July 6th, 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. So I tell people on a regular basis, there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called Texas. The problem is these departures from the constitution.

They have become the norm. At what point must a female Senator raise her hand or her voice to be recogniz. Over the male colleagues in the room. And welcome back to the second reading podcast. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin. Uh, extremely happy today, uh, to be joined by two excellent guests, a frequent, very frequent guests, Josh blank research director of the Texas politics project.

Good mid-morning. Josh good morning and, uh, especially happy to have Ross Ramsey. Um, I’m not sure how to describe you now. I, what I have is veteran political journalists and co-founder of the Texas Tribune now enjoying perhaps either retirement or a gap year. I can’t quite tell right now it’s a gap year.

so far, it’s just a gap two months, but you know, so Ross, uh, recently stepped down to great accolades as executive editor. And as I’ve said, one of the founders of the Texas Tribune and, uh, really happy that you said yes to coming today. You know, you didn’t have to. Josh works here. I do. I have to be I’m required.

wait. I’m not getting paid. Josh is getting paid. Um, well Josh will take care of that. Um, and this was optional for you. So, uh, we really, uh, uh, appreciate it. Now. We’ve invited, uh, uh, Ross to talk today because we have a new, uh, UT, Texas politics project poll that, that we released this morning. Whereas we record on Wednesday in the, in the middle of the.

Um, Paul has ton, you know, tons of policy stuff, election returns, lots of mood items. Um, and this I, you know, and we can talk about this. This is one of those polls that I think really hangs together. It’s it’s of the moment, you know, I mean, it really does capture a moment in time. Sometimes you look at these things and I, you know, I should mention this is the 50th poll that we’ve done as part of the UT project.

Wow. It’s a lot of polls between 35 and 40 that you Ross was directly involved in. So that’s another good reason to have you today. But you know, as we’ve talked about these polls over the last, you know, 14 years, um, You know, sometimes you kind of go, well, I don’t, you know, I don’t know, there’s a bunch of mishmash or this is going on and that’s going on.

This one feels like there’s a, a definite mood and, and a definite thing going on. And we can, uh, sort of, uh, uh, dig some of that out. And maybe, maybe you guys do or don’t feel the same way. Um, Let’s start where we often do when we’ve laughed about this. And I, I should mention that we often have Darren Shaw co-director and co-founder of the poll, uh, on these podcasts.

Darren is, uh, on vacation somewhere in the west. I don’t want, he may be in an undisclosed location, so I don’t want to, I don’t wanna see or have. People be able to track him down on some of these results. Um but, um, so, uh, that’s why Darren is not here today, so, but let’s start at least briefly with the election stuff before we get to the policy.

So, so Josh, why don’t you start us off and give us kind of an overview of the main trial ballots and the election stuff? Yeah, sure. So what we found in, in the June poll was, you know, top of the ticket, Greg Abbot, Leading better. O’Rourke among registered voters say registered voters here. So four months out from the election, 45% to 39%, that is definitely a tightening in our poll or a narrowing, you know, which is a lot of people are kind of focused on right now in February.

Abbot had a 10 point lead 47, 37 in April polling. He had a nine point lead 48. 37. And now we’re at 6 45 39. Now these are the sort of things I think, you know, in the old days, when we were doing three polls a year, I’d be, you know, we’d be less inclined to say, yeah, this looks like something going on because of the distance between the polls.

But as we kind of watch it go along, it’s sort of, it, it looks right. And the main reason I’ll say is, if you look at the internals, aro is increasing a support among Democrats. Right. Uh, you know, Greg abot is losing some support among independence. That could be partially a reflection of the moment. And some of the policies we’ll talk about, right.

And we’re seeing a narrowing in the suburbs, which is kind of something we’d expect because that’s where we think a lot of the competition is gonna take place. So what we say is the internals hang together. When we look at sort of the tightening in ways that I think make sense. And we’ve talked about independence in this race a bit, you know?

Yeah. In the last year. Yeah, we can, we can certainly go back to that. So let’s just, should we hit a couple of the. Races first. Yeah, let’s let’s just hit the other ones. Okay. So, you know, Dan Patrick finds himself in a slightly more comfortable position. This is the first, uh, in the series that we’re polling on the Lieutenant governors and the attorney General’s, uh, general election race.

So we don’t have anything to compare it to yet, but he had a comfortable 12 point lead over Mike col or 38 to 26. Uh, the ag race is unsurprisingly a little bit tighter. Uh, Ken Paxton has an eight point lead over Rochelle Garza, 37% to 29%. I think that’s sort of something. Again, makes sense. In the context of, you know, Ken Paxton’s, you know, you know, long term in the spotlight.

And I think Rochelle GARS is kind of positioning the moment around abortion rights and, and all that kind of stuff, but, but still, and we didn’t, we didn’t do our, the FFA for all the candidates this time as we did during the primaries. But Rochelle GARS are still not. widely known. Almost certainly not. I mean, the thing, the, the main, the main sort of the main sort of differentiating point, I think that we should just sort of point out here is, you know, was only 10% of registered voters said that they didn’t have an opinion.

Hadn’t thought enough about the governor’s race to offer an opinion is about a quarter of voters in both. The attorney General’s race and Lieutenant governor’s race. So we know from our polling that was done just, just recently that it’s very unlikely that even half the electorate has an opinion of who Rochelle Garza is at this point.

Just to be fair. That’s that’s more of Ken Paxton versus not Ken Paxton. That’s a hundred percent more of Ken Paxton’s fact actually Republican versus Democrat. A little dash. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Um, so Ross, you know, you’ve seen a lot of. These election polls. And you’ve seen a lot of races in Texas. Anything sticking out to you on this?

No, I mean, the Republicans are pretty persistent and if you go all the way down to the generic races for Congress and for the legislature, you see, you know, numbers that sort of fit in this, in this general scheme, the Republicans are six to 12 points ahead. Um, and we’re, you know, several months out, one of the things I did look at, you know, we haven’t quite got to it yet, but when you look at favorable unfavorable, Ratings for people like Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick in the June polls of election years.

Going back since you’ve done so many polls, you can go. And see that there’s often this sort of moment when their numbers get a little shaky, it’s like the voters are locked in I’m for these incumbents. And then we get to about a half year out from an election and they go, well, let’s go shopping a little bit.

And they generally in Texas in the last 20 years certainly have come home. You know, couple of exceptions, but they’ve come home. I don’t know what’ll happen this time, but you’re clearly, if you’re looking at their, the, the shifts and their numbers of favorable unfavorable, uh, you know, there’s some reconsideration of the incumbents.

And even with that, they maintain their leads. It looks like, yeah. That’s like a direct political science kind of observation actually, which they call like enlightened partisanship in the is if you’re listening to this podcast, like you, you know, your partisanship is accessible to you, it might even be like, you know, something that’s, it’s pretty close to the surface core, core identity.

But I think, you know, there’s something that I, you know, staff that’s been going around a lot lately, lately that I think have as a good example, which is, you know, if you look at political Twitter a lot and think, oh my. , this is the world it’s like, yeah. Except like 80% of adults have never tweeted in their lives.

Right. And similarly, you know, most people, you know, are kind of going around, dealing with other stuff, you know, their allegiance to like their football team or, you know, their college all and mater might be higher than their party. But then it is the summer kind of rolls on and we start to get into campaign season.

It’s part of they say is like, it’s the job of the campaigns to remind people like, oh, you’re a Republican because of this. Right? These are the things we agree on. And these are the things you don’t agree with Democrats on and vice versa. So you start to see that kind of, that kind of thing happen. And I think, you know, what, the only thing I think is interesting in this moment is Republicans always have a certain advantage at that in this state, because.

They’re monopoly on all the offices. Abbot can go and have a press conference and remind you. Right. Right. It’s a lot harder for O’Rourke, which is why I think part of what you’re seeing again, in this poll to the extent that O’Rourke is kind of coming. You know, back into the picture a little bit, bit more is the Democrats, right?

The people that he’s kind of competing for, who he might have, you know, a chance with are starting to pay a little bit more attention, but it’s still it’s the long ways. Well, and, and the other thing I would note here is that, you know, to some extent over the last two or three months, Events have conspired against incumbents.

You know, that’s one way to put it. Well, if you talk about, if you talk about inflation, I’m sure it feels that way to them. Well, I’m sure it does. I mean, if you talk about inflation, you can see the deterioration of support for both Republicans and Democrats. If you’re in office, you’re, you know, you were there and you’re to blame.

And as the, you know, there were, there were pretty, you know, Interesting similarities between what happened to like a Greg Abbott and to a Joe Biden. And as, as voters became increasingly. Concerned about the economy about, um, inflation, about other things like that. You know, you can see them kind of, you know, looking over the tops of their glasses at the incumbents and, and you see it in their numbers.

Well, one, I’m sorry, I just wanna, you know, it’s really interesting cuz I mean, we can go into the mood stuff cause I think that’s a big part of, of this. I mean, I think that’s just gonna go, I just want to jump, I mean, we can come back to this, but we have a, you know, an issue approval battery for Biden and Abbot.

And what’s really interesting to me is that, you know, Abbot’s overall approval rating on the economy. Okay. I mean, none nobody’s approval reigns are great. Let’s just say that right now. I mean, the best you can kind of hope for is ambivalence here for the, for the most part. Right. We’re getting it great on the curve here.

Yeah. Yeah. Biden is net negative on all issues and Abbot is only barely net positive on, I think, two or three on two or three. And the thing is, is one of the, his better issues is the economy, but one of his worst issues is inflation and prices. Right? And so, I mean the whole kind of, you know, definitionally how, how, you know, how that gets mobilized and this sort of gets to another set of results, you know, which I think we.

I guess we’ll go to now, which is the overall mood, which is remarkably, remarkably poor. And it’s like we’re. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we, we’ve sort of just, we’ve backed into this whole sense of like, what is unifying in this poll? And it is, you know, job approval ratings for anybody that’s elected to anything is down some much more than others, which we’ll touch on.

But also the, the, you know, what we have thought of as our general mood indicators are just, you know, for this poll again, you know, 14 years, historically negative. I mean, right, Texas wrong track is 59, right? Track 31, wrong track 59 for the state. Um, 59 highest negative number we’ve seen in, in our polling.

Um, But to balance that to your point, Ross, the us right track wrong direction is even worse. Yeah. 16, right? 76 wrong direction. Um, national economy asking people whether the national economy is better, worse than a year ago, 73% say that it’s worse, Texas economy. Well, more than half 58% say it’s worse.

People’s home economics situation. 53% say it’s worse than it was a year ago. And on and on. And just, and the thing is, is that, you know, just as just to add to this, there’s something kind of important here, which is, you know, these are also big uptick since April. I mean, this isn’t as though this was like, you know, we’ve been kind of, I mean, as you said, you know, sometimes you go, you do a million of these polls and sometimes, you know, I mean, we’re kinda talking you’re in the situation of like, no, no, no, this is interesting.

Like really, because it didn’t change and people are like, people like Ross, look at me like, uh, Yeah, sure. But in this case we’re talking, I mean, just for example, you know, the country wrong track number 76% percent, that’s up 10 points over April. I mean, this is not a long period. This is where I was going, you know, to, to a, I mean, it’s a, it’s a external factor, you know, the news has been terrible.

Mm-hmm and all of the things that, you know, the atmosphere has soured considerably in the last. 10 or 12 weeks, you know, since that April poll, uh, came back in and you can see it in these numbers and you can see it, not only in the concerns that they have their most important issues, but certainly in how they’re feeling about all these incumbents.

Well, back in August, you Ross, you and I were were, I, I, I can’t remember who I think I was calling the outlook dower and you were calling his sour and that’s when the Texas track was at 52 wrong track. Right. Which at that point was a record just as an aside. I mean, that was a record then. Um, So, I mean, I think the question then becomes, you know, how much does, you know, how does, you know, a national environment and mood and economy, uh, that is sort of anti big de Democrat?

Does it become anti incumbent at some point is sort of the question. I mean, if you keep going in this direction, at some point, it’s hard to be sitting there at the top of the tick and say, I mean, in Abbot’s case, you know, Joe Biden has been in office for 18 months, parentheses I’ve been in office for 90.

Hmm. And somehow, you know, everything that’s going on in Texas is his fault. You know, when you take that and you add it to some of these other sort of big, big, high profile incidents and sort of, you know, I think politics and policies around abortion and guns and these sort of other things that are kind of hard for people to avoid.

Even the people who aren’t necessarily walking around with their partisanship on their sleeve. It does make you wonder whether Texas voters are gonna. Come into the fall, looking at things a little bit differently than we’ve normally expected them to. I think all the boats could sink, but I think the democratic boats get swamped first.

Yeah. You know, and, and the best thing going for the Republicans is that they’re. The least disliked party. Right. But everybody’s sort of disliked. Yeah. I mean, there’s a real, just, you know, the people in charge are not doing a good job kind of sincere well, and not just the people, the people in the institutions.

I mean, part of this, you know, this is the difference between, you know, politics is emotional and government’s logical, right? And, and if you look at this and you say, you know, To what extent is, are Joe Biden or Greg Abbot directly responsible for inflation? Mm-hmm well, it’s a little bit mixed, you know, I mean, you know, the easy example of this is, you know, everybody gets mad at incumbent presidents when gasoline prices go up mm-hmm if incumbent presidents really controlled gasoline prices, gasoline prices would never go up.

I mean, you know, this is, this is right. Why would you do this? Why would you do that? Well, I wouldn’t, you know, um, but they, but they do, you know, This is the, this is the job for chief executives. Is that you’re the person on the seat in the dunking booth. And when it’s time to, to throw, you know, you’re the one who’s gonna get wet.

Yeah, sure. But I guess the question becomes, does that ever happen in Texas because which well, which executive, well, exactly. Which you know, which executive, and I think that’s sort of, I mean, I think that’s kind of what the test is. I mean, I think, you know, again, look, I think Republicans in the state are incredibly well insulated for a number of reasons, you know, at the lower level, from because of redistricting, uh, at, you know, at the top level one, because of an advantage in the number of voters in the state who turn out.

Regularly. So let’s just admit, you know, that’s, that’s a fact, right? And the advantages of incumbency and resources, the encompasses the advantage of having a 1200 mile border with Mexico, which as much as it is a, you know, is a, a perpetual policy problem for Texas. It’s also a political opportunity that, you know, allows that proves to the Republican advantage.

Yeah. Well, you know, I, I guess the, you know, does it ever happen that that’s what was so interesting about 2018 wasn’t that it happened, but at, you know, particularly at the Ted Cruz level, it almost happened, right. He got splashed. Um, and, and, and it raised the possibility of wow. That could happen. I, you know, I think the odds of it this time appear to be pretty low.

Yeah. I agree. I mean, to me, what I think is, you know, you look kind of go back to the polling numbers. I mean, there’s been a lot of, there’ve been a number of there’s more higher frequency of, of trial ballots are coming out now and Texas. And I think, you know, there’s a little bit of a, of a tendency to sort of over interpret, you know, each one is somehow some kind of major new, like data point when really they’re painting a broad picture snapshots in time, whatever, but you kind of look at it and you.

You know, if we were talking in 2014 or 2016 about the idea that, well, you know, the democratic candidate for governor is gonna be about a five, six point deficit in, in the summer with the Republican candidate, you know, who would’ve loved that Wendy Davis would’ve loved that, right? Like, you know, lube Valez, would’ve loved that.

I mean, the, I mean, the fact is is that, you know, this is not a bad place for Democrats to be. And then the question becomes to my mind, you know, in addition to sort of the campaigns plus the national environment, plus the tax environment, does that end up, you know, Abbot ended up overperforming that, and kind of pushing that number out a little bit more towards, you know, eight or 10 or, or is it more like, you know, two or three, three or five, you know, he may need more of that 50 million than he thought he did.

Yeah. Well, but I think that big ad buy was to some, I mean, look, they have polling numbers. I mean, some, something of a reflection of the fact that this is not gonna be well signaling easy, you know, let’s, let’s circle back on that, on this environmental question, but let’s look at. A couple of the, you know, the marque issues that are right now, I think feeding into this overall environ.

um, in a couple of different ways. So, you know, let’s start with abortion and we should, you know, remind, you know, anybody listening. So the poll came out of the field, the day of the DOB decision, the Dobbs, uh, decision overturning Roe V. Wade was announced. So it’s not reflected here, so it’s not reflected here, which actually I say just real quick.

That’s good. Well, I mean, just, I mean, from my perspective, that’s good. No, I was gonna go there. Go ahead. You go ahead. You know, I mean, just, you know, I mean, it does give us. A good, robust, right on the evening of Roe, right. Of RO being overturned. And it was in the field. The full field was after the leak. Yes.

So the possibility of Dobbs was out there. And, and it was really just a question, right? I mean, look, I much like the, how much, like the leak is the final decision gonna be? Yeah. I mean, I think there’s two things going on with this and, and Josh may want to add to this, but I, you know, two conditions here is people say, well, you know, you were in before the decision and you know, not to be defensive, although it’s gonna sound that way no matter what, but there are two things that we’ve seen.

One is just the remarkable durability of attitudes on abortion across. You know, a decade or more of the, the polling that we’ve done. Um, you know, for people that are listening, if you go and you look at our, at our summary sheet, you know, we’ve got trend data in the summary document and all the graphics there, and there’s just not much shifting in people.

This is, this is something that people, you know, as Josh office have thought about, or then Darren, everybody kind of says this, I guess, but people thought about this, you trigger it to me. There’s not a ton of, there’s not a ton of people that go. Oh abortion. I haven’t really thought about that lately, um, as, as an attitude.

Um, and then the other, you know, is, um, you know, the, the, the piece that you raised Ross, which is that abortion was a pretty live issue. And there was a lot of anticipation of the Supreme court decision and a lot of anticipation of what it was gonna be. Now, we didn’t know that that leak draft was going to be.

Necessarily the final decision. Right. But it telegraphed what was happening. Yeah. Fundamentally the situation on the ground in Texas has not shifted. Overwhelming I’m so, you know, it has shifted dramatically in some, in some senses, but in terms of the legal landscape for obtaining a legal abortion in Texas, I mean, really we, the, the state went from very little access to no access, right.

And so, I mean, ultimately, I mean, a lot of that years, to your point, too, like we had a large discussion around abortion during the legislative session and the special sessions and moving on. So, I mean, this is, this has been in the air in clinics closing. I mean, we were already, there was already a lot of media coverage and a lot of people in the situation experiencing.

The impact of, you know, access to abortion in the state being severely cut back. Right. Just delayed. I mean, in, in the run out to this, but so what, yeah, a little bit of then about what we got and there’s a reason why to just to make a point here, it’s kind of, we talk about sometimes it’s like, well, if you find a result and it’s 90 10 and people say, well, what about the subgroups?

It’s like, yeah, they’re mostly about 90 10. Because you can’t really have a bunch of jumping around. Right. And it’s kind of, I mean, I think, you know, an abortion again at the top level. I mean, there’s a certain aspect of that, which is that, you know, what we found in them this most recent survey is that, you know, asked across sort of a very, very generic set of circumstances.

And Jim spoke, I think in a previous podcast recently about the problems with this question, but it does provide us with a certain amount of, uh, Of of, you know, time series here, only 15% of Texan said that abortion should never be permitted. And this is very consistent. That include 23% of Republicans also very consistent that that number may be just slightly high actually on the overall time series.

Um, then we asked basically about the, uh, About the trigger law in Texas. And what we’ve found is that only 37% of Texas supported the trigger law that automatically abandons abortion in the state. If the Supreme court overturns Roe V Wade, 54% O oppose it, we’ve asked this five times between April of last year, and now we’ve had at least 53% opposition each time, no more than 37% support this time.

What we did to kind of open this up a little bit more is we took a set of questions that we’ve asked before about circumstances in which people think. Women should or should not be able to access an abortion ranging from, you know, uh, a threat to their health, a serious, you know, health problem, rape incest, uh, you know, the presence of a birth defect.

You know, basically not having enough income, so et cetera, et cetera. We’ve asked this question before, basically as a, is a binary. Yes, no. And what we tend to find is, you know, even the people who say never, still allow for abortion in the case, especially of rape incest and sort of threat to the danger of the mother.

What we did this time was we took something to the Rowe framework in a sense and said, okay, here are these circumstances, should a woman never be able to access an abortion in that circumstance? And then we said, six weeks. 12 weeks, right? 24 weeks, 36 weeks, anytime during the pregnancy, which really kind of layers it instead of the whole package here, look at it, one thing at a time, right?

I mean, what, you know, what we were really after here in this speaks to, you know, at least my, and I think others, but my, my frustration, especially um, with the existing question is we decomposed both the timeframe. Mm. And the conditions under which a woman might seek an abortion, the context. Right, right.

And broke that down in a much more, I think, direct and clear way. And, and had people choose an option, you know, express attitudes within both of those in a matrix. Right. And so what you do is then what you find is when you say, okay, 37% of people score the trigger law no more than 36% of Texans, which I would say statistically, same thing, 36 30.

Seven’s fine. No more than 36% of Texan. Would in any of the circumstances completely prohibit abortion. And it ranged between 8% in the case of health endangerment would say, you know, have too bad. And 36% at the high end, which is basically you either have sort of an unmarried person who just doesn’t wanna like form a family at that point.

Or you have a married person who doesn’t wanna expand their family at that point. And those are sort of the two least popular things. But even those that’s where you get to the, the top end, which is. 36%. So, you know, the long and short of this is that as, as Texas basically now has no access to legal abortion safe for the case of a serious bodily injury or death to the mother.

The reality is, is that pulling in Texas consistently should even up to the moment of the overturn of Roe V. Wade, that the vast, vast majority of Tex. support access to legal abortion, at least in some circumstances. And at least at some point in time. And so this is me, I mean, to me, like this creates such political exposure, really for both sides, right?

I mean, on the one hand you’ve got, you know, Republicans are gonna come into a legislative session where the energy, at least from their partisan is gonna be okay, well now how do we enforce this thing? Right. When the reality is, is the vast, vast majority of Texans are saying, yeah, but like, shouldn’t you be creating some more exceptions, like for, for rape?

I mean, you know, for example, like statutory rape and there’s some stuff out there that’s gonna be pretty ugly. The, yeah. The lack of support in this poll for, you know, banning abortion, even in instances of rape or incest, I think is very telling and really crystallizes, I think a big, a big problem approximately.

For Republicans nationally and perhaps in the state for the reasons you’re talking about. Um, but also in the broader sense, it’s like, if you have numbers like this, and this is not the first time we’ve seen numbers like this, right. If you’re in charge of government, what are you doing? Well, and there’s, I mean, if you’re the Supreme court, you get to do whatever you want, but that doesn’t really answer the question if you’re a legislator and this, and if you’re now operating in the environment that Supreme court is now created, where it’s up to you as a state legislator to sort this out.

Right. Well, the Supremes didn’t do policy. They did law. Right. Right. And, and, you know, you can, you know, we could argue that over whiskey. Yeah. But, and that’d be fun, but, um, But it’s now down to the legislatures to do policy. And you do all of these numbers that you’re talking about, and you look at all of these results line by line.

What about this situation, this situation, this situation, and you get a set of answers. And then you ask the question in the poll. Do you support or oppose automatically banning all abortions? If the Supreme court overturns Roe V Wade and 37% say, sure. And now if you’re a legislator, you look at that and say, well, that’s not what you said over here.

I mean, there’s a, there’s a lot of sand in this. Well, see, this is the thing I think we’ve been dealing with this and I’ve been dealing with this and I don’t, I don’t actually see as as much sand. I think the reality is is that, you know, I think what we found and I talked, we talked about this previously.

I’ll just make this point again. I mean, there’s something actually about the Roe V Wade framework. That really mean, you know, we can say like, oh, this is just, you know, judges making law, not policy. Right. But actually the framework of Roe V Wade really matches public opinion in a, in a pretty good way, which is to say, look within, within a reasonable amount of time.

Within the, within, you know, gestational age, right. We’re talking, there is a pretty wide appetite to allow people to kind of make a choice back on, based on their circumstances. You get a little further out, there’s a lot less of an appetite for it in terms of the range of, you know, circumstances and choices, which you find is, you know, sort of the, in the sort of classical, you know, again, rape incest life, there’s almost uniform.

Yeah. You, you know, you should have it be able to access this even on the ones that are more, I would say choicey. Right. If you will, there’s still a lot of, you know, I think openness to a certain amount of access within a certain time period. And that’s why actually, you know, the whole kind of first trimester framework works pretty well because it allows for the fact that you can be someone who says, yeah, I’m, pro-life I oppose banning abortion in all circumstance, you know, let’s say abandoning abortion, Texas, we say, oh yeah.

Okay. What about when the, when the mother’s life is end danger? It’s like, oh, well, yeah, sure. No, you should be able to access this. Like what if she was right. Well, yeah, I. Obviously, and then you kind of get to like birth defect and then, well, it depends on the person depends on a number of factors. Yeah.

And so that’s what I, I don’t think that this is actually inconsistent. I think what it is is that when you come right down to it, when, when the rhetoric of like, you know, I’m either pro-life on the one hand or pro-choice on the other, you know, we want to end abortion on the one hand or, you know, unfettered access on the other when that meets.

But when that rubber meets the policy road, it becomes a lot more complicated. And just one other piece to this, this is why Democrats also face a certain amount of exposure here, you know, in the, in the left leading states in New York and California, or wherever where they’re gonna start passing, you know, probably pretty ex you know, I say, they’re gonna be start discussing a pretty expansive right to abortion access that, you know, if the Democrats are consistent, we’ll probably go far beyond where public opinion is comfortable in most places.

And that becomes. The poster child of the, of the, sort of the resistance to this, I think in states like Texas. And then we see how that kind of gets mixed into the system. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, kind of simply put, I mean, there’s, you know, context matters a lot and you know, there are reasons that, you know, on both sides that as matters of campaign discussion or political discourse, you boil things down to either, you know, it’s my choice.

or, oh, they want abortion on demand. Right, right. well, and if those, and you can kind of see that in all of these numbers, including even the more nuanced read. Yeah. I mean, the, and the discussion seems then elite democratic circles right now are very much about like, so do we want like policies that’ll win or policies?

That’ll make our coalition happy. and they don’t really have an answer. So it’s not clear that, I mean, even well, a number of, in a number of places, a number of, well, a number of plays. I mean, this place, I think it’s, it’s particular. I mean, there’s a whole argument about the discussion. I mean, you know, in the question we used the word woman, we talked about a person, you know, and ultimately this is a big debate going on in democratic politics right now about how to talk about this.

Even now, again, it’s early, there’s a lot of time again for everybody to message these things out, but it just, you know, it just lays out the fact that, you know, we’re an uncharted territory in terms of how much exposure there is, but on balance. a lot more exposure for Republicans and Democrats. There’s an analog there for John corn.

well, yeah. Let’s know let’s split. Well, let’s, let’s talk about John corn, but to get to John corn and let’s talk about guns because I think we have to go through guns to get to John corn. Right. So, you know, we were in the field, you know, a couple of weeks after about three weeks, I guess, about three after the UAL day shootings and.

During a period. I think when the discussion of this, uh, uh, of what happened in yal, Very gr you know, talk again, unifying theme in the poll. Yeah. Was very, was a very dark discussion because it was becoming clear that the response had been a poor response and much of the political response, you know, to my mind.

And, and this is, was a good time for you to be sort of out of the game, Ross. I mean, I, you know, I went and sat through one of those Senate hearings and watched a lot of them and it was dispiriting. Yeah. To watch. The political class, try to quote unquote, I’m doing air quotes here in the studio, try to handle and respond to the issue.

Right, right. Because there was a lot of just casting about for blame and, you know, in terms of who was gonna have to take responsibility and a lot of redirection based on the, on partisan politics and, you know, bending over backwards to not talk about. Access to guns in a, in a way that I, I don’t see’s formative irresponsibility.

I just don’t see how you could not see that as just yeah. You know, the, the most intellectually dishonest approach to this, that one could possibly imagine. Um, That said, you know, guns, you know, in some ways have looked a little like abortion in the fixedness, in the fixed quality of the attitude. So with a little more movement, right?

Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, there’s, there’s a couple ways that we think about this and sort of to be, you know, fair. I think the way to think about this is terms of, you know, Gun violence on the one hand and then sort of gun safety slash gun control on the other and attitude towards other things, cuz they’re not the same thing.

Right? So attitude towards guns, attitude towards gun violence and then attitude towards gun safety or gun control proposals are kind of three they’re related, but separate buckets. Right? And so the first thing is we repeated a question that we’ve asked, uh, two times before in the wake of other mass shootings in Texas in 2015 and 2017 about sort of what people think are, are.

The most important factors leading to these mass sheets and the reason we do this, I think that’s important is first and foremost, you know, I think we can acknowledge right now, there’s almost no chance of significant movement on. Gun control laws in Texas in the near future. So we can just say that as, as a, as a set piece and, and, and gun control RI large, right?

I mean, and so really, almost anything that influence it includes access to gun. So we, you know, so generally speaking, you know, we’re pretty disinclined to ask about kind of. P, you know, it’s say hypotheticals that we haven’t asked about in the past, when we say hypotheticals, we have about in the past, it’s usually things that have been in the discussion.

So a national background check or universal background check has been in the discussion for a while. Red flag laws were raised by the governor, the Lieutenant government at one point in time. So everything that we do ask about on a policy standpoint is not something that like, we’re just making up. But part of this goes back to the factors.

The reason we ask about the factors that people think lead to mass shootings, it gives us a. As to where the solutions might come from in the perception of voters is the idea, right? So if it’s about guns, then the legislature tell you’re the problem. Yeah. That means addressing and being dealing with guns.

If it’s the mental health system, then it means dealing with mental health system. So what we find of course is, you know, pretty consistent, uh, you know, so the, you know, the plurality of Texan said that current gun control laws are gun laws are the main factor, but it was 50% of Democrats who thought this and 6% of Republicans, right.

Okay. So about one in 20, like to do those conversions for Republicans, it was much more likely to be failures of the mental health system or UN unstable family situations. 25% of Republicans said failures on the mental health system. 21% said unstable family situations. This is pretty consistent. What we find.

And I think fits with an overall view that we hear about, which is it’s about individual failings. You know, it’s, it’s people making bad decisions with their guns, not the guns themselves, which we’ve seen historically in these kinds of batteries, going back a long. Two little just side notes on this battery that are worth mentioning only 7% said it was insufficient security or like that basically at the public buildings.

And this is consistent. Very few people think it’s because the school are just easy targets. That’s not the reason that people attribute it to it. Also, I should say, you know, the 25% who said current control laws. Does represent a change back in 2015, when we asked this for the first time, 13% of Texan said it was current current gun control laws in, uh, 2017.

It was 21% this time it’s 25%. So there’s definitely more, uh, voters who are increasingly saying, you know, this might actually have to do with guns. Having said that. You know, the big sort of underlying attitude that really divides this. We ask this question, you know, if more people carry guns with the us be safer or not.

Right. And this is sort of the idea. I mean, one of the responses to you all these, well, we need to arm teachers, you know, more, you know, more, you know, resource officers, whatever. Well, the plurality Texans think that if more people were armed, we’d actually be less safe, 43%. But among Democrats, it’s 77% among Republicans.

It’s 16% among Republicans and majority 57% say more safe. So what you start off with this. I think you gotta start here and say, look, when we’re responding to a mass shooting. In the pro you know, the short proximate thing, partisan responses are very different. Also partisan attitudes towards guns are very different.

Having said that we ask these policies that we’ve asked repeatedly. We find in texts that we find everywhere else. 78% of Texan support, universal background checks, 93% of Democrats, 66% of Republicans. 73% of independents, just keep score. Uh, 70% support raising the age to buy a firearm from 18 to 21, uh, 91% of Democrats, 60% of independents, 56% of Republicans, 66% support a red flag law, 89% of Democrats, 57% of independents in a plurality 49% of Republicans.

And again, I think some people say, well, this doesn’t make sense. Like it’s not consistent saying no, it’s very consistent, right? If you think that guns make people safe and that safe people. With guns, make people safer than a bunch of laws that are there to ensure that safe PE that the safe people are the ones with the guns get support is actually pretty.

And I think that’s a fair, you know, I think that’s a utterly fair point to make about this. Well, I did too. This is, and this goes to John corn. This is what’s interesting about this. Is he pretty markedly? turned the conversation in Congress to the kinds of things you’re talking about that were popular, both with Republicans and Democrats and away from the things that were only popular with Democrats.

And what you said a minute ago. I don’t remember the exact phrase, but you know, you’re representing these people, um, in the, in the way that they answer these questions, but then when they go to. Uh, partisan flag, you know, he was cutting against the grain and it cost him in his numbers. It’s like, you know, you’re, are you representing what people say they want?

Or are you representing the party? They say they belong to, and, and I think corn’s the corn’s numbers. Have always, you know, been, been kind of dreary, but this is a surprising change. No, you know, I think I used this term somewhere recently, but I think it’s utterly fair. I mean, his number’s cratered. Yeah.

Real quick. Let me just give you these and we can talk about it. So in April corn’s job approval. Now we’re just real quick. Cornin stands out and we have a piece on this actually on the blog, on the website, which are shows how corn’s numbers are just so different from other Republicans, but they oscillate, I mean, is a good point, which is, you know, he.

Pulls out a public consciousness. And a lot of people don’t have an opinion of him. The election comes around, he ramps up the machine as a good incumbent does. Yeah. We talked about this on the podcast a couple weeks ago and he’s a classic us Senate strategy for somebody who wants to remain a us Senator.

So when I say his April numbers, you’ll say those don’t sound great, but they’re kind of in line. So in April 32% approved to the job, he was doing 39% disapproved in June. Only 24% approved, 50% disapproved. Now his disapproval went up among Democrats from 65 to 70, among independents from 39 to 58. That sounds like a lot.

Remember independents are probably the way that we define them. Pure political independent independents are probably about 10% of the overall electorate. The real notice within here is among Republicans. His approval went down from 53 to 41 and his disapproval doubled from 17% to 34%. And really the only kind of pro I mean, we can’t say, was it the gun debate?

Well, we can’t say that social science put that quote. but in terms of proximate causes yeah. What was available? I mean, I think we can kind of say, yeah, this was probably what did it, I was talking to a Texas Tribune reporter yesterday or last night in advance of this and was saying, and she was saying, well, you know, is this is because of guns.

Right. And I’m like, you did a good job. well, probably perhaps. Yes. You know, it’s. It certainly seems the most available explanation. Right, right. Shall we say, um, so your point about this Rossi, well, it’s just one of those things where you look at the, you know, if you were a, you know, if you were a non-politically tuned policy person, you would look at these things and say, corn’s doing a pretty good job of following the numbers here.

And, but if you’re politically tuned, it was clearly. Um, discordant at best. Well, you know, I think Josh said as you were going through those numbers, I mean, his numbers went down, um, in every group. Right. right. So, you know, just, just, you know, they, you know, for their various reasons, which is why you’re not, why you’re reply to that trip reporter was right.

I mean, it’s just sort of like probably, um, but you know, there’s a lot of other stuff here, you know, what are you doing? Talking to Murphy? What are you doing? Talking? What are you doing? Working with us well, and yeah, I mean, I, I, I’m gonna, you. one of the things that we say all the time, uh, is, you know, don’t over, you know, the common thing is overinterpreting poll data.

I’m about to do that. Okay. Get ready, everybody. okay. Buckle up. But I, you know, but I think I can kind of, I mean, to me, I mean, it’s not too much of an overinterpretation of the data to look at what happens with corn in connection, in all likelihood with guns and see a real. Kind of telling moment for.

What’s wrong with politics right now to some degree, least. I think that’s one of, yeah, one of the things, I mean, here’s a guy who takes a real institutional strategy. I mean, he played this in the way that, you know, a member of Congress and in particular Senate, we would expect to play. He looked to see what he could get across felt like there was a public demand to do something.

And look, he got criticized for not doing enough and I am amenable to that criticism. Right. Um, for reasons I’ll say in a minute, um, But, you know, this is like an institutional guy and he just got PII for it. Now, look, you can criticize him that he did this. He took the hits because this is about his ambition to be leader.

I would say Senate leader, right. You know, to succeed Mitch McConnell or, uh, Republican leader in the Senate. Um, but I would also argue that, you know, if you’re gonna take a hit on this. right. Why not exercise a little bit more leadership and be a little less risky and, and push it a little harder now?

Well, I, I think he would say, you know, go find me the votes that’s dude. That’s what I was thinking. Yeah, right. Find me the votes dude. And you know, and that utterly fair. Well, as a matter of politics inside Congress, he did exactly what. You know, you would want a leader to do. I mean, I mean, if you, he did what, you know, the other members would want a leader to do.

He was the one who caught all the javelins that were coming in and he got a bill out of there that virtually, you know, I mean, pass the Senate with very few nos and, and, and made it safe for all the other people to vote. That’s what you do. If you’re a speaker or a leader or something like that. Right.

You, you know, so it probably played pretty well for him. He’s, you know, he’s got the advantage of not being on the ballot this year. Yeah. And, and for, for a couple of years still. Right. So, you know, I mean, and in that sense, we talked about this in the last podcast or the podcast. We talked about corn in a couple weeks ago, you know, that’s a.

Us. I mean, that’s like how a us senator’s job description you. So that’s the, the design he was on. If, if he was on the 20, 22 ballot, he would not have been in the lead position on that. Let’s just, I mean, and nobody would’ve expected him to, nobody would’ve expected it now. And for all the hit he took in this poll and I presume other polls too.

Um, He played, you know, he’s on the right part of the calendar and he played the inside game very well. The outside game took a little bit of a hit, but he, but having said that, I mean, I, you know, I mean, I, I, I follow up on Jim’s point. I mean, I think it does speak to sort of the dysfunction and, and, you know, and kind of what we think of as like the overall feedback loop of democracy.

Right. I mean, corn and really did. Thread the needle in a way that he could go to Democrats and say, look, yeah, I know this. Isn’t what you want. But look at all the things that it is. And he could go to Republican and say, look at all the things that it isn’t. Right. Yeah. You know, this should be okay with you guys, which is classic.

And everybody said, you know, basically put up their middle fingers and said, get outta here. Right. I mean, that’s kind of been the response he’s received for that, but, but I mean, to me, the thing that’s scary is, is, you know, I mean, somebody say his public opinion and somebody say, look, look, that’s, it’s overwhelming.

I mean, these are pretty obvious. We went down the numbers, like there’s nothing he did here that was like, so outta bounds. And if anything, you know, the vast majority of it was really in the Republican. You know, desired policies, response around mental health. When you look at where that money was going, I mean, a lot of it was going to, you know, schools, mental health.

Yeah. That kind of stuff. And the reality is, is like, you know, if you’re someone else out there thinking, okay, let’s try to figure out how to compromise. Just pick an issue. Is it worth it? Well, I’m curious, you know, I, and I, I haven’t seen anything. I don’t know if you guys have, I’d be curious to see what Chris Murphy’s polling did coming from the other direction.

Mm-hmm people said, you know, you didn’t do anything, you know? Yeah. Right. Because they both came out and said, You know, this is the, this is the narrow band in the middle. We can, no, I think that’s a really good question. And we should look, we should look that I am interested in, I there’s a response to that.

I mean, just as, so, as long, we’re just gonna guess things go throw us head. I would think that there’s something here about this kind of issue set up that probably advantages someone like Murphy versus corn. Right. Which is just to say that, you know, it’s kind of like immigration it’s like, you can fight the fight.

I mean, ultimately the issue’s still out there, he’s still fighting the fight. He was still the leader on the democratics had to even try to get anything through a Senate that nothing can get through. And so to kind of, in that sense, it’s like by not solving the issue, it’s still out there to be solved.

So I don’t, I don’t see that he’s also the democratic who agreed to take a bunch of democratic issues off the table. And did it publicly enough that he was catching javelins for his members? I, I, I’m just curious about that. It would be interesting, you know, but I, but I think Murphy’s number’s good or bad.

I mean, there’s an underlying. there’s something, you know, beneath this that is really just sort of, not good about where we are because right. You know, look objectively the bill that came out, I mean, and this is, you know, other people will disagree and look the gun rights, many of the gun rights groups or the, the gun safety groups rallied around the bill, which I think they needed to do for tactical reasons.

I get it. Personally, I’m not very impressed with what the build does. It’s pretty weak sauce. Yeah. Right. I mean, and, and I think there was a lot of, and I was frustrated with a lot of the media coverage, you know, if you could call this literally historic. Right. I suppose, because, well, it’s historic in the sense that the sense didn’t do nothing, Congress did something right, right.

That a paralyzed institution managed to do, you know, something, but, you know, This is gross, but I mean, if I’m paralyzed and I manage to wiggle my toe, but that’s all I can do. I’m still paralyzed. Um, so on that note, what else? Um, I, I’m curious, what else, uh, I wanna start with you, Ross. What, what else stuck out in the poll?

We’ve covered a lot of ground, but, you know, I just did a couple of things. Just sort of general comments, you know, I’m, um, we talked before we started recording about the persistence of certain issues and, you know, things fade pretty quickly. We saw it in the Ukraine numbers in this, you know, where people are very concerned about something.

While it’s in the headlines and fresh and new, we’ve seen this with a number of shootings. We’ve seen it with police violence. We, you know, have seen it with court rulings and we’re seeing it in Ukraine. And at the same time, some issues remain persistent. You know, so inflation is the one that’s rising right now and inflation in the economy show up in people’s listing of most important problems.

And yet. Border security and immigration persist in there. They’re, you know, combined, those are still the top item. So, you know, you, you get some fluctuations like this. And I think in a, in a, an election year, this is what can be misleading about a June poll. When you’re thinking about a November election is we don’t know what we’re gonna be thinking about in October.

Um, so, you know, that’s one thing and the other one, and I, you know, this has been a, a thing of mine for a long time. I’m always interested in polls. And, and these polls have consistently done it. That show the difference between sort of the logical underpinning of people’s ideas, about policy and the emotional underpinning of their feeling about partisanship.

So you see something where they say, well, I like this and I like that. And I like the other thing. And if you let ’em choose on a cafeteria plan, they basically the voters in a poll write a bill. The legislature would never pass, but when you ask ’em about. Straight up question, are you pro-choice or pro-life they snap back into their emotional party positions and just, you know, you know, for me, one of the most useful ways to analyze this stuff is to say, okay, are we talking with our brain or our heart here?

And, and they’re talking with both. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of conflict between the two that’s evident in this poll. There’s also causing some of the noise. How about you, Josh? What else? You know, I, I just to follow on something we’re also, I’ll be quick then, you know, I mean, I think that’s where for me, that’s where you really see some of these things that are kind of hard to square, right?

I mean, I’ve kind of gone through, I think some difficult results that I think are actually easier to square and I think there’s some easy results that are a little bit harder to square. And you look at, you know, for example, and this is where I think, you know, you ask Texans, well, you know, how’s the Texas economy, not.

You know, how’s your own personal economic, not good. How are gas prices affecting you? You know, a lot, how are cost of food, housing, all these things affecting, you know, it’s all kind of negative and then, you know, sort of see ambivalence towards Abbot, but then you gonna, you know, overall, but then you say, well, how’s Abbot doing on the economy and you’d think, and it’s like, fine.

You know, Republicans say, yeah, he’s doing great. You know, Republican government tries the county. Why is United inflation not so good? And it’s sort of, you tend to say to yourself, and I think this, to your point, this is kind of how you square some of that. Where, when you say like a, you know, one plus one plus one doesn’t equal three, right.

And you’re seeing some of that. And that’s kind of this broken piece of kind of Jim is talking about. And I think that you’re talking about in terms of the partisanship that, you know, At the end of the day. I mean, one of the things that I think is really broken, we see this on our polling, you know, for a long time in the time series is sort of the extent to which valuations of the economy are filtered through sort of these partisan lenses.

Now the, the valuation of the economy are so negative right now, overall that it’s almost, it’s breaking that a little bit, but it’s not really breaking it in the way that I think we might expect to where people might start to actually cast some blame even within their own party. Although I think Democrats are starting to abiding a little bit, which adds to.

The difficulty that Democrats are facing, you know, overall just throw one thing out there. We also asked a lot of questions, uh, about January 6th and questions that we repeated. The reason we, we wanted to repeat them was with the hearings going on. We wanted to see whether, you know, these sort of high profile hearings had any impact on people’s views of what happened on January 6th, legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election, uh, and so on.

And ultimately the answer is almost none of those attitudes change between February and when we recently, and when we pulled, I should. Still time. I was still pretty much right on the heels of those hearings, but the one, one attitude that did show a pretty significant change was perceptions of future political violence in the us, which in February 54% of Texan expected more political violence in the us, in the future.

And in June, it was up to 64%, a 10% increase, uh, that was acro, you know, 6% increase among Democrats 8% de increase among independents and a 14 point increase among Republicans. So that’s one that kind of keeping eyes out for. And I think we’ll definitely be repeating on our way to the election to see what happens.

Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I probably would’ve gone a little bit in that direction, but I think, you know, this has been a great conversation. And for me, in terms of. A lot of things that we’ve been talking about over the last several months and, and, and stretching back to when you were still on the clock, Ross, I mean, but the way that you both just talked about that really crystallizes something in Joshs I’ve been in sort of, we’ve had some conversations, some colleagues at UT recently, but there are two things going on simultaneously right now that I think are just really.

They’re bad in as independent things, and they’re really bad in conjunction. And that is on one hand, as Josh is pointing out, we’re seeing a, a real decay in what we’ve called democratic norms FA you know, trust in the system. You know, a sense of allegiance to the, you know, to the basic ground rules, right.

That we see in these responses on, on democracy and how well democracy is working in the country. And in the state we see in these embedded, like really deeply now entrenched attitudes about the 20, 20 election in January 6th. But on the other hand, we’re also seeing something that I think is Fe is helping to feed that to some degree.

Uh, without letting some political leaders off the hook, but institutionally. You know, there’s a lack of responsiveness in the system right now. I mean, both at the national level, you know, this conversation has touched on, uh, you know, the limitations of what you know Congress can do. And, you know, one of the most consistent results we’re also seeing is Democrats run Congress, Republicans run Congress.

The houses are divided Congress Congress’ approval ratings. Haven’t been over 30%. It’s under check, right? The entire time we’ve done this poll. It’s the one thing you have going for you. If you’re John corn in this poll is that you are not Congress. Right. Um, you know, we look at. The conversations we’ve been having over the last couple of sessions in the legislature, the contrast between 2019 and 2021, we’re having real problems with, with what I would call a more representative.

Go approach to governance in the state and that lack of responsiveness in institutions at both the state and the federal level at the same time that we’re having a real crisis in democratic institutions and fundamental democratic norms, you know, one or the other of those things, you know, needs to change, or we’re gonna continue like on a real path of decay here.

Right. You know, there’s a, a way you can look at some of this data, you know, we asked. What question we’ve asked before about whether or not Joe Biden legitimately won the election. And about two thirds of Republicans say that he didn’t, but if you look at the results of some of our, so that he did or did not, did not, did not.

Uh, but if you look at those results among Republicans or Republicans who say that Joe Biden legitimately won about a third, about two thirds that you say he did didn’t right. Accuracy of us elections, 87% of Republicans who say that Joe Biden legitimately one of the elections say that us elections are accurate.

They look like Democrats, 90% of Democrats, 87% of Republicans among Republicans who say that he didn’t 80% say us election results are inaccurate. Uh, you know, we ask was J basically said, you know, did what happened on January 6th basically? Was it basically people trying to overturn an election result amongst those who feel that, uh, Joe Biden legitimately one of the elections, 60% of Republicans agree.

that it was, it’s fine. That it was basically an insurrection among those who think that he didn’t win the election 76% disagree with that characterization. Uh, and so, you know, I mean, the point is, I mean, you know, people have talked about the, the, the perniciousness of this continued sort of idea that the 2020 election was, was false or wrong or illegitimate or whatever, but this is the direct perniciousness, which is that you have about two thirds of Republicans holding just fundamentally anti-democratic.

Attitudes at this point, right? 72% of those Republicans who think he didn’t win, expect more political violence in the future compared to 52% of those who didn’t. So these, these views do have consequences. This language does have consequences and it’s, and it’s trending in a bad direction to, and Republicans shape at the, you know, the accusation that they’re developing into an anti-democratic reactionary party, but, you know, the evidence is mounting pretty heavily.

And it, and it’s not just a lead. How would you behave differently if you were right? Yes. It’s also happening counterfactual, you know, you know, I mean, I think there’s a lot of leadership, you know, to blame for that in the last 10 or 15 years. And look to be fair, you know, Democrats have not governed particularly effectively at the national level while they’ve been, had a lot of, you know, proximity to levers of power.

Um, right. But, you know, I. Is another of the real, underlying, consistent themes in this poll and it’s, and it’s really troubling. So, uh, Ross, thanks for coming in, uh, being, you know, in your while you’re on your gap year Hey, I wore socks and gotta wear socks once, once in a while. Right. I backing in Europe right now.

um, Josh, thanks for being here for all the work on the poll and, and the wise commentary. Uh, thanks to our production crew here in the audio studio, in the liberal arts development studio at the university of Texas, uh, all of the poll results, uh, hundreds, if not thousands of graphics from this poll. And the fifth, the 49 polls that preceded it, uh, are available at the Texas politics project website.

That’s Texas politics dot U texas.edu. Thanks for listening. And we will be back next week with another second reading podcast.

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