July 21st, 2020 – Second Reading Podcast

[0:00:00 Speaker 0] 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 raised her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room? Hello, And welcome back to the second reading podcast for the week of July 20th. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. And, um, again, joined today by Josh Blank, research director of the very same Texas Politics Project. Josh, how are we on this week of the pandemic? You know, I guess I e I don’t know. I don’t know how to say anything other than okay, I guess. Do you and find better than many could be better. Um, well, today we want to talk about partisan politics and and the political system a bit mawr. And you know, this podcast often talks about those things quite a lot, but in the midst of the pandemic and all the unusual circumstances, we have really done a ton of that kind of business as usual. Uh, this, you know, for the last couple of months, really, since we’ve been doing this again, it’s funny, because on the one hand, there’s all these things that we’d almost say are non political, and yet it’s almost like everything’s political. And so I mean, we’ve the mere politics that we normally talk about has been pushed aside for, like the global pandemic economic crisis, race politics we have been talking about. Yes, it has a little bit of the feel, and not that electoral politics or not important, but in terms of some of them or into the weeds. Uh, in an Internet, seeing things that we often talk about, the very detailed in her coalitional politics and and deep reads of what might be going on and what might be happening. You know, the the sense of overall structural crisis seems to make that feel a little bit like the deck chairs on the Titanic. That said, um, today we, uh, we want to return to electoral politics a bit and we we flagged some of this last year. I mean, we recorded the last podcast on the day of the runoff elections. And this is one of those, you know, pandemic quarantine time things. I mean, it feels to me like that election was a month ago. It felt that way at the end of last week. You know, uh, you know, as I as I was thinking about what we should talk about today, I was like, Yeah, I guess I guess that’s only been a week and we never did get back to that. Although we had written about it a bit and that could be just the subject, the experience of us talking about it a lot. So let’s talk about the election and and we want to really focus at least the beginning on three U. S. Senate race the the race for the Democratic nomination, which had come down to a runoff between MJ Hager or actually MJ Hagar, Comptroller Hager, MJ Hagar. I have to keep reminding myself who beat Royce West in the Runoff and MJ Hagar Waas. There is, um, somebody’s not served in statewide office, but had run as a candidate in 2018 and a congressional race in which she came relatively close but failed to unseat, uh, multi term Republican congressman and John Carter in the area north of Boston. Um, Royce West, multi term Democratic state senator from the Dallas area. Um, and the outcome was much closer than people expected. Haeger. With a little over 52% of the vote, almost 500,000 votes. 498,000. Odd West finished with 47.9% about 457 and a half 1000 votes, you know, So total votes in that in that run off will put at 9. 55 7. 35 put a pin in that and come back to it. Um, but this has been a nod race that for all its importance And of course, the winner in this race will now be the Democratic candidate to face, uh, incumbent John Cornyn, who is pretty favored going into this. Um, but the backdrop of this race is you know, this has been kind of the dog that didn’t bark for much of the campaign, in the sense that as important as it is, it really didn’t get a lot of attention. Well, yeah, I mean, I think, Well, I mean, he says, get a lot of attention from the public. It got a lot of attention from elected officials, and it got a lot of attention, I think from, you know, the national party organizations and sort of groups that are really focused on electoral politics. But in some ways, I mean, it’s kind of funny now. I mean, you sort of said maybe you did this on purpose, but the conversation we had at the top here kind of reflects what happened to this race. You had a bunch of Democrats jump into the race early and usually what you could find, E means. I’ve said this to other people, too, is you know, they say, you know, people call us all the time from various news outlets said, Well, how competitive is Texas? How competitive is that center race? And I think I agree with you, you know corn and is still the favorite. But I always say, You know, we’ll look at what the candidates are doing, and ultimately this Democrat is race to be. The Democratic nominee originally had I believe 11 candidates in the field and really, you know, for the most part, I would say, You know, there’s a couple, couple odd ones in there but for the most part, pretty high quality candidates. But then that created the part of the challenge, which was, you know, how do you separate yourself in a field of 11 candidates where, you know, four or five of them could end up being the nominee when it started and then throw into that, you know, a national political environment that’s very noisy and makes it very difficult to focus on, you know, even as localized a race as a states as a Senate race, right, but then combined. On top of that, the pandemic. You have a weird election calendar. You have a bunch of candidates who are trying their best in a huge state with a bunch of expensive media markets to introduce themselves to voters. And it’s always a challenge for Democrats. But I would say it was an even bigger challenge this time. Well, no, no, no. When, while there were a lot of talented candidates in that race, there was nobody with the possible exception of you know former congressman and gubernatorial candidate Chris Bell that had name Y statewide name recognition. Your nobody who is better or core or one of the Castros, right? Ultimately. So you know, as we look at the outcome of this race and you look at the the county well, before we get to the details, I guess I mean, you know, So it turned out that, given all that, M. J Heger was largely seen as the favorite for much of that race. In part because of that that run against against John Carter and in part because fairly early, she was, You know, she gained a lot of outside support, most importantly from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The you know, national level campaign packed, directed by, you know, with lots of money to direct money into Senate races. And yet, if you look at those totals in the end, that race wound up being, you know, much closer than what polling there was suggested. It might be, though, you know, all along, you know, is a function of the lack of attention to the race. There were huge numbers of undecideds and huge numbers of people that didn’t know who either candidate was and by huge numbers. You know, in our June poll, we were still in the range of 50% of people saying they didn’t have either favorable or unfavorable view of each candidate. So when you look at the outcome, you know, it was less lopsided than I think people expected. And so we’re all left kind of searching for what? The cause of that or hypothesizing about what the cause of that is, given the limitations on the data that we’re gonna have, right? I mean, I think, you know, ultimately, in most things, expectations are so important about evaluating in reality. And Hager had basically entered the race basically with a strategy that seemed to focus on the didn’t really try to elevate the idea that she was the front runner. Ultimately, she didn’t focus too much on her Democratic primary opponents until, really, she got into the run off with West and really only at the end of that she had been focusing on corn from the beginning, as if she was the Democratic nominee. She got endorsement and money from you, said the DSCC. This or the National Democratic Organization trying to elect Democratic senators early on, much to the chagrin of the other 10 people in the race. Uh, so then you have to weigh sort of that sort of expectations against, you know, the reality of, ah, almost split decision runoff. But then I also find, you know, this is certainly we’ve been talking about is you also have to balance that against the fact that it was a run off in the middle of July. And though it had high turnout for a runoff, which we’ll get to, it’s really not a large share of voters. I mean, we’re really talking about a sliver of the electorate making this decision, and we’re really talking about, you know, each candidates ability to mobilize again a very small share of democratic voters. Ultimately, I mean, in the end, you know, for all the you know, there was a lot of time, you know, look relative to other run offs is you say turnout was high, right? Surprised what we mean by high turnout is five, about 5% I think was the final radio. Five plus percent of total registered voters. Right? Right. Which puts you again, which you know again for Texas, normally a low turnout state. Most people who voted in a Democratic runoff since 1990 right? So I mean, it’s a lot of people for a Texas runoff, but Texas run offs or low turnout affairs? And I think you know, if anything, you know, the one thing I think that you know you have to balance here is you know, there’s a desire to sort of say, Boy, you know, where did Hager perform? Well, you know what? She performed well around Travis County in the urban centers, you know, more West. You know, in West Texas, you know, West performs, you know, not surprisingly well, but I’m sorry I just West performed well, unsurprisingly, in Dallas is his home political base, which is kind of always expected, but also performed really well in in Harris County, which was a bit of a surprise, I think. Well, you know, I would I would disagree with that. I mean, to the extent that I wasn’t that so I actually think that one of the reasons he didn’t do better waas that he didn’t perform better in Harris County. I mean, he he won relatively narrowly But if you look at the you know and this gets, though, I mean one of the things that’s interesting about this race and points to some of the you know, the underlying kind of structural factors brewing in the electorate at large and particularly the Democratic Party is that if you look at the county level map, West did best in the counties by and large, larger black populations. Even allowing for the fact that he did, he was going to do well in North Texas, in the DFW area where he’s more well known, he has a political base. He has access to political machinery, all of those things. But it’s really striking to see, you know, if you look at the map of just who won what counties, It’s just a swath of North and East Texas makes up the vast majority of where West one and got most of his boats, and I think you know, there’s still kind of an open question to me, You know that. You know, you know, we’ll see about just how the rest of the Democratic Party shook out. I mean, ah, lot of attention to the fact that you know, Hager, Hagar. One. The counties where there’s the most attention, you know, from both the outside and in the internal politics, the Democratic Party. And that is, you know, she won all of the majority. You know, most of the majority Latino counties or Latino county. The largest numbers of the county is the largest numbers of Latinos. Um, you know, But, you know, like, what did the white You know what we’re white liberals really thinking here in terms of how they digested Hager’s Hager’s image? Um, the way that she deployed her, you know, um, military veteran, you know, White Mom, image and I. You know, I think there are some some sensitive but very important questions that air lurking there as we watch this campaign go forward. And it began to surface it at the end of the campaign. And that final half hour, and maybe it was in the final. But the the final televised, I think, half hour debate that Western Hager did. They got the Hagar did. They got the most that half hour because they aired out the negative images of the other. And, you know, one of those points that rest way that West raised was that hey, Guard voted in the 2016 Republican primary and she never did really given answer to that very well to my mind. I mean, other than some convoluted, it was a protest vote for Carly Fiorina, which really kind of doesn’t make any sense, but at any at any rate, you know, that is kind of brewing here. And I think the question is or one of the questions is, you know, Hagar presented as one of a kind of ideal model of candidate that was very prominent in the 2018 election. That is, um, non political, professional military background, female white mom. And that, you know, was, you know, kind of a very popular models, shall we say, in 2018, particularly for running and Competitive Transitional District’s or States District’s, like the Carter District, um, states theoretically, like Texas. Now, with the pandemic going on it and a market perhaps for more government expertise and the post George Floyd racial environment is that model Still, given the factors in the Democratic coalition, is that model still model for the moment? And well, I don’t want and I go even further than that. I’m not even sure it’s the model for Texas. I mean, when I think about, you know, I have to think a little bit more deeply about the House seats that flipped here in 2018 from Republican to Democrat. But when I think about, you know, the congressional seats that flipped from Republican to Democrat, it wasn’t the Democrats were running, you know, basically a bunch of moderate to center left, you know, veteran white female mobs, right? I mean, technically, you know, I think that was I mean, this has been an ongoing. I mean, there’s a couple different conversations that intersect in interesting way, right? I mean, one. This lines up with the Democratic choice for the presidential nominee. There’s a question going into the Democratic primary here in Texas, the original one about, you know, essentially does. Does Texas become more competitive with with someone like a Joe Biden at the head of the ticket or someone like Bernie Sanders? And that’s purely based on ideology? And it does dovetail with what you’re saying here. You know a desire for more robust government response versus this idea of, you know, can you attract away basically moderate white voters from the Republican Party to make Democratic Party more competitive in Texas. But this has been. But this dovetails again, I think, with an ongoing conversation about what is what is the path that the Democrats follow to get out of the political wilderness here. By which I mean they haven’t won a statewide race in over 20 years there, you know Klein at potentially, you know, being even with the number with Republicans and the number of seats in the State House. But they’re not gonna have a majority of, uh, state Senate seats. They’re not gonna have a majority of the congressional seats, so they’re trying to get competitive. And there’s been this ongoing discussion of, you know, does tech just do. Does the Texas Democratic Party become more competitive by riding a way of of increased turnout among young Texas voters who by and large, are non white? And are you more progressive, ideologically and our and our, you know? And then, secondarily, there’s this other sort of line where he says No, you know the text Democratic Party becomes more competitive once they start appealing to moderate white voters better and part of the ideas they can’t lose as badly as they’re losing with white voters and still be competitive well and again, this is a conversation that’s been going on in Texas for, you know, a very long time. Probably, You know, you know, it commenced almost the moment that the, you know, the Democrats sort of lost, you know, their hold on the state and has been ongoing. But you know that, you know, how does that discussion match? This shifts in the underlying terrain. So let’s let’s talk a little bit about that. I mean, all of these air questions then that apply not just to the, you know, to the to the West, Hagar to the Hagar, Corn and Race, or even to the all those congressional races there. The backdrop for that, but also this larger question is just how competitive is. Texas is really kind of. This is kind of the how you sustain that competition of the conversation we’re having so far. But I mean, let’s talk a little bit before we go about what the terrain looks like. I mean, the you know, obviously the most national interest is in the presidential race. You know, as we see a national trend line in which Biden seems to be leading fairly consistently if I think, you know, probably views deceptively in national polling. Um, but there’s also been attention to, you know, pulling in the state that shows that state chose that race. Let’s put it that way. You know, a single digit race and, you know, with with Trump leading most polls other than you know and out, you know what? I would consider an outlier here and there. Um, you know, how do you You know? I mean, So I You know the question I Because you know what is one’s expectation of the presidential race, and how would we know at this point? And, you know, I think you know, one point is that you’re not going to know at this point, right? Well, you can’t. I mean, I think in assessing Texas’s competitiveness, there’s there’s two sides to that coin. I mean, there’s no doubt that Texas has become more competitive over time is the, You know, the electoral results of the top of the ticket have gotten tighter. We saw Greg Abbott beat Wendy Davis by about 20 points in 2014. We saw Donald Trump Hillary Clinton by about nine points in 2016. We saw Ted Cruz beat better Iraq by about 2.5 points in 2018. Now, does this mean we’re on, you know, basically a march towards Democratic victories in Texas? No, but I think it would be hard to look around. Look at those results. Look at the congressional results. Look at what happened in the Statehouse, uh, in 2018 and say Texas isn’t Mawr competitive than it was five or six years ago. But in terms of answering this question about whether Texas is gonna be competitive in the 2020 presidential election, I think you really have to look to see whether the candidates themselves perceive it that way. And if they perceive it is worth spending money and their time in over other states, or in addition to other states that are generally considered, you know, essential to to clinching the nomination states like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin. So, ultimately, that’s I mean, you know, presidential contests are really the fought out over a handful of states, and Texas hasn’t really. I don’t think they’ve moved into that column yet both because one a Democrat hasn’t Democrats haven’t had that really much success here statewide to speak of, except for doing less bad. But also, it’s a really expensive proposition. And unless both can media markets lots of things you know with lots of places, you have to spend money, right? So So this Biden is going to decide to do that. You know, I just don’t I’ve been saying they’re seating Texas Thio Donald Trump, but I think you know, they’re probably other states that they would start adding before they had Texas Well and I had it. And I think the footnote to that is, you know that you know, every time a Democratic campaign invest anything in Texas for the lot for this cycle, really, for the last couple of cycles, you know, it’s almost worth it to them. Thio, do you know some low six figure ad buy or or investment? Because it generates this big discussion, this big media discussion and you know, I mean, the idea is probably to try to at least bait the other side into making sure that they you know, the Republicans into making sure that they continue to spend money. And so you know there is another. There’s a sub tactical level is people watch what’s going on there. And I think you know is frankly, as long as the press falls for that or some big faction of the political press falls for that and headlines, the BIS Democratic campaigns will continue to do that, you know, as a za long, as long as it fits into that that strategy And I think one of the you know, But and then one of the interesting things. Here’s how you know, even even if we stay on the line of that, you know that you sketched out of you know where the vote totals sort of keep going down. And there’s, you know, the top of the ballot margin continues to shrink, you know, I mean, two things about that one is that there are cross currents there that the same year that, uh, Ted Cruz won by 2.5 points over Baidoa Rourke. Greg Abbott won by 14. Mhm. Um, now there was some bleeding out below him in some of those races where people that were used toe winning by double figures, you know, one by only single figures. But there’s a lot of mixture there. But, I mean, I think you know, then if we think, though about the linkage without making big assumptions about coat tails but making some extrapolations about what it means for turnout If a Democrat was toe Luke, if Joe Biden used to make it specific is toe lose, say he loses by somewhere between D. O Rourke margin of 2.5 and the Clinton margin of 8.5, where he which I think is pretty plausible that this would give a five. Yeah, you know, if you’re in there, you know, But if he so, you know, take your five, you know, split the difference. I think you kind of have to assume. And I think the people looking at this right now, you know, and again, it’s just prognosticating right now. But, you know, you’re not just making it up. If you look at, you know, the kind of candidates that came out of the run offs. If you look at what the campaign finance patterns look like, if you look at, you know, the competitive districts in the state of the legislative and congressional district. And because, like, you know, Jeff Blaylock has been doing this. Others you know Blaylock is ah runs a website called Texas in service called Texas Election Source. Um, you know, it’s plausible. I mean, I think you’re seeing a general sense that even if the margin shrinks like that at the presidential level, you’ll see another cycle with Democratic gains, you know, and you know, whether that’s some kind of an earthquake or not. I mean, I kind of doubt it, but I also think there’s still a lot of you know, there’s still a lot of water to flow under the bridge before we actually get to the election. And so, you know, But but But I think you know that is the nuance of thinking about text more competitive. I think that, you know, if you look if you focus on one level or you know, one set of races, you kind of miss the overall systemic evolution that’s going on here. Yeah, and I would say it goes both ways. I mean, you know, I think in 2018 there was a bit of, ah, Rush Tau to sort of Crown o Rourke, with all the success that Democrats enjoyed in that race and again relative to past failures. But that included, you know, picking up a number of statehouse seats, picking up some congressional seats again, decreasing the margin by which Republicans? One really at various levels on the ballot. I always feel like, but there are other asked, You’re not going to say something bad about bitter or car you? No. Okay, I don’t want the I don’t need the hate mail. Um, I shouldn’t say bad. Less than during. You know, I was nothing less than adoring about beta or work, are you? I was going to say I’ve said more than enough. The things less than adoring about that worked at this point. So that’s not the point of this. But I mean, the point I wanted to make was, you know, better was a really strong candidate. I think you know, you brought up the Greg Abbott margin against Lupe Valdez, and you could see what difference a well resourced, really honest. Like a high quality candidate, uh, you know, can do relative to someone who really, you know, probably shouldn’t have been running statewide. To be fair, Um, you know, there’s a difference there ultimately, but also, the other thing is, it’s a different Democrat. I mean, when I think about the you know, this question about competitiveness in Texas, it’s also a different Democratic party. And you you brought this up a couple times. This is stuck with me to, you know, the except, I mean, the idea of an M J Heger running for a seat, failing and then turning around and running again right away. The fact that you know a guy like Mike Segal, who came within five points of representative McCaul runs again doesn’t even make it through the Democratic runoff because someone else came in who wanted to take on that seat. I mean, what you’re seeing there is both, you know, Democratic candidates again committed to turning seats, which is important because ultimately you run an election. You may fail but doesn’t doesn’t even just to make sure you were right doesn’t avoid a runoff with Siegel. Well, no protest. Gandhi was in the runoff and then beats and then beat Siegel in the runoff. He doesn’t avoid the rough, but then British Gandhi won the runoff, right? And now he’s running against McCall. I believe you can check that, but the main, you know. But the point here is that the idea of someone like, you know, again, a Siegel going running in a congressional seat, making all these contacts, building up his voter list and then actually doing it again almost immediately is something that Democrats could account on. And I think, to the extent is Muchas Texas Democrats benefited from a rocks candidacy, which they did in spades. The other side of it is the fact that Iraq benefited from Democrats actually competing in most State House, most state Senate seats, all the congressional seats. There were campaigns on the ground, and all these counties that better, better work may have visited 254 counties, but he couldn’t visit them all at once. And so when we get too far on this, I just want a flag single one that oh single did win it. Okay, my bad. But even so, that’s even better for the argument that I’ll say right, which is, well, great. It’s even. That’s even better than what I thought. No, but that’s the point that But you have a strong, a strong candidate comes back and wins again, and now he’s gonna basically do something that he’s done before. It makes him a stronger candidate, right? And that’s something that Democrats couldn’t count on really for a long time that they can now. And it makes the party more competitive, even absence. You know, the presidential level stuff. We all focus on it. I just just one thing I wanna say about the presidential races. You know, Joe Biden doesn’t need to win Texas to become president, But Donald Trump can’t lose Texas. So there’s a bit of an asymmetry here in terms of how each would approach the race, how the state, you know and how the state party would approach it. And they’re just again. It’s not exactly the same thing. Where is, you know, a state like Wisconsin or Michigan? They’re both looking at that thinking. I need to win this state toe, win the president, and that’s the big difference. I think in terms of thinking about competitiveness, yes, um, yeah, and I think you know, we’ve talked. I mean to the to the point about you know who’s running for what And J. Hagar moving up the Senate race and Siegel success. You know, this is You know, for years Democrats have talked about how they don’t have a deep enough bench, the bench is getting deeper and whether people will you know what decisions people make in that context going forward. Um, that’s another facet of the competitiveness, you know, is we’ve, you know, for years we’ve talked about, you know, what the Democrats lacked in terms of their ability to become competitive and candidate recruitment was one of the was a big factor, and, you know, depends. You know, we’ll see how long it takes for that to really cycled through. I think we’re already seen some of the benefits of better candidate recruitment and just MAWR candidates, you know, competing for more races. Um, that’s that’s been contributing toe all that. I think we’re gonna wind it up there. Uh, we will be back next week, thanks to Josh, thanks to our crew in the liberal arts development studio at the University of Texas at Austin, and we will be back next week. Second reading Podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.