February 9th, 2022 – Second Reading Podcast

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

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

And the second reading podcast, I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin. Happy to be joined today by Josh blank. Research director of said Texas politics project here with the water back on at your house. Yes. And that’s what, you know, not everybody here is from Austin.

Right. We had a bit of a water issue, right? C Y. Everybody’s looking one direction for infrastructure collapse. And it came from, yeah, I mean, I like, you know, watching the Twitter, the Twitter versus the water thing was starting to, you know, the mixture of, you know, people panicking and running to the store and then there’s people, you know, and I say, my wife is very thoughtful about these things and was scared weeks ago when you started to see these supply chain issues in the grocery store.

But I know this started, I’m like, oh, do we need to get anything? She’s like very proudly. We’re not going anywhere. Right? Well, we happened to be out of town for most of it. So, you know, I’m glad you were prepared. I guess we’d have been okay. We had cases of water and stuff, but at least beer, but I’m tired of it.

I just, I just get tired like this, you know, last night I was like, I, you know, Dinner and wash dishes with boiled water and loving. I mean, we’ll solve what’s other cars going, but that is the ultimate disruption. I mean, if you have small kids who like you need to feed is not fun in any way. And then you end up, you’re like, alright, I guess we’re doing the freezer meal.

And after like a couple of nights of that, it’s just, yeah. Yeah. It gets LOLed. Yeah. We went someplace where they make and got a pizza up someplace where they have lots of boiled water on hand, which is. The neighborhood brewery. So, uh, I guess we give a plug to our friends at the ABGB always Oltorf Oltorf near south Lamar.

Um, and that, that is a non-sponsored, that’s just, that’s a non-paid product placement. Um, maybe I should get re get hold of them. I’d love to make this the ABGB second reading podcast. Um, so today we thought, uh, we talk about a topic that, that Josh and I have talked to. About, and it’s come up in the podcast with you and I with other guests.

Um, and then I think you and I have promised to get back to it’s when we’ve got a long list of, well, we’ll put a pin on that. There’s a lot of pins and a lot of pins in this podcast, but, um, we’re going to, we’re going to go back to one today and that’s the subject of the partisan allegiances and voting behavior of Texas Latinos or Hispanics or Latin X per.

Well, I mean, well, I don’t know. I don’t, you’re not supposed to for some people, but others, you still supposed to, I hear this out, but we’ll, we’ll put a pin on that for later. Um, this is one of the recurring themes, you know, more specifically though in coverage of. The 2020 election proximately that’s now popping up in a big way is 2022 unfolds.

So the real trigger for this coverage, I think again, only most approximately, um, as we’ll say later on, just say it now. I mean, this has been a recurring theme and discussion of Texas politics for quite some time. And that is, you know, what, what can we expect from Hispanics in terms of their, their partisan allegiance in their voting behavior.

But the more approximate trigger was Trump’s showing in the Rio Grande valley against Joe Biden in the last presidential election. Um, you know, I think for our part, we’ve been mulling this for a while and talking to reporters as we do now and again, and been skeptical of, you know, what it’s become to me, a trope that there’s a fundamental opportunity for Republicans to move a sizable share of Hispanic voters in their direction.

And it’s really playing out. I think in this cycle in looking at congressional in particular house, uh, state house elections to a lesser degree Senate elections. And of course, while anyone is follows, Texas politics has heard this before. This whole discussion has really experienced a resurgence in recent months in part, because of not only attention from the press in Texas, but the press outside Texas.

Now you’ve done a lot of digging on this and compiled a bunch of data. So let’s start talking about what you found. Let’s, let’s start in the RG in the Rio Grande valley. Okay. So, I mean, the first thing to kind of note, when you look at the election results in the Rio Grande valley, is that there’s no evidence that Democrats were, we’re losing our hemorrhaging Hispanic voters.

If you look at the data, uh, ultimately the Democrats increase the number of Hispanic votes that got in the RGV from 2016 to 2020. The big thing was that. So did Republicans and Republicans did it at a much more. Faster rates. So, whereas in 2016, Democrats in the Rio Grande valley got about 191,000 votes in 2020, they got about 200, 3000.

So not a big gain, but 10,000 more voters in an area that say that’s pretty small. And again, 10% of 190,000, it’s like 200 a year. You’re talking about 5%. Increase. That’s not small Republicans though. Had about just under 82,000 votes in 2016 and the RGV in 2020, they got almost 150,000. That is a humongous increase.

But I think the first point to take away from this, it’s not as though Democrats were losing votes in the region, they were increasing their, their numbers. It’s just that they weren’t increasing their numbers. As fast as Republicans, Republicans were very successful in this campaign, it finding a, I would say Republican leaning, Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande valley.

And that’s what I think this data kind of points to when we just look at the RGV. But the second kind of big thing to take away from this is that the RGV is a really, really small share of the Texas. I do want to give some, I want to give a little something to the people that have noticed this, just because one of the things, you know, that the dead come out in the data you compiled is that the democratic advantage.

Did decrease pretty significantly from 2016 to 2018 to 2020 from in those years, 38, you know, the, the democratic advantage was about 38 and a half point percentage points in 2016 stays roughly the same 34.79 and 2018. But then does drop to 15 point, you know, about 15.1% in 2020. Now those are still democratic advantages, but.

I think if you’re looking at just that column and just the Rio Grande valley, you know, that’s, that’s worth noticing it’s, it’s absolutely worth nothing, but, and you know, and here’s the thing, we’ll, we’ll definitely put a pin in this and come back to it. But before in this, in this podcast, even, but before we do that, I think the point I was about to make, and you’re setting me up on this is that the RGV is such a small share of the texts.

Electorate. In fact, when you look at all the votes cast in Texas in 2020 in these counties that make up the RGV only 3.2, 1% of the total votes cast in the state came from this region, which leads to some pretty important questions here. Right? Right. Okay. So the main question that we want to ask. Is the RGV or these results are representative of Hispanic sentiment statewide.

And is it enough to support either the proposition that Republicans are making gains or the Democrats are losing some of their allegiance among Hispanic voters, right? And so there’s a bunch of different ways we can look at this. And the idea is let’s look at all the ways relatively, relatively briefly.

So one thing we can do is we can look at exit poll. I know you and I have talked many times about the accuracy of exit polling. It’s got strengths and weaknesses, but it’s a, it’s a relatively consistent data source. We can go and say, Hey, if there’s a big shift in. Maybe we would see it here, not as precise as we’d like, but not crazily wrong in all likelihood.

Most in most circumstances it tells us it tells us something and in conjunction with other sources of data, you know, let’s see if it tells us a different story or if it reinforces the story. So if we look at this, we can go and look at the exit polling going back to 2004, and I’m looking in particular at the democratic advanced.

Among Hispanics. So basically there’s a democratic voter that is Republican vote share, subtract the Republican voters from the democratic nature. That’s the democratic advantage in points. And we look at it when we look at 2020, what we see is kind of an average election, really Democrats were plus 18 in the exit polls, the overall average, going back to 2004 and I should say 2012, there was no exit polling data in Texas as a missing point, the data, but the overall average, going back to 2004 was about plus 20 plus 20 advantage for Democrat.

Uh, in midterms, the average is plus 18. So the fact that in 2020, we had a plus 18 advantage. Really. It actually looked more like a return to normal. What was abnormal in a lot of ways was the 2016 and 2018 elections in which the democratic advantage swell to 2035 points in 2016 and 29 points in 2018.

The flip side of this is if we go back to 2004, 2006, a democratic advantage was only about. Maybe 10 points. And so in some ways it’s hard to say that, you know, this is a major sway. If anything, it looks a little bit more like return to normal. And the previous elections were actually a little bit more unusual.

Right. And he’s just, let me ask you, I, and I don’t remember how you pulled this, um, is this top of the ticket or. Reported party identification in the exit. This is top of the tickets. So, so for example, in the 2018 cycle, in this case, I’m looking at the Senate race because it was a much more competitive race.

So this is not the Abbott Leiby Valdez race in 2018. This is the job just did considerably better. Yeah. And I mean, among Hispanics. Yeah. And I can justify this by just saying, look, you know, Louis Valdez did not run a terribly serious competitive campaign that site. Uh, you know, that are dead. And so I think what we’re trying to look at is what does it look like in a competitive election?

Ultimately, you know, if it’s not a competitive election, one way or the other, none of this stuff really matters on either side. Okay. So we can also look at our own polling. We have a lot of UT polling going back over many election cycles. So what I’m looking at here is top of the ticket trial ballots in October before the election.

So just before the election, October, we used to do some polling. We asked people who they’re going to vote for same thing in 2018, I’m looking at the Senate race, cause it was more the closer race and. Tell us a pretty similar story. I’m looking at this, in this case at the, again, the democratic advantage among Hispanic voters in each of these final trial balance.

And I should say, and I’ll add this when we write this up, you know, when we look at the overall accuracy of those trial ballots and the democratic advantage overall, or disadvantaged really statewide and look at the final results, the polls are pretty close. So we have reason to believe that the sub-sample Hispanics is probably pretty accurate as well.

And what we find again in 2020, the interestingly compared to the exit polls, the Hispanic advantage among Democrats with. 17 points, 18 points. The next poll, we have 17 points. Here you go back to 2018. It was 27 points. You back to 2016 is 23. Again, those were pretty big outliers. Look at 2014, the democratic advantage plus to 2012.

It was even term in our poll in at least, right. And this again goes along with the exit point numbers, but it shows again that you know, this regression in some ways from the, you know, the heady days for Democrats of 2016 and 20, uh, 18 to 2020, it’s not so much necessarily. A big shift. It’s actually a little bit more of just, I don’t know.

I would say again, a regression to more normal times, a little bit 2016 and 2018. So is there a presidential midterm pattern here? It doesn’t seem like. I don’t think so. I mean, I’ll say this pretty small, I mean, look, it’s a pretty small, it’s a small, it’s a small and it’s small sample size. I mean, the thing I’ll say this is, you know, the thing that strikes me from this data is not so much that 2020 is so telling about politics in our state, but the 2016 and 2018.

We’re so weird. Yeah. And we’re such strange outliers. So, I mean, this is something that I think is kind of important to note here is, you know, what we find in Poland. You know, the attitudes of Hispanic voters as sort of a starting point. I think people are kind of failing to recognize. Yeah, no, I think that’s right.

I mean, you know, I could have said this at the outset. I mean, this has been something that’s been out there that we’ve been skeptical of for a long time that, you know, people both overestimate the degree of democratic advantage or, or the hold that Democrats have on Hispanics and underestimate the, you know, Republicans record with making inroads into the.

Population and making inroads is probably the wrong figure of speech, but there’s actually a pretty, already a pretty reasonable baseline. Yeah. And I mean, I would say this too. I mean, one of the things that Republicans have, I mean, there’s a lot of advantages Republicans have in this, but one of the things that they have going for them is that because as a party they’ve been successful in this state for a long time, without really relying on maximizing their vote, share among Hispanic voters, it hasn’t been, I would say a major priority of their election campaigns, especially statewide.

What you’re seeing now is a focus, you know, especially in, in these areas, along the Rio Grande valley. And there’s a lot of political advantage to that, that we could talk about and we probably have talked about, but you know, part of it is there’s just more opportunity for Republicans to go out and find Republican leaning Hispanics, because they haven’t been trying to do it.

You can look at the democratic party and say whether or not they’ve been successful at mobilizing low propensity, Hispanic voters over time. But they’ve been trying for quite a while, right? So there’s a little bit less to be gained to be here. Now. It also makes me wonder a lot about, you know what I mean, it’s maybe a slightly different way of saying we should, which you’re just saying, but you know, the part of the problem here is our assumption about low propensity Hispanic voters and the fact that they are automatically Democrats.

That if you go out and you start knocking on doors based on, you know, no insults to anybody’s product, but you know, based on catalyst or based on, you know, whizzbang, you know, modeling or algorithms that there’s going to be a pretty good. Error for margin. And you might actually be mobilizing people that from a strategic perspective, not a civic perspective, you’re not really aiming to mobilize.

Yeah. I mean, anecdotally, you know, knowing as we know some reporters who’ve done, you know, reporting over this, over the last couple of cycles and some of the efforts to mobilize low propensity Hispanics, and most of those stories end with something like, yeah, they knock on the door, expecting the voter to be, you know, something and find out something else, something entirely different.

Yeah. So, you know, not surprisingly the date is a little spot. When you start to talk about, you know, some of these times of low propensity voters, right? Okay. So you cut this up a different way though, to kind of get some more nuance on this. Yeah. And so part of it is these are all estimates. And so I wanted to do was, is not just rely on the Rio Grande valley.

So instead of just looking at the four counties that make up the RGV, what I did was I wanted to look at the counties where the census tells us that Hispanics make up either a majority of the popular, the adult population in the county. At least 65% of the population in the county, at least 75% and at least 90%.

So counties that we can think of, and these are not mutually exclusive from each other should be sort of obvious. But the idea here is to see, you know, as we look at, you know, counties that are overwhelmingly Hispanic or marginally Hispanic, do we see the same pattern that we see in the RGV? So the short story of this is to say, you know, it tells much of the same story as the RGV, right?

So both Democrats and Republicans are increasing the number of voters that they’re pulling in between 2016 and 2020, and Republicans are just seeing a bigger increase and in some cases, a substantially larger increase. So one of the things I want to look at was what was the increase in voters each?

What does that look like? So we. Counties where Hispanics make up. Majority of the adults, Democrats increase their raw number of votes by 21% or just under 22% Republicans by 40. If we look in the counties where Hispanics make up 90% of the vote of the adult population, Democrats increase their total votes by 3% versus 97%.

Right. That is the, you know, but there’s a big problem here, which is again, the counties that make up. Or they’re made up of 90% or more of Hispanics are a very small number of counties. I think it’s less than 10 and it’s less than 10% of the over all voting population. So we’re talking about a small thing.

So when you actually look at the numbers of this. Counties are in that set. Oh yeah, absolutely. Now we put a pin in something we’re going to come back to it now, actually, we’re going to follow a new, better follow through in the new year. Maybe there you go. Okay. So shorter turnaround on the pins. So if you look at basically, you know, how many votes we’re actually talking about here, what it means is that these different counties, you know, a majority Hispanic up to 90% or more Hispanic, you know, Democrats are adding, you know, about 6,000 votes in the counties that are 90% or more Hispanic in the majority Hispanic counties, they had 186,000.

For Republicans, they had six, almost 68,000 in the counties with 90% or 90% Hispanic or higher, they had a 230, 8,000 and counties that are at least majority Hispanic. And so you can do a net here. We can say, well, okay, were Democrats had this many Republicans that have this? I mean, how what’s the Republican advantage that came out of all this and all of the net advantages or Republican advantages because they have so much room to grow.

Right. And so, yeah, exactly. And so it’s, it’s an advantage to Republicans within these counties of between 50 3080 8,000 votes. Okay. So we say, okay, you know, there’s support at least for the, at least for part of the story here, Republicans are making gains among Hispanics, but it’s not because Democrats necessarily are showing some sort of weakness with Hispanics.

It’s really about the fact that, uh, Republicans are probably one have more Hispanics that they can start talking to for the first time and mobilizing. And they’re really investing in the effort. They’re finding more voters, but I think this kind of collides with another story in Texas politics, which is about, you know, the role of the cities and the suburbs in, in sort of the political competition here and especially the increase in competition in the suburbs.

So if we look at either, you know, the six core urban counties, the big six, where, you know, Austin, Dallas and Houston, San Antonio, El Paso are, and the counties that we can define a suburb. We see the opposite pattern. Now, again, this is sort of what we’re talking about 2016 and 2018, right? The frame matters well on the frame matters, but there’s nothing Christmassy.

The frame matters and it’s like, and the numbers also should matter. Right? So the frames in this case, we look, we say, you know how many I know it’s okay, that’s good. How do we, you know, how, how much, uh, what is the percent increase in the Republican votes in the big six counties? Will they increase their vote between 2016 and 2020 by about just under 24% Democrats by 32%.

A little bit more for the Democrats and the suburbs Republicans increase it by just under 30 to the Democrats by just under 56%. So a much bigger increase. Now, if you take these into raw votes and add them up, what is the democratic advantage out of these gains and voters? Well, in the big six it’s 342,000 votes, a little bit more in the suburban counties.

It’s another 45,000. So before we were talking about the Republican gain and votes, because of their increased performance in the RGV, we’re talking about 50,000 to 80,000 vote Republic. Gain here when we talk about democratic voters and their increasing competitiveness in the cities, not in the cities, but they’re increasing turnout in the cities and they’re increasing competitiveness in the suburbs.

We’re talking about a democratic vote share of. 400,000 votes. So net really, when we’re talking about what’s been going on in Texas politics and the dynamism here, if we focus on the Hispanics, it sort of fits into this again, a story, isn’t it, it’s interesting to people, but it’s not really the whole picture.

And when we look at the broader sort of, when we think about what’s most, you know, where are the competition points in Texas? We’d say. The emerging Hispanic electorate, which is, you know, going to be a majority, certainly in the population soon enough and will increase their share in the electorate. We’re talking about turnout in the cities and the role of sort of cities and the broader state, you know, kind of political constellation.

And we’re talking about competition in the suburbs. And when you look at all three of those things at the same time, even if Donald. Had a, had a good 2020 in the RGV. And even if you know, the Republicans, you had a good showing in Hispanic counties, the story is so much the same, which is the Democrats are picking up a ton of votes in the cities and the suburbs.

And actually that’s kind of the story in some total. So this is really crazy, you know, I think raises some questions about choices and sort of the coverage. And as you said, the framing of this race, As we’re going through this again, and we’ve talked about it and I’m thinking about, you know, there’s a grossly oversimplified way of thinking about this, but it, you know, it does remind me of the discussion that we’ve been having, about how parties during campaigns try to shape, you know, the issue agenda to comparative advantage.

They also try to shape media coverage to comparative advantage. So when we look at these numbers, it shouldn’t be surprising that when you talk to. You know, a lot of people that are trying to, you know, seed coverage of 20, 22 people that lean to the right, want to talk about gains among Hispanics, all things being equal, people that leaned to the left want to talk about gains in the suburbs and the increasing shift to the cities.

Now what’s great. I think about having the state and we’ll we’ll post the state on the. You know, we’re going to put together a post on this, but given that we’ve got some other things going on and maybe an ad, just some of these tables to a quick post when we post the podcast. Yeah. So if you, if you heard this podcast on one of the platforms on Spotify, um, I guess, I guess we’re still on Spotify.

I think we are apple podcast, Stitcher, et cetera. If you go to our website at the Texas politics project at Texas politics dot U, texas.edu, and go to the blog section, what we’ll do is we’ll put together a post that has a link to the podcast and has some of these tables. So you can look at some of the data.

You don’t think they, it at all. My recitation. No, I, well, I think I’m sure everybody was taking notes. They’re going to, they’re going to listen repeatedly. Um, but you could also just hit pause right now, go to the website and then go back and listen again and then follow along. Um, uh, that’s that’s uh, actually an educator.

There you go. You know, we’ll, uh, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll promote this that way. Um, but yeah. You know, and, and it really does, you know, under line, the point to which, you know, news coverage is, you know, to be, you know, a gross social scientists, you know, indogenous to the campaigns. Right, right. And the, you know, you, and you’ve been saying this a lot.

I mean, I think you’ve, you know, you sort of made the argument that the following of the storyline is actually something shaping campaigns. Yeah. I mean, I think there’s, and maybe even political. Yeah, I think there’s two ways. This story really, you know, I think it helps Republicans in a couple of ways. You know, I have to be careful exactly how I phrase this.

Um, but first and foremost, I mean, if Democrats and Republicans to a large extent are looking to turn out low and lower propensity, Hispanic voters, what I mean by that is just Hispanic voters who are not as likely to vote. Right. As opposed to say, you know, someone who votes every time and you know, again, the campaigns know who those people are.

Right. Right. Well then ultimately. You know, what would you know about these people is that their attachment to politics is probably relatively low. And so if the media coverage that they’re hearing, you know, all the time is, you know, and then the Callan monitor or whatever is, oh, you know, Republicans are making gains among Hispanics in south Texas or Republicans have, and this is something that has gone on, there’s a story about the Republicans have gotten, uh, Hispanics to run, uh, in the Republican primaries for multiple hundred lower level offices in and around the region.

Well then, you know, you don’t really know much about it, then that shapes kind of, what’s your, what’s your, what’s your status quo, starting point is on this, which is you say, well, I don’t really know much about politics, but I hear, uh, Republicans are making, you know, really making inroads with Hispanic staff, right?

So it softens the ground for when the campaigns actually eventually make the contact with these voters. And so this story in and of itself, Pushing along the narrative that actually helps the campaigns achieve their goal, which is to turn out these low again, low propensity Hispanics who might be amenable to the message.

Right. And then I think, you know, for the rest of the electorate again, because I saying this is a small share, it’s never bad to have a Republican candidate, uh, in the Rio Grande valley or along the border, talking about immigration and border security and beaming those messages back up to midnight. And back to east, Texas and back to Collin county.

Totally fine. And so it really, it solves both, both issues at once, which is it mobilizes, you know, your core constituencies, but also allows you to kind of push along this narrative that no, you know, we’re, we’re here for you. Yeah. Although there’s a lot of big, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of funny, big picture implications to looking at all these, in terms of the big, the big narrative arcs that we’re being asked to to consider here.

I mean, you know, as you look at. Notable, but not huge democratic advantages. I mean, obviously big democratic advantages in the big six urban areas. There’s not no thing about that, but especially in the suburban number, you know, I mean about, uh, you know, about a five figure, you know, mid five figure advance, um, for the Democrats in that 20 16, 20 20 figure about, you know, just shut, you know, shy of 46,000 votes.

You look at the numbers that the Republicans are gaining again. Five figures. Uh, when you look at those Hispanic gains, those gains among Hispanics in the different population share cuts. I mean, it really does underline the sense to which there are shifts going on in Texas. And everybody wants to talk about the shifts and predict what they are, but even more, I think.

Tellingly make assumptions or claims about the pace of those shifts. This is happening slowly, right. But both, you know, w whether you want to tell a story about Republicans making gains among Hispanics, or you want to tell a story about Democrats, you know, taking over the suburbs, both of those. Are very incremental things going on right now.

I’m not saying they don’t matter, but neither one of these is the Rosetta stone to understanding multidimensional change in Texas politics right now and in elections. Yeah, I totally agree. There are two points I want to follow up on that. Let’s see if I can remember them. I mean, the first is something that I’ve said before.

This is really important, which is, you know, what hasn’t changed here is the fact that Texas is just a much more competitive place than it was 10 years ago. And I think that’s what the data tells you, you know, you can kind of look at, you know, you can, everyone is going to pick on again, campaigns in particular are going to pick out a stat or a figure or some aspect of, you know, some number of the last end elections to kind of make the claim that this is what’s really going on, but what’s really going on is more competitive electoral environment.

The fact is if it weren’t a more competitive electoral investment, You wouldn’t see the Republican shift in strategy. That’s now focusing on what in and of itself is actually a relatively small share of the margins, right? Not marginal, but I mean, I would say not, but not, not an, you know, it’s, it’s a complimentary coalition to the, to the major part of the coalition.

So one, I mean, in some sense, you know, their actions and the data points to the fact that the real story is what the story was before, which is, you know, Texas is still more competitive than it has been. Is it less competitive because. Certainly, but do we feel like, you know, Greg Abbott is gonna have a harder election now that he had in 2018?

Certainly that goes without saying the other thing I want to add, you know, you mentioned this whole trajectory piece of this, you know, this is like a little kind of, I think I should get close to the end here. And this is where it’s perfect to bring in social science. Again, you can’t draw a trend line through two points.

Right? Right. And if anything, if you’re looking back at the last few elections and thinking about the last three points, last four points last four, five weeks. What you’re seeing is democratic gain democratic gain, democratic gain, democratic gain. And now. Smaller democratic gain. And so, number one, it’s not even, there’s not a line that points in the direction of, you know, this is, you know, things are trending in the Republican regiment.

Look, Republicans are still the, you know, the, you know, the, the majority party in the state, but there’s nothing about the 2020 election that said. Um, you know, the Democrats after gaining for election cycle after election cycle, they’ve hit the ceiling. Now we’re going in the opposite direction. If anything is said, well, the games are still there.

They’re just a little bit slower. Republicans are counter mobilizing as you would expect. And so now the rate of change is a little bit slower, but even here, we’re talking at a very slow rate of change and we actually don’t have the data to say, oh, this is actually a trend now. Right. And, and you know, that just gets you in being that very specific piece about Republicans and Hispanics in Texas.

And that brings you to. You know, the, the competition between the parties and. There the, the comparison or the comparative levels of resources that have, are very different in terms of trying to mobilize and cope with this situation and these fundamentals, I say, you know, resources and complex. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, you know, I try, you know, I guess when I’m in a nicer mood, I think of competence is one of the resource buckets. So talking about right. There are different buckets of resources, you know, to be fair. So, you know, and, and again, I mean, this isn’t the downplay, the importance of the Hispanic vote or the Hispanic electorate, if anything, I think part of the implication of this is that it’s that much more important, but it looks very different it’s yet, you know, one of things I like about the way you sorted this data out is that it’s.

It’s a different. Take on what has become one of the hoariest of cliches and that’s H a R I E S T. Okay. Thanks, Mr. Rogan about the Hispanic vote, which is, you know, it’s very, you know, et cetera, genius. It’s not monolithic, it’s not, and you have to look at that in, in a lot of different dimensions, you know, and I think, you know, again, for a pendant that there probably is something about the comparatively rural nature.

Of those smaller counties, um, that is playing into Hispanic voter rights, voter behavior and, and political identification, you know, and I think, and you raised it. I mean, we need to get out of that as I’ll say, that’s kind of the next thing I think I’m going to look at here, which is to say, you know, we can look at the new census data and we can actually see over this time period, not only look at where the growth was, but where the relative has spent.

Growth in the population is, cause my guess would be that because most of the growth in Texas as population is taking place in the urban and suburban areas, whether through, you know, migration, births, deaths, et cetera. My guess is is that if most of that population in Texas growth growth in Texas is being driven by non white populations, which we know it is 95%.

Most of the population growth we’re talking about. And a lot of these centers were Democrats are doing better, is also going to be driven by the nonwhite population. Right. So, which is again, which has a, I don’t have this data here. It’s a little unfortunate, but that would actually be. Directly in the opposite direction of the conclusion being drawn from the RGV and other much more we’re all parts of the state.

Yeah, I think that’s, yeah, I suspect that. That is your idea. I want to say that was your idea. Well, I’m getting to it, but nonetheless, you know, uh, you know, who knows, who has, what ideas in this, in this relationship? Um, so I think with the. We’re going to wind it up and you know, if you’ve made it this far in the podcast, we’ll give you an Easter egg.

By the time we have another podcast out, we’ll have new polling data for you to look at from a new university of Texas, Texas politics, project poll. So keep an eye out. Not sure exactly when we’ll roll that out, but certainly by the next time you, you listened to one of these, um, we’ll be talking about new data.

So with that, thanks to Josh. Uh, thanks to our crew in the audio studio here in the liberal arts development studio in the college of liberal arts at the university of Texas. Thanks to you for listening. And again, remember Texas politics, Texas politics.utexas.edu. To find more of the data we’re talking about and to find poll results next.

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