July 28th, 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.

[0:00:22 Speaker 1] 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?

[0:00:32 Speaker 0] Hello and welcome to the second reading podcast for the week of July 27th. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, And I’m joined again today by my colleague Josh Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project. How we doing, Josh?

[0:00:52 Speaker 1] Doing pretty alright, I guess that’s all I could ever say. I just There always has to be, and I guess at the end, because I say it and then I think I am. I I guess so.

[0:01:01 Speaker 0] Well, it’s hard to differentiate at this point in the environment, so So let’s let’s jump into. We wanna talk about a couple of things today. We wanna talk a little bit about attitudes on Confederate memorials and monuments, which has been intermittently in the news and the public discussion, and then talk a little bit about an executive order that, uh, Governor Abbott issued yesterday regarding voting in elections for the general election. Um, and some some changes that were sort of long, one long promised, and the other, I think maybe a little bit surprising on male and voting, but we’ll get to that. So, first Confederate monuments, um, we have, ah, piece that Josh and I wrote that we posted on the on the Texas Politics Project website today or yesterday, I guess. And, um, you know, that looked into data that we’ve collected on attitudes towards what to do with these monuments. And, you know, this has been a a new intermittent issue over, you know, really, over several years. I think it really, you know, kind of reached a You know, it’s first recent crescendo after the Charlottesville protests and counter protests around the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlotte in a Charlottesville park. Um, you know, responses to that that that actually, in response to various, uh, protests and actions that were taken in the wake of of those protests. Um, closer to home, you t remove UT Austin removed several statute, uh, including one of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, but also a few others, including Woodrow Wilson, Um, whose racial attitudes have long been known and long being controversial. In some ways, you t was ahead of the curve on that one. To the extent that Princeton very recently announced they’d be renaming the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton. Um, so this has been kind of brewing for a while and and, you know, we tried to get it. This with a survey item that created, like, a range of options On what, first, the UT Texas Texas Tribune poll than more recently on the pole that we did for the Texas politics project.

[0:03:28 Speaker 1] Right. Uh, so the question that we use I mean, just to lay this out. And, you know, one of the things I think is always important is, you know, sometimes things were simple and we could just say you favor or you oppose something, and sometimes things are more complicated. And ultimately, at the time that we created this question, I think we huge towards allowing a little bit more diversity of opinion thing just basically removed. The monuments keep them there because the discussion was still forming, and I think it’s a good idea. So we asked people which of the following his closest to your opinion regarding Confederate statues and monuments on public property. So again, we’re talking about, you know, in places like the Capitol, other sort of public spaces and therefore options. They should be removed from public view. They should be moved to a museum or other site where they could present it in a historical context. They should remain where they are, with historical context provided, or they should remain where they are unchanged. And then, of course, people could say they don’t know where they don’t have an opinion. But the idea here is that we’re allowing people to different points of distinction between keeping the statues and removing them. So if you wanna keep the statues, the question is, do you keep them and just leave them alone or you keep them and add additional information? If you want the statues removed, you know, basically, should they be removed and thrown into the garbage heap or wherever or melted down. Or should they be moved somewhere else where they could be perfectly a museum and where they could be put in again, a broader historical context about slavery, the civil War, etcetera?

[0:04:47 Speaker 0] Yeah. And in some ways, I mean, you know, we were, you know, joking recently. If one can joke in the context of this topic you know, about, you know, one of those gradations, like, you know, adding context, I mean what it really means. But that was something that people were discussing at the time. And then, you know, you go ahead.

[0:05:09 Speaker 1] What does that say? I mean, that’s a reflection of the discussion, and you brought up sort of, You know, I mean, what’s interesting is these These statues have existed on public property for a long time, though. Is many point out? Not as long as you might think, right? I mean, a lot of these were erected and basically during the civil rights movement, which should give you some indication about their purpose. Um, but ultimately, you know, the, you know, the violence that took place in Charlottenburg in particular, started a discussion where people had to start to really assess. Wait, why are we defending these statues? And so that ultimately sort of thes gradations of opinion started to appear when people say, Well, no, no, look, I mean, I understand the statues have problems, but the solution is not to remove them. It’s to actually explain the history more now. Ultimately, it’s not our job to say whether that’s a good argument or not. But that was the argument that people were making at the time, and ultimately, you know, it was worth sort of allowing for gradations. I think in the arguments through on the other side to which is, you know, there’s sort of this overlapping discussion, you know, setting, let’s say for the moment, setting aside the symbols and the message is that these statues said to people, there’s another discussion that is more or less relevant, depend on who you are about you know what role they play in our understanding of history. And we allow that on both sides so that for some people who don’t think that maybe the statue should be on public property, they can still acknowledge that the civil war was part of US history, and these could be could take, you know, basically placed in a museum and be helpful for people to understand. For people who are may be less inclined to remove the statues that allows them to basically be a little bit less, uh, you know, uncompromising in their view and acknowledging that maybe there could be some more information placed with these statues to make it more palatable to people. Potentially, that was the discussion we were facing the time, at least.

[0:06:55 Speaker 0] Yeah, and I’m thinking a lot of the you know, I’m just imagining what, uh, committee meetings to settle on. What that context relation contextual ization would be what the you know, writing the clarification, the quote unquote clarification plaque by committee. But at any rate, um, we’ll get a doctor. There’s a lot

[0:07:15 Speaker 1] of issues here. Let’s say there’s a saying that you know, if you look back at your old work and you don’t cringe a little bit, you haven’t grown. And not that this question was wrong, but ultimately looking at it again with another three years and a further discussion, it’s very easy for us to say, Well, wait, what kind of historical context are we Even thinking about here or are people thinking about? That’s an open question anyway.

[0:07:34 Speaker 0] Yeah, and I do want to kind of sketch out a little bit just for another be kind of the history of ah, lot of the monuments were talking about There were minute, you know, some that were erected during the more modern civil rights movement. So, for example, the, uh, we’ll talk in a minute. Probably about the plaque that after much you know, Manu, Verena and bureaucratic kind of, you know, redirection and misdirection was removed from the capital in January 2019 that that had been mounted on the capital wall in 1959 in the middle of the civil rights movement. The first riel wave, as I understand it of Ah, whole lot of these statues that are in public or in public places. And this is true. A lot of statues on the Capitol grounds, I think here in Texas was in the, you know, between roughly 1919. 20 is you begin to get, you know, kind of retrenchment of the Jim Crow system in the South, and you know, there’s a whole sort of route of looking at where these statues come from. There was a good piece in The New York Times in the 2017 18 cycle of all this, You know that Discuss how there was a You know, many of these factories. Many of these statues were not unique works of art that were mass produced, statues that were marketed to small towns and with minor, you know, with some minor changes and the contextual ization of the plaque near these statues. Some of them were even like the same figure like that. Yeah, Or, you know, some of which were sold to Northeastern town. Some of works were sold in Southern towns

[0:09:07 Speaker 1] down, you know, maybe that

[0:09:09 Speaker 0] quality control issue, But in terms of talking about history and the work that contextual ization does, contextual ization does a lot of work. So, you know, closer to home, into the point. I mean, one of the things that we found was that between the first the first time, we asked the question you described in 2017 and the most recent time with it. We asked it in. In June of this year, we saw pretty noticeable overall movement. And if people were to look at the block post, which is at our website of Texas politics. UTexas edu Um, you can just see it looking at the bar charts, right?

[0:09:46 Speaker 1] Right. I mean, in 2017, the plurality response. So the response that the most largest share people picked was leave the statues alone. 34% of Texans would like to see said that in 2017 that they like toe just embrace the status quo is what we call it. Leave the statues with another 22% saying that you can leave them. Just add some context, which means the majority of Texans at that point said we should leave the statues alone. It’s flipped in 2020 today. Now 20% say that they should be removed completely. And that’s up from 8%. Uh, in 2017. If you add in the people who say this removed to museum, you get to 52% now say we should remove these statues. So there has been a pretty notable shift, but the other thing to kind of note here e what this is a great example of how depend on how you read the data you could get to different conclusions. I think there’s a couple things ways to read this. I mean, I think the main point is to say one. Attitudes have shifted right towards a larger embrace of removal and a definite move away from maintaining the status quo. At the same time, Opinions air still pretty split on what to do with these issues with it. With these statues, in the sense that you know you’ve got 52% who say Remove them, you’ve got 43% who say Leave them there to some extent, Um, but I mean another way to look at this, I would also add is you could say, you know, if you add up, the people who have them removed completely moved to museum and those who would have them remain, but with historical context. At that point, you’re up to about 75% of Texans who basically say we should do something with these statues, right? So e

[0:11:18 Speaker 0] I mean, I think I think the way that you described it when we first looked at this was almost the simplest way to thinking about is that there are lots of complexities in between, but it all shift in one you know, in the way that we, you know, I think we were talking about the graphic that it all shifted. Kind of. You know, I guess it is more or less toe a little to the left in the sense that you know, groups. There wasn’t a big change in public opinion, but the group’s shifted, you know, within them and that Which brings us to the fact that you know, part of the explanation for this is that there are really partisan differences here,

[0:11:51 Speaker 1] right? That’s right. And so you know, ultimately, if we look at the groups and most and least supportive of removing those monuments, combining the group’s what you find is that 86% of Democrats would like to see the monument. It’s removed. To some extent, 74% of Republicans would like to see the monuments left where they are, to some extent, either with historical context or not. And so I’ll be going back to the sort of this discussion of, you know, the political ramifications in the response. You know, we’re not necessarily likely to see a lot of movement on Confederate statues in Texas, right I mean, what’s the evidence tell us at this point?

[0:12:29 Speaker 0] Well, I think that’s right. I mean, if you look at, you know, the biggest movements were really within those groups in a lot of ways, right? And that certainly the number of Republicans who said that they should just be left where they were decreased noticeably. But so too, did the number of Democrats that said, You know, they shouldn’t be moved to a museum. They should just be moved

[0:12:55 Speaker 1] right. And, you know, it’s funny we were talking about He’s not yet. None of this is funny. It’s funny, only find us in like a very esoteric data sense. But I mean, we were talking about this almost is a similar to a gay marriage question that we had asked for a number of years on the Texas politics project well before gay marriage was legalized, where we basically asked people whether they thought gays and lesbians either have the right to marry, have the right to civil unions, but not marriage, which is a very in vogue in that discussion at that point in time, or basically should not have the right to either civil unions or marriages. And what we found was is that, you know, even before Republicans moved to being more accepting of gay marriage in general, especially really after a za group and really after the court legalized it just has become more of just accepted fact of life, even if you disagree with it on various grounds. But ultimately what we found was that for Republicans, whenever there was movement and you saw him or Democrats basically embracing gear marriage, what you might see is fewer Republicans opposed to either. But civil humans were something of a way station. It would say, Well, I’m not comfortable with gay marriage yet, but I don’t. But I know that, you know, outright opposition to gay marriage is becoming less and less socially acceptable. And so you see people moving to the middle category, which is why I support civil unions, and we call that a nice, safe way station. You’re not saying you’re in favor of marriage, but you’re not, you know, basically holding retrograde attitudes about, you know, the nature of marriage, etcetera, whatever I think it’s I mean, we’re seeing something similar here, which is you’re seeing more Democrats move towards you know the absolutist remove statues. But with everybody moving, you’re also seeing more Republicans move from a position is becoming a little bit hard to defend this idea of. Let’s just leave these statues alone. There’s nothing to do about them into something of a compromise, which is what we can leave them. But we definitely need toe, you know, we need to put some we need to do something to mitigate whatever damage this is causing

[0:14:42 Speaker 0] right, which is a really interesting trajectory. And then enter Donald Trump, Right? So then, you know, way See, in the interim of this movement or amidst this movement among Republicans, uh, we also see Donald Trump taking up this issue of Confederate statues as a way of trying to rally his troops in the in the aftermath of the protests. Um, you know, first over the murder of George Floyd. And you know the way that in the aftermath of that, some of that protest energy did get focused on public monuments and, you know, the net got cast pretty widely there for a couple of weeks, maybe even just a few days. But the president seized on that and kind of doubled down on the protection of public monuments and kind of extended it without getting to into the you know, the weeds of what the president did at that point. But, you know, basically associate ID any questioning of these monuments with an assault on patriotism and memorials to American history. And I think we see traces of that in this data. When you look at, you know, views on the Confederate statues and how they overlap with the most intense of the Trump supporters,

[0:16:01 Speaker 1] right? So, you know, I think I said previously, something like 74% of Republicans, uh, embraced, basically leaving the monuments alone to some extent. But but the slight plurality among that group would still provide historical context. If we look just at Trump’s strongest approve er so, he said, look on Lee. Those people who approve strongly of his job performance 84% would like to see that the statute of main place. So there’s a 10 point jump in the share of people who would keep the statues where they are. And most of the people who approve strongly of the president are Republicans, and then among those the plurality 45%. I would prefer that the statues remain where they are unchanged. So ultimately, if the president looking at his strongest supporters to at least you know, guide him or to speak for them, However you wanna look at that ultimately, you know, the vast, vast majority of his strongest supporters want the statues in place. And on balance, they also want them left in place unchanged. And so he is speaking to this group when he makes those pronouncements

[0:16:59 Speaker 0] and and, you know, the attitudes suggest, you know, you know, obviously chicken egg thing here with public opinion in elite opinion Annalise signaling, you know, they’re speaking and he’s listening. Let’s say they’re engaged in a conversation, the president in these folks. And it’s a conversation with, ah lot of agreement between them. So I think what All this you know bodes in the immediate term is certainly we’re not going to see much happened in Texas on this front. Um, I think going into a legislative session in which there are gonna be a lot of fires to put out, it will be interesting to see whether you know this becomes one of them. I have my doubts. But I also think that the discourse about race and racism in the country has has become mawr high visibility and shown mawr durability in the last few months than we’ve seen in, you know, in the recent past. And so I you know, I would not be surprised if there weren’t legislators that were interested in trying to get a little leveraged on this issue and trying to push it some, um, Whether they could get part. I think it’s gonna depend on a lot of things. The main thing being, you know, what happens in the presidential and and in this state elections between now and then

[0:18:21 Speaker 1] and then, I mean, and the overarching context, right? I mean, I think ultimately you know something. You know that. You know, some sessions air difficult, some sessions there a little bit easier, given the fact that you know things is undoubtedly going to be a very difficult session where there’s gonna be lots of heated conversations about where to find money in an already tight budget. And so these these air one of these This is the sort of issue that I think you know, You can kind of group into a bucket of issues that we say are kind of about, you know, sort of really. So it’s really social issues and cultural issues and those I think I might define it that way. I’m not sure I have to think a bit more about it, but I think sort of a bucket of social or cultural issues that legislators and legislative leadership acknowledge suck up a lot of time, energy and goodwill between the members and the Legislature in a way that especially in a difficult year, you know, I don’t know how much I mean, they’re certainly not going to be a universal appetite to take an issue like this on

[0:19:16 Speaker 0] well, right? I mean, you know, when it came up in 2019, which was a comparatively in the last session, which is a comparatively easy year in terms of their was money laying around, there’s a lot of consensus on what the main agenda should be. When this subject came up, particularly in the in the Texas Senate, it was one of the most charged and and, you know, not bipartisan, not consensual. You know, everybody called that last session the Kumbaya session, when when this when a bill came up that would have made it harder to remove these movements, thes monuments and memorials. Um, in the Senate, it got hot very quickly and had consequences that, you know, we’re still seeing. I mean, in terms off. You know what you know, Lieutenant Governor Patrick in that lower temperatures and to try toe, you know, I would use the word mollify. You know, Democrats and in particular, African American Democrats in the Senate promised the creation of, ah, committee to review the art in the gallery in the Senate chamber, which permanently some confederates that committee is, you know, ostensibly is in existence because the lieutenant governor named I thought long ago. I doubt we’re going to see a lot of work come out of that committee, um, to see much action. It speaks to the to your point that it’s harder the pointed hand that you know, it’s harder to sort of tackle these issues in very tough physical Paul environments. But I also think that they do have a way of coming up and and, you know, I I don’t think we’re gonna hear nothing. It’s gonna be a matter of what the How the leadership handles it. And, you know, right now, we don’t even know the leadership’s gonna be in the house. So, um, so let’s talk a little bit about governor Abbots. Executive order yesterday. Um, Governor Abbott issued an order yesterday that give us a little bit more information about what’s gonna happen in the November elections. And it seems weird that we’re I mean, it shouldn’t It doesn’t seem weird in contacts, but it’s, ah, sign of our unusual times. We’re living in that We didn’t really know when early voting was going to start in the November election, and it’s coming up on August. But that the But you know, the background here Was it because of the pandemic and the various, you know, adjustments here and because of the political discussion about making larger changes in the vote in the voting process, in particular, mail in voting, the governor had said that he would extend the early voting period for the November election. He did that yesterday, and so early voting will now have an extra week on it. So the election that is still scheduled for the regular for its usual date of November 3rd. Well, now have early voting start on October 13th instead of October 19th. It’s a long time to early vote. It’s a non, you know, in some ways that you know, to be fair, I’m tempted to say it’s a nontrivial extension. Well, but the context, you know, makes me wanna put a star on that.

[0:22:30 Speaker 1] Yeah, that’s that’s a compared to what?

[0:22:32 Speaker 0] Yeah, I think that’s right. And but, you know, sometimes we struggle to be fair. A times. Um, you know, Abbott also suspended the section of the election code, Um, in order to enable voters to deliver their mail in ballots in person, so take their mail in ballot and not mail it in presumably, um, early to the voting clerks office prior to and during election day. So, in other words, that is interesting. I mean, if you really unpack that, it means you can go through the process, request them a ballot that you were sent in by mail, you would fill it out, seal it up, and you know the way you do that. And I haven’t I haven’t voted by mail, so I don’t I got to say I don’t know exactly what that looks like. Um, but then instead of put it in the mail, you can cart it down and presumably their hand it to somebody or put it in a secure box. I mean, it’ll vary by county, I’m sure. And turn in your mail in ballot early. Now, that zone. Interesting change. Or I’m sorry not to return your mail. You can actually, you can turn it in early, but you can also the band point being you hand it in in person rather than put it in the mail

[0:23:45 Speaker 1] and you can hand it in early. The other things. You could handle it so you can

[0:23:49 Speaker 0] hand and early.

[0:23:50 Speaker 1] Previously you could mail it or you can hand it in on Election Day. Only now you could mail it or you can also deliver it early.

[0:23:58 Speaker 0] So this is all you know in the context of what has been a a kind of war of maneuver, you know, a chess game between Democrats. And I think we could say civil rights organizations and allied organizations who have wanted to expand people’s ability to vote by mail. Um which has been resisted by by the governor or by the state government, really, in the personage of the attorney general. But the governor has been pretty, you know, clear. I think that he’s not really interested in expanding this, and this falls within pretty conventional in some ways, for such unconventional times. It falls within conventional partisan views of this, right?

[0:24:44 Speaker 1] Yeah, that’s right. I mean, I mean, ultimately, you know, there’s a lot of constraints. I think that Abbotts facing here, uh, you know, in general there’s a belief, I think held, you know, which may or may not be true, but it certainly held by a large number of Democrats and Democratic operatives, and and I don’t know whether Republicans they certainly don’t agree with it in open court. But I’m not sure that they disagree with it, which is that you know, is turnout gets higher and higher. You tend to sweep inm or Democratic leaning voters into the electorate in the sense that people who tend to vote tend to be older in the state like this. If they’re older, they’re also whiter if they tend to be more affluent things like that. These are people who just tend to identify higher rates of the Republican Party is, you start to expand the pool of who shows up in votes that you start to sweep in more young people, more people of color, people of lower socioeconomic status as you tend to sweep in more people who are on balance, more likely to identify with the Democratic Party. So there’s some rob politics here. And what kind of falls out of that raw politics is that Republicans in Texas and really everywhere for the last I would say, you know, to my mind, you know, formally for at least about 15 years started in about in Indiana, I think in the mid two thousands have really gone to great lengths to paint. The election process is under constant threat threat of voter fraud, Fred of bad threat from bad actors, and that essentially, what this has done is one. This view has replicated itself in the Republican electorate. So when we ask questions in polling like you know, how often do you know people voters knowingly break election laws, for example. What you find is that well, 9% of Democrats say this happens frequently, so one and 10 30% of Republicans say this happens frequently. Another 39% It happens, say it happens sometimes is supposed to rarely or never. And really, whatever question we ask about voting, whether it’s about undocumented immigrants voting, Uh, you know, foreign actors influence elections. Basically, Republicans see voter fraud as an ever present and constant and pervasive problem. And what that means is, if you’re a Republican elected official, any proposal toe, loosen the voting laws in some way that will expand access or make it easier is already being met by a set of attitudes that, to some degree, has been created by those same officials within their party. This is Well, wait a minute. You’re just going to contribute to the fraud and you your job is to fight it. And so I mean, that’s That’s one of I think, you know, the political sort of context. It makes it difficult to see a broad expansion and obviously one of the thing on the other side. I mean, just, you know, the other side of this is just but practically, you know, we know that there are, you know, the process of voting is going to take longer and be more complicated because and by complicated I mean for the voter, per se. But I mean for the for the poll workers, the people who have to clean the machines have to keep people separate from each other, have to make the election process orderly. There’s gonna be less of these poll workers on basically around for election because most of the most people who actually volunteer their time to do this are old. I mean, if anybody any of you have voted recently, you don’t go and see a bunch of young, spry people sitting there at the voting tables taking your idea. It’s It’s generally older people who are more susceptible to the coronavirus. And, you know, ultimately, in what we expect, what should be a high turnout election setting, decide whatever impact the pandemic has on people’s decision to turn out. You know, the state’s not really set up to handle the volume of voting with fewer and fewer people. I think, actually, the point you made about, you know, being able to hand in your mail in ballot. I mean to me also, I don’t think Texas wants to sit there on election night and say we don’t have a result, and we won’t have a result for two weeks because we’re waiting for all the mail in ballots to come in, which just went up dramatically. And so part of what they’re doing is they’re providing people MAWR options to get there early. MAWR options to get their mail in ballot turned in before Election Day Because ultimately male involves only need to be postmarked by Election Day. And I think you know, an election like this, an environment like this, you know, this is about the extent to which Abbott can say he’s doing something about this without triggering. I think Republicans in particular about, you know, three idea that he’s basically not backlash. He’s not concerned about voter fraud anymore.

[0:28:59 Speaker 0] Well, and I think, you know, if you look at the most recent questions we asked about this, you know these suspicions of the process and you know, the that skepticism with what you can expect Republicans to greet any you know, we’ll call it increased flexibility in the in the voting process. You know, it’s being reinforced by the fact that you know, we have a certain, you know, a small but not you know a minority but not insignificant share of Republicans who are skeptical about over reactions to the pandemic. Shall we call it? And so if you look at the questions we asked in the most recent in the most recent Texas politics Project poll, you know you can see that you can see that when we asked if Texans were allowed to vote by mail, how would you cast your ballot? You know, 54% of Republicans said in person early. Another 28% said in person on Election Day Onley, 13% said by mail. And given the, you know, the the demographics you were talking about, Ah, lot more Republicans than 13% are eligible, probably to vote by mail that if you ask them if they either you know, support or oppose it, just vote, you know, allowing text all Texans the vote by mail in response to the coronavirus. 72% of Republicans opposed that 88% of Democrats supported it. And, you know, I don’t see that changing. Um, you know, So I think you know, in the way that you unpacked this, I’ll be interested to see in the next few days. If it’s not just swamped by other developments how Democrats and civil rights organizations greet this This change, I mean, they’re not gonna I don’t think anybody’s gonna any of those groups. They’re gonna give Governor Abbott a pat on the back for this, but it’s arguably at least a little bit more of an opening up. And I would still argue, and, you know, I’m not gonna have timeto unpacked the court decision again. We’ve done it in the podcast before. There’s a little bit of an implicit recognition here that the vote by mail regime has loosened and that more people other than those that we thought of as most eligible in the past, that is, people over 65 people with disabilities and severe health conditions are gonna be voting by mail. We saw it, you know, in the recent run offs, and it feels to me a little bit like there’s an implicit recognition here that this is gonna happen a lot. Mawr. You know, despite what the state has been arguing unsuccessfully for the most part in court.

[0:31:45 Speaker 1] Yeah, I would say, you know, you can see, I mean, depending on what kind of mood you’re and you could see it is fig leaf. Or you could see it is cover, right? I mean, as you kind of you sort of alluded to directly, they’re

[0:31:55 Speaker 0] both I mean, we’ll cover. So it’s

[0:31:58 Speaker 1] well, well, it could be both. Yeah, that’s true. Cute. No, only

[0:32:03 Speaker 0] decomposed metaphor about man. But,

[0:32:06 Speaker 1] you know, you’re alluding to all the court cases here, and I think ultimately there is an aspect of this where, you know, this does allow Abbott to say, Look, yeah, I recognize it’s a problem, and I’ve I’ve adjusted the system, right? I mean, I’m not adjusting it to the degree that all these lawsuits are asking for, but I’ve done it to the degree that I think is correct. Let’s say, given the context information and he could say that, and and the truth is, this provides them both. You know? I mean, probably less fig leaf and mawr cover, but, you know, ultimately it was I would say it was getting hard to think that we would do nothing with the With the election given.

[0:32:41 Speaker 0] Yeah. I mean, I would have to admit I’m probably a little surprised by this and but I’m also not convinced that between now and the election having I mean, it’s not crazy to think that having now sent a signal that they were open to this, you could still on a separate track. And that separate track would have the last name of Pakistan move to increase, you know, find ways of increasing enforcement or limit the people people’s choice and latitude in choosing to vote vote by mail. So, you

[0:33:14 Speaker 1] know, we’re, uh we’re not lawyers, but sometimes we pretend, and I mean, I also wonder to what extent, you know, given a number

[0:33:21 Speaker 0] within the limits of the law

[0:33:23 Speaker 1] given, you know, well, I mean, like, I could be a judge in most places, but I’m not a lawyer anyway. But, you know, I mean, I think there is an aspect that I wonder also in this, which is to the extent that the state is facing multiple court cases about the impact of, you know, basically the limitations on people’s ability to vote during a pandemic and the limitations being the current regime. Before Abbott made this change, I’m not sure it will have to wait and see whether by doing this, Uh, we don’t see attorney general packs and move to dismiss some of these cases as the state, basically, you know, at least in the way that it deems best, addresses the concerns of the plaintiffs in these cases. And ultimately, the state has a lot of leeway in terms of how it runs elections. And so it might be that this is basically their response to the pandemic, and it might not be up to the court to say whether it’s good enough or not.

[0:34:12 Speaker 0] Well, I think that raises another. You know, I’m not sure about that analysis, but I would say that this is another of uninterested example. There’s another interesting example in the ongoing discussion of Just How is Governor Abbott Maneuverings in a space that seems to acknowledge the reality and the threat of the pandemic and the reality of his political situation in his political base and thes judgments, Air like very hard to make, and one of the things that he seems to be doing is maintaining his own room for maneuver while the situation unfolds and everybody figures out what to do. And he’s far from alone in that,

[0:35:01 Speaker 1] and increasingly, has no choice. That’s the other piece of this, right?

[0:35:05 Speaker 0] Yeah. I mean, that’s what I’m saying. To see how the situation is is pretty, uh, remains. You know, fluid sound is almost too positive. Spin on it, you know, perilous and ever shifting. So with that, we’ll call it a day. Thanks to our technical crew, thanks to Josh, the data and the peace, the Peace on the Confederacy that we and Confederate monuments that we’ve talked about are is always at the Texas Politics Project website at Texas politics dot utexas dot e d u and for Josh Blank and Jim Henson. That’s me. Thanks a lot for listening, and we’ll talk to you next week. The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin