodied by particular candidates.

So, um, I’m not terribly surprised by this. I mean, I haven’t looked at the campaign finance figures to see how much Huffines has spent an awful lot. You know, time, energy and money capital put into this campaign. So far west has I think, a fairly well-known constituency and avid still at 60%. Um, you know, and of course the issue context for avid is you have this massive collapse of the grid last time.

So at least one kind of appreciable grievance. And then, uh, the county has been talking a lot about the situation at the border. You know, you would think, uh, incumbent has been around that long. It was accumulated some performance baggage and then faces, or is it the head of a party that has. Very very strong, uh, conservative elements to it that, you know, Abbott has, you know, been able to space to some extent, but this sort of represents that, right?

This is, you know, very, very strong conservatives. I think don’t think Abbott is kind of a true believer enough. I think there’s casual voters who pay attention, who either know about Western Huffines who’ve defected. So I don’t know Abbot to me. Paul is pretty strong. He’s considerably above 50%, which is really what you want here.

Um, it doesn’t seem to be taken on a whole lot of baggage. I mean, I’m sure there’s a pride factor here in wanting to, you know, I’m sure they would really appreciate being over 60 at the end, just for bragging rights, but there’s, you know, there’s an interesting kind of chicken egg question here that, you know, I think we’ve all talked about it various.

You know, various points in terms of how Abbott is positioned himself in the anticipation of just this race, going back really to the first summer, the first summer of the pandemic and that, you know, I think, you know, he long anticipated. I think that if there was going to be a challenge, it would be from the right.

And he has in a very sustained way prepared and positioned himself for. For the race that he finds himself in. Right. I, you know, it’s, uh, every, and obviously this almost goes without saying yet, I’ll say it. Anyway, everything we say here is within the context of sort of political strategy. And so when we say somebody who’s done something good or been effective, we’re, we’re speaking to that context, not talking about policy.

Um, but I think Abbott has had you think about the last four years had a really tricky job in a lot of ways you had this pandemic. That emerged. Uh, then you had this failure of the grid, those. Events that could very easily contribute to things. Yes. That could, you know, if you’re asking yourself, well, how does a Republican lose in Texas?

Well, you know, you have immediate events that the Republican doesn’t respond to her boss and collapse. Yeah. Um, and so now I know people could. Pointed out the opposite and say like, you know, the pandemic provided opportunities to show leadership, et cetera. And that that’s obviously true, but, um, you know, I think in Republican, you know, Republicans and heavily Republican states are Democrats and heavily democratic states.

They love states. They, they, they love the lack of crisis challenged because the default is they win and they win fairly comfortably and Abbott, I think a very tricky job managing the pandemic, which is how do you be responsive and address this major issue, uh, when that involves. You and your government doing something in a state where your constituents are suspicious of you and the government doing something.

Um, and then there’s the regional variation in Texas that mark the pandemic as well, which is, you know, a pandemic what’s the appropriate public policy in Houston or Dallas versus, you know, west Texas or, or the border areas. And, uh, so again, I’m not commenting on whether, you know, Governor Abbott did the right thing or the wrong thing in certain circumstances.

I just think his situation was extremely complicated compared to let’s say, blue state governors, like Cuomo, or like Newsome where, uh, you know, a robust public policy response is not only something that shows your. Committed to addressing this major issue, but it’s also something your, your core constituents who is very comfortable with avid didn’t have that luxury.

And in fact, he had the opposite. Exactly. Right? Yeah. And that’s, and that, and that guy that, you know, we’re not going to that guided policy and, and, and, and the pulling over that we’ve done over the last couple of years on COVID Josh really underlines in stark terms, what that dilemma was for him. Right.

And actually, I don’t think he treated it like a dilemma. I think they looked at what they had. They did it? No, I mean, I think, you know, you raise, I agree with everything that Darren said, and I think I’ll just add one thing to this and, you know, without going into the COVID elements of all of this, I mean, I think there’s a sort of set of the, the shocks that were thrown upon the system that Abba had to deal with in the political environment that he faces and includes constraints, you know, being a huge state.

And, but also again, Large segments of the Republican party who were basically saying don’t do anything right. And that’s, that’s difficult. But if we look at where he is right now and everything that’s happened between then and now we can also look at this poll and say, look, you know, among those same GOP primary voters who give them 60% of the vote, 77% approval for the job he’s doing.

So there’s not, you know, that’s not much different than Republicans overall. Uh, it’s not, you know, his favorite building numbers are not terribly different. President Trump’s especially, you know, among Republicans. So, you know, to say that there is an opening there isn’t as sure there’s an opening, is it, you know, a big opening?

Is it a majority opening? I think, you know, these numbers and everything that we’ve seen through the pandemic. Clearly not. And I guess to provide it, get it, to underline that point and provide a contrast. Let’s talk about the ag race, where Ken Paxton finds himself in a very different position than Greg Abbott does, goes in.

It comes into the campaign. Second campaign in a row with legal and ethical issues hanging over his candidacy. There’s no denying that. Um, some of those were there when he was elected in 2018, to be fair, but not all. And those, those problems have gotten worse and he finds himself, you know, as Josh was saying, just under 50% now I, you know, I would almost say tantalizingly under 50%, I think we had a 48.

Right. And that’s 47 47. And, and he’s been in that range in other public polling that we’ve seen. So what do we make of that race? That’s going to be a runoff, right? Yeah. I, you know, I love this result. And when I say I love this result, I mean the same. Darren Mads about good and bad. I love in the sense of looking at politics, because I think this really encapsulates what is going on this race from a couple perspectives.

Right. Right. If you take the support for, for, uh, George P. Bush and for Eva Guzman and kind of, you know, lump that together as sort of, you know, either you can either call it, you know, institutional or moderate support. I don’t think that’s exactly what I could say. You know, when I say institutional support, I mean, you know, there’s a.

Sure of Republicans who are looking at this and rightfully saying, you know, Paxton might be wounded. If Paxton goes through and becomes the nominee and the general election and the FBI investigation goes forward. He could be a liability to Republicans in that let’s say in the AGS office, but also maybe in general, who knows.

And so that’s part of the rationale I think there, but you combine those two, you’ve got 37% who say, you know, yeah, we should probably move away from the incumbent on the other side. PacSun. And Gohmert representing about, you know, a little over 60% of the, of the, you know, of the vote here, basically taking that right lane up.

And so the other piece that kind of comes out of this to me is to say, you know, Paxton, would you also see in this result is that despite Paxton’s legal problems. Uh, you know, I’m gonna say extensive legal problems that have been going on for an incredible period of time. The fact that he’s developed such a reputation and a brand within the Republican party with activists, with conservatives, regardless of all, that he is still at 50%.

And when we look at his job approval again, among those primary voters, 69% approve of the job he’s doing so. You know, he’s, he’s not in, I mean, I said relatively speaking, he’s not in a bad position, even though we always say an incumbent below 50% is in a bad position, right? Yeah. I, I think normally you look at a guy at 47 and you, you figure, okay, well, let’s, let’s assume there’s a runoff.

Right. Um, and right now, you know, Paxton’s actually within striking distance of not needing a ride. Which is something it’s a coin flip ish right now. Right. I mean, you know, with our Mar our margin of error for, you know, for the listeners who are interested, as we’re talking about, you know, 350, roughly, you know, kind of voters in these primaries.

Okay. A little higher than that Josh points plus or minus, right. So it’s a, it’s a plus or minus five. So when we say, you know, PAX is at 47, well, you know, this basically the bound is between, you know, um, 40, uh, 42 and 50. And he’s overseas. He’s somewhere in there. So he could, you know, write squeaked by, and that’s not even allocating some of the, you know, some of the undecideds or others who are in this race.

But certainly if you, and I think Josh is right here, if your instinct is to kind of combine the Paxton and. Votes and say, okay, if PacSun needs to run off well, he’s basically kind of, it’s 60% in that runoff, assuming turnout dynamic, all that the Paxton was announcing his latest, uh, lawsuit in the middle of Gomer to district this week.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, we keep going. I’m going to go even further away from like, we look when we’re not talking about policy, we’re just talking about the politics. Now I’m going to step back even further and say, I’m not even talking about the politics. I’m talking about how people are thinking about the politics.

It’s been very interesting to watch people in the political community and in the press move around on this race from the, oh, you know, Paxton’s, he’s fine. He’s, there’s no way he’s ever going to be in a runoff to, oh, he’s in a runoff. And now too, like I think we’re, we’ve kind of settled where. Yeah, maybe.

I mean, you know, I mean, it’s, I would like to say it’s an informed, I don’t know, but it is interesting. I, and you know, do you agree, Josh just mentioned Paxton announcing this latest lawsuit in Gohmert district. Grimmer Jefferson here, a cup on the, on the podcast a couple of weeks ago from down in the Dallas morning news.

And we were talking about, we talked a lot about this race and it was right at that time that Paxson had begun watching attack ads against Gohmert in his district. And it strikes me that, you know, for a while, that was tempting to go. Maybe they’re seeing polling that. That he, that Gohmert is moving up and he has moved up, but it seems to me, the bigger problem is that GeMar draws directly from Paxton’s assumed core support.

And that’s why they’re driving, trying to drive his numbers down. Does that make sense to you? I think, I think the logic is correct. The logic UL. It’s almost certainly what they’re thinking. Yeah. I wonder that it would be right. I wonder though, about, you know, in a primary election, w we should preface all of this by saying that, uh, you know, even in today’s kind of hyper partisan hyperpolarized environment areas, we’re talking about politics, you know, turn out is low in these elections.

There’s not that many people who are going to vote. I mean, they actually in raw numbers. Quite a bit, but as a percentage in Texas, it’s a registered voters. It’s not going to be that high. So the kinds of people who vote are engaged and they’re interested, but they’re not a random subset of the Texas population, probably not even of, you know, Republicans in Texas or Democrats in Texas on those respective sides.

I tend to think that, you know, the Paxton people, if they see Gohmert moving up, the responses that well, you know, we need to project ourselves as more conservative because the entire basis for. Taking out of our chunk is that, uh, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re bleeding conservatives and that it’s probably right.

Demographics. To your point, Jim, about the cause. Is it really the case that conservatives just don’t think Paxton has been conservative enough and therefore they’re voting for go? No, I think it’s completely related to the ethics challenges and the negative, uh, press that’s attended to that, that, that Paxton has received.

And so I, I wonder about, I mean, you have to do something in a campaign, right? That’s why you’re, you’re paid and you’re serving the candidate, but I just want. Uh, you know, the conflation there, isn’t a little too cute, right? The real problems are not the, the ideological purity of Paxton. Yeah. The real problems are the real problems and the real problems are why he has three strong channel.

That’s it? Yeah. That’s exactly right. Yeah. Going back to that, you know, there’s another kind of chicken egg situation, like is he in trouble? With the candidates, because you know, there’s just more candidates or because he’s in trouble. Yeah. But I mean, but th this is the whole point though, but we say all that, and then you look and you say, but he’s close to even not, he’s close to the runoff threshold.

I was like, again, that again, I just want to say, like, that speaks to the power of his brand and within those voters, I mean, it’s just, it doesn’t matter. It’s a good point by getting real quickly, uh, you know, the, the reality is if Paxton were not associated very closely with a particular set of issue positions in ideology, then I think the, the ethics allegations and.

You know, charges that his faces would really be damned, would have been fatal. Exactly. But he’s got earlier. Bingo. Exactly. Right. I don’t want to leave this, this part of this discussion, Darren, without plugging your book, the turnout myth. So we’re having you here to talk about turnout. I owe you that since I sent a reporter, since I sent a reporter on you last week, thank you.

Thinking now available at Oxford university press, but I also wanted them plug your book, but then ask you, like, what do you reckon you got, you have any expectations for. Yeah, I had him in the primaries I had relative to the trend. Sure, sure. I, I hadn’t until, um, the reference that you, uh, sicked on me, um, asked me it was actually a good exercise because I hadn’t looked at the numbers recently.

Um, and, uh, you know, I don’t know this. Typically, what do you get the drives turnout in a primary competitive races on one or both sides? Uh, you know, we’re competitive races, meaning you have candidates who are raising money and spending money and bringing attention to the race. Uh, and when you get a decline in turnout or lower turnout, it’s usually because one or both sides don’t have a lot of competition going on.

So I’m a little struck by. Particular context. Well, we sort of have competitive races on the Republican side and theoretically on the democratic side. Um, so that would lead you to be, well, there ought to be decent turnout, except if you actually look at those races and have been following them, how much attention has been given to the democratic race?

I mean, Beto is very much a double-edged sword. He comes in and he brings attention and, you know, probably increases the Democrats chances of being jazzed about the fall election, but he just crushed. Interest in the primary. Yeah. Which is, which is a good shoe. So what do you think, okay. I almost transitioned without putting, holding your feet to the fire.

I’m going to ask you, let me ask you it this way. Since you’ve worked on campaigns before, what’s your vote target for the statewide versus the statewide Republican race? I think I would peg Republicans at about 1.4 and Democrats at 1 million, 1.4 million about one main. So, so collectively about 2.4 million, um, which puts us in terms of a percentage at, uh, at about the 16, 17%.

Rate of total registered vote, registered voters in the state of Texas. Um, that’s a slight uptick, um, from, uh, the average across midterms, but not quite as high as a percentage terms. I think I gotta check this. We have 20 votes anyway, in 2018, it was 1.5 something. Right. So, so I think we’re a little down there after just because Beto brought such newness and excitement last time around.

I don’t know. My only prediction is that because it’s going to be not, you know, a high percentage number and the trend line. We’re going to get a lot of stories after the primaries about the collapse of participation in Texas. That’s inevitable. Yeah, and it was, well, I’m not to go there and I I’m already getting student papers on the imputed cause of that, but we’ll, we’ll let that go for now.

Sure. Okay. So just to run the, as Darren alluded to, uh, Josh, not, not a lot going on in the other primaries, both, you know, where there is probably the most. You know, BETOS crushing his opposition better, or work has more than 90% of the vote in that primary race and evidence in what we S in, in the responses and the pattern of responses we saw that there’s just not a lot of formed opinion on the other democratic races at all, or.

Right. That’s right. And just to go back a beat, I’ll tell you, this is the one thing that Beto O’Rourke and Dan Patrick have in common is that they look likely to just cruise to three nomination without much problem. I mean, we’ll see what the eventual number is. All guys. Well, that’s true there. Okay. I’ll just let you noodle on your list.

Your listicle of the ways. Beto and Dan Patrick are similar. Yeah. I mean, the thing that really, you know, you know, this is so difficult as Dan was just saying, I mean, on the one hand, you’ve got Beto at the top of the ticket, who seems to basically be a consensus Peck among Democrats. And he’s extremely well known and well liked amongst, you know, primary voters, democratic voters.

And then, you know, we go and the way we ask these questions is we always allow people to tell us at the outset, well, we are, I haven’t thought about that race, but the primary’s coming up. So if you vote in primary and you plan to go, then we say that. But really if you had to choose, and that’s how we report our results as if the person were in the voting booth, they’re going to make a choice, but on the race for the democratic nomination for Lieutenant governor, the majority 57% didn’t have an opinion.

At first, uh, on the ag side, it was 52%. Didn’t have an opinion at first. Um, and so, you know, the, the results still carry through in the sense like, you know, for the most part, the person who is in first, you know, at least in the LCS Lieutenant governor’s race, In both the initial question. And then when we force them to follow up, my colleague is in the lead.

This shouldn’t totally surprised us. He’s ran statewide two times. Like he has at least some knowledge there’s knowledge within the democratic electorate of who he is at least a little bit. The ag race, I think is a total. Mess to some extent, right? In the sense that, you know, we ask initially, who are you going to support?

Rochelle Garza gets 15%. Joravsky gets 16. And Lee, Mary gets eight. Once we go enforce people, shall Garza jumps to 41% Jaworski jumps to 24. Uh, merit goes to 15. And I mean, I just, you know, I mean, I think there’s a big part of this, which is I’m. I tell people all the time, you know, when people say, oh, well, if a woman jumps in the race or if there’s a Hispanic on the bell, wasn’t it.

Throw everything I say, you say, no, not really, not a people know who the cancer, but if people don’t know who any of the candidates are in the case, like those there’s one person on the candidate, who’s like on the, on the ballot who will be identifiable as a woman. There’s one person on the ballot who is identifiable as a Hispanic democratic and the democratic primary here.

It’s not surprising that she gets this extra boost. And as the question is going to be, is that going to be enough to kind of keep her there? We’ll see. I mean, more than anything, I think what we expect is runoffs in both of those races, which is going to make it even harder for Democrats to compete November.

Look, I think on the Republican side, what you see is, you know, well-known income. Kind of anchoring the ballot. And then, uh, in, in a couple of the races, certainly in the ag race and certainly in the, in the gubernatorial race, you have other candidates who were reasonably well-known either by virtue of spending, you know, millions of dollars, like Huffines, or just having a family name like Bush.

Right. Um, but in the, on the democratic side, you’re right. Democratic voters are searching for cues. How do. Construct an opinion. How do I figure out who to vote for in a race where I don’t really know any of the candidates? And so I think, you know, we’re actually very sympathetic to the kind of dilemma that voters face, um, in this situation, which is, you know, well maybe, uh, I think it would be good for the Democrats to nominate a woman, whether for representation, reasons or strategic reasons, maybe I, uh, you know, think that Hispanics need to be more.

Favorite the Hispanic candidate. I think, you know, sometimes people’s flash reaction is, well, that’s just silly to vote on the basis of these things, but, but when you. Pull back a little bit and ask, well, what are you supposed to do in a race where you don’t really know anything about the candidates? Is it, is it ridiculous to, to use these small bits of information to construct an opinion?

And I think we’re all very sympathetic to that and you’ve got some damn pollsters say no, really? Yeah. Yeah. Well, and especially in, you know, and if you do think about those sorts of things, but you are, you know, but you don’t have information out of these candidates, you know, You know, you probably just selected Beto O’Rourke as your democratic nominee.

There’s a good chance. You just selected my colleague or a surrealistic governor nominee. Now you get to race of, you know, a bunch of people you don’t know. And it’s like, well, okay. Got one white guy, two white guys, you know, what, what are we, what are we doing here? And part of it, is you saying yes, no. Does this matter?

No, but look, this is the democratic party in Texas is a majority female, majority non white party. So there is a problem at some point, if you keep putting up tickets where you have white male after white male, after white male, in terms of, I think, you know, I think what the democratic messaging is. So it is a real consideration, but in this case, I mean, what we’re really talking about here, People don’t know these who these vote, who these candidates are, is the main takeaway.

So let’s move. Uh, I, I, well, I guess we can’t move away from this without talking about what we got in the, in the hypothetical matchup between. Greg Abbott and beta O’Rourke, you know, we say hypothetical, but obviously per this conversation, it’s the, you know, a very high probability outcome. That that’s what we’re going to see after March.

Um, you know, and we had, you know, Abbott ahead by. You know, 47, 37, 47, 37 I’ll point out exact same gap that we saw between Abbott and Davis in February of 2014. Interesting interests. There’s a good little factoid. I’m just here for that. Um, so what do we make of this? You know, it’s, it’s interesting. You got in Greg Abbott, uh, you know, a fundraising dynamo, a candidate who is, you know, run and won elections in Texas across multiple races.

You have Beto O’Rourke who is, you know, if habits of fundraising, dynamo, then you know what, whatever the level up above dynamo is is certainly what O’Rourke is a very well-known run. Uh, I guess if you count the presidential, you know, in the two most recent 20 18, 20 20 has run statewide slash national campaigns.

And yet what you ended up with is kind of a party line vote. Um, you know, about a 10 point spread, if you allocate undecideds proportionally, it’s about a 12 point spread, uh, that’s kind of what you would expect even as Texas trends, less con you know, reliably red, uh it’s you know, maybe slightly actually above what one would expect nowadays, right?

That is, I used to some Josh and I, and Jim had this conversation 10 years ago. I think we probably would have said the base. Republican beats the baseline Democrat by 10 to 12 points. And I think in recent years, it’s come down to say eight or nine or something. I might even widen my band and say 10 to 12 points plus, or minus two, it’s like 10 to 14.

But I think that’s exactly the point here. Right. Which is, you know, historically. At these rates, especially early on, and you’d see, you know, at least a 10 point lead for the Republican candidate. If it was less than that, you’d say, oh, is that an Ethan odd measure that has to do with like when we polled, is there something particular about that candidate or those sets of candidates, but then the idea is, is that as the race would go on, we would see like in the case of the Davis, Got bigger.

Right? So Dave’s ends up losing by almost 20. I think the question is now, if you know, if we’re starting at about a 10 point gap, do we expect that gap to grow or to get slightly smaller? And I think, you know, looking at again, the underlying numbers here, I would expect it to get slightly smaller. Given that I think our work is probably underperforming a little bit with groups he’s going to have to work on, but that’s all to say there’s a whole campaign season to see whether that number gets grows or shrinks.

But I think this is like, this is where we expect these things to kind of start and that’s the other. We’re still seven months from the election. This is the start. They’re not even the candidates. This is a hypothetic. Yeah. W to Josh’s point, you know, we talk about partisan sorting and a lot of what we think about campaigns and political science these days is that the campaign provides an opportunity for people to kind of remind themselves or to be reminded of where they quote should be unquote.

Right. So I’m a Democrat. I will eventually move to a Rourke as the campaign heats up. And I kind of remember, yeah. Democrats versus Republicans and why I associate myself with the democratic party. What’s interesting now is that that’s already happened in a lot of it now, not entirely as Josh said, O’Rourke is actually underperforming here with some key constituencies.

Um, but, but basically the sorting that we typically back in the day would expect to occur in October and late October, early November it’s already happened. Yeah. Um, so I would not be surprised if this is a steady state race. All the way up into the cycle. I’m not sure we’re going to see a lot of absence, some major events, a lot of, uh, oscillation in support for O’Rourke in Abbott over the course of this campaign.

Um, I will say that, uh, you know, it’s interesting. O’Rourke though has a lot of baggage here, but maybe more so than Abbott, even, even though Abbott’s been around considerably longer. It’s just a, again, continue to be amazed at how short the windows of opportunity are in American politics. These days, you know, our work was such.

Uh, a force in 2018 and now it feels like he’s been around forever. Uh, you know, it feels like boy, he just, he lost in 28, lost in 2020. I, you know, there, there seems to be this kind of notion that, oh God, is he running again? And I think that’s something he’s going to have to fight a little bit against. And, uh, you know, I, I do think there are some things he’s done, which we can talk about, um, that are very smart in terms of position.

Um, no, but we can get good into us. I was reading something this morning. I can’t remember the beginning of the quote is, but the end of the quote is, you know, like in strategy, there’s nothing worse than a mistake and a rock made a big mistake and, you know, and he’s still kind of paying for that. I mean, but the other side of it is, you know, Abbott has such control over the media environment or over his media environment and his ability to define O’Rourke, uh, you know, in a way that’s just going to make it, I mean, it’s just, it’s a challenge that Democrats always face the differences is that, you know, I think Republicans take our work seriously.

And so it’s just, you know, they’ve been spending since the summertime trying to redefine him, especially amongst, uh, you know, lower propensity versus independence amongst suburbanites, that he’s just too extreme for Texas. And, you know, if you can take that out on the, on the, on the, on the heels of the presidential campaign, that’s, that’s the big point.

Yeah. And if we look at the fave unfaves we ran on, on better. That campaign among Democrats or among Republicans has worked. And it’s also, I think, born some fruit among independence, which of course in Texas, even shoe independents are going to lean towards the right. So, you know, we spend most of the time talking about the campaigns.

I’m just going to let’s end this by just say, I’m just going to ask you guys and I’ll give you a second to think I’ll vamp for a second. Pick out an issue, uh, an issue you guys thought was an issue result. You guys thought was interesting and telling about where we are right now. And for those of you that haven’t looked at the poll yet, we, we pulled very broadly on a lot of issues.

Um, you know, I think we flagged that the education is public education has really been back in focus again in a very different way than it has been in the recent past in Texas. One might argue that, you know, if you’ve been around a while, we’ve seen this movie before, but we’ve shifted from, you know, a real focus on funding, distribution, um, a systemic focus that we saw in the legislature in the last couple of sessions, certainly in, in.

If not the last session, the two before that to a return to looking at content and, and the schools is a political kind of battlefield underlined by what we’ve seen during the pandemic. We also asked about, uh, positions on abortion, on guns, on voting laws, on a sort of national. Systemic issues, January 6th, the Biden, the 2020 election et sort of.

So there’s a lot to look at and we’ll be on unpacking this in the podcast and in writing and in coming weeks. But so, so, so Josh, what struck you on the issue front? And, and we got just a couple of minutes. Yeah. You know, I, you know, it’s great stuff. I don’t want to highlight a specific result. I mean, you you’ve mentioned so many.

I mean, they’re all really interesting. I think, you know what I look at when I look at these policies in this poll, we were trying to figure out kind of here we are in the transition from, you know, what the legislature did in that year of legislating into the campaign season and how that plays out. And what strikes me is I, you know, I agree with Darren, there’s a bit of a steady state right now.

We’re kind of watching where things move. And as we pull throughout the session and into this. This pole, I mean, one of the difficulties you face this whole time has been well, you know, which of the many issues that have come up, should we even pull on? And I think what I’ve been trying to figure out throughout all of this is sort of, you know, How are people voters dealing with all of this information and how is it going to, if at all, what parts of it are going to make their way through the campaigns and be effective or not?

You know, abortion’s a great example, right? Where we have a majority of, of, uh, Texas voters who say, you know, that they do not support an outright ban on abortion. Should the Supreme court overturn Roe V. Wade? Well, we’re, we’re, that’s very likely going to happen during this campaign season. What effect does that have on the case?

I don’t know. And so before I thought there might be kind of a death by a thousand cuts when you have a bunch of issues where you have majority opposition or even significant, uh, shares of Republican opposition. Now, I mean, I think part of it is it’s too many things, but the question becomes, okay, what is the thing?

And there’s this state. And if you look across this fall, you can find a lot of areas where there could be a thing. Will there be an exogenous shock that was for you Ross Ramsey. If you got this far, Darren what’s on your mind about this, what kind of, what’s your big takeaway? Well, let me go, uh, broadly speaking to sort of echo Josh’s point, although with maybe a little bit of a different twist, you know, in a state where Republicans are generically favored by eight to 12 points where, you know, the, the other side, the Democrats.

The federal government, you know, the administration and the Congress, um, you’re heading into a midterm election where, you know, I think Democrats in the state of Texas are greatly disadvantaged. Um, everything that’s going on at the national level that is unsatisfying or dissatisfying to people, um, is laid at the footsteps of a party that really needs issues to cut their way to make headway in Texas.

And so. Kind of echo adjusted, but with a slightly different twist, which is absent, something like that, absent a set of issues that undercut Republican, you know, kind of dominance in Texas, it’s difficult to see how you, you know, how a candidate like Beto O’Rourke or some of the other candidates, you know, gets enough leverage to, you know, to make something happen.

Um, Uh, on the specifics, there were two results. I really thought were interesting. One gets at our general point and those of you who’ve listened to Jim and Josh and I talk about Texas opinion are probably sick of hearing this, but the subtlety and nuance to opinion in Texas is really striking again.

Having said, oh, Yeah, by default or Republican state, that doesn’t mean it’s, it’s a state that’s enormously ideological and how they’ve used some of the day-to-day problems. So for instance, we asked a pretty cutting edge issue about, uh, you know, education today. So the, the statement we asked people to agree to disagree with the following statement, parents of children in Texas public schools have enough influence on what their children.

And this is kind of a litmus test for, you know, are you, are you buying into the, what we saw in Virginia and other places where there’s a parent rebellion occurring? Well, we ended up with about the same number, actually within one percentage point of people agreeing and disagreeing with that’s stupid.

And I want to say, you know, we ask intensity on that and the majority of the opinion was in the middle, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree. It was very normally distributed. I think, you know, this reflects, I, this is a pretty new issue. That’s being thrust upon a lot of people and they’re trying to kind of figure.

Right. How to react to it. Right? So I point to that result. And then the second result was we continue to ask people about voting rules in Texas, and I’ll give credit to my co-principals here because I like, I like what they have done. I think they were the ones who formulated the response option here, which is rather than talk about Malin versus in-person voting versus extended.

They simply asked, should the voting laws be more. Less strict or left as they are. And you basically get a one-third one-third one-third divide on this, um, and really consistent. And it’s I think speaks to now of course there obviously represents differences in opinion, but I think also shows that people are, are trying to grapple with these things.

There’s not a lopsided opinionation on these sort of difficult issues just because we’re in a traditionally red state. Yeah. And I think that’s good for the, you know, Wayne into storyline that people often want to write that either the state is going is running in one direction. And that’s why government is run by one, one party or one party is pushing the public in a direction.

They don’t want to go. And what’s up with that. It’s a very complicated landscape out there. And the parties in the, in the election are looking for comparative advantage in, in. In what people, what is front and center for people. But a lot of these issues that have been front and center are, as Josh says, very new.

And I think we’re, we’re going to continue to see movement in summit. Some of these things are already set, but we’re going to see movement in others. So, um, with that, I want to thank Darren and Josh for being here. Thank our excellent production team in the audio studio, in the liberal arts development studio at UT Austin, remind everybody, you can find all these results we talked about and much, much more at Texas politics dot U, Texas.

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