July 9th, 2019 – 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 chart. 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

[0:00:25 Speaker 2] must a female senator

[0:00:26 Speaker 0] raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room and welcome back? Or, if your first time listener, welcome to the second reading podcast for the week of June 24th? I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. I’m very happy to be joined today by Ross Ramsey, who is executive editor, The Texas Tribune. Ross has been president attributing since its founding in 2009. Ah, after a illustrious career, doing several other things mucking around, mucking around. And Ross is one of the leading mucking and journalistic voices on Texas politics today. So we’re lucky to have them. And for those of you in the government 3 12 class, you’ll see and read Ross elsewhere in the course material, although we’re not paying the Tribune royalties. Um, okay, I want to start with a piece that you put out yesterday, I guess in the Tribune, maybe day before yesterday. Now it will be dated July 8th in the Texas Tribune. It’s called Why would politicians fix our immigration problems when they can campaign off the mess? And one of the reason I want to start with it is because it seems to it, you know, it plugs into the situation at the border, which in itself is such an amalgam of obviously national politics but also cuts into state politics in some interesting ways. Um, you know, you wrote to the situation at the border, you know, look at the practice towards the end of the piece. Look at the practice that is what they’re doing and not doing from a policy perspective and look at the political conversation. The first is a gnarly and messy problem, and I want to emphasize this, but a solvable one. The second has become a way for each set of elected officials and the people who would like to become elected officials to appeal to partisan voters on both sides. So tell us about the burr under the saddle in writing this.

[0:02:25 Speaker 1] Well, you know, it was it was interesting because, you know, you have the incidents at the border What’s going on right now? And right now, we’re talking about detention centers that are overcrowded. The, you know, I have a column in the works. Um, you know, that will appear later this week on the office of Inspector General at the Department of Homeland Security. Basically has been dogging the homeland security people in the border patrol people and everybody else for months about the problems down there. So they’ve got this, you know, problem. And that’s the news piece. And then, as you know as well as anybody, you know, we just came out of the field with a poll that once again showed that immigration and border security are top of mind problems for Texans. Ah, when you ask him about issues facing either the state or the country and that the opinions on things around this everything from you know, what do you think about dreamers? What do you think about amnesty? What do you think about? And and for years of polling that we’ve done that you guys have done for us. It’s clear that we have become segregated into Republicans and Democrats in ways that prevent the problem solving. But that enabled the politics. And as you go into a political year like 2020 you look at the situation on the ground in sort of a practical, I think practical. Why don’t they fix this? Why aren’t they looking for solutions? Why don’t they walk out of this forest? And then you look over here and say one of the reasons they don’t walk out of the forest just because it’s politically profitable for both sides and it’s not an equivalency. I’m not taking a side in this thing between the Democrats and the Republicans. But if it does take a side, the side I’m taking is you guys are to roll up your sleeves and get to work here on the problem instead of the politics

[0:04:13 Speaker 0] right And then the problem is we see that this point. I mean, I would you know, the problem is manifesting on the border. Are all of these folks with a lot of including a lot of Children who are being held in overcrowded facilities with particularly the Children. But many of the adults as well you know what is arguably a lack of basic services food, water, space to sleep. I think they don’t even really arguable.

[0:04:39 Speaker 1] I think you could say if an adult treated a child like this, the government would come in and take the child out of that because of the child’s welfare. You know, the government doesn’t allow people, parents, guardians to do what the government itself is doing on the border.

[0:04:54 Speaker 0] You know, it strikes me that, you know, when we were you were talking about the polling we pulled earlier in the cycle of this crisis on Should we be separating families, Children from their families? It actually split Republicans. It was a little bit less partisan.

[0:05:11 Speaker 1] Well, and that’s the only place where this is moved in the last couple of years. So, you know, we have a persistent immigration, you know, whatever you wanna call it, political issue, problem, conversation, whatever. You know about the policies that we should have in place for immigration, and then how should we enforce those? And what should be our practice and the practices that seem to make the Republicans who are very conservative about this stuff. Recoil is when you start talking about Children, you can do almost anything to adults in a political sense, without revving up the crowd or worrying your base. But when you begin separating families and Children and Children can’t be, you know, um, I didn’t even know how to reconnect the kids with the people that they take them away from. You know, when you get into issues like that, it’s sort of like That’s where voters sort of set down their party flags and say, Wait a minute,

[0:06:03 Speaker 0] you know, because we could. We even saw glimmers of that with the dreamers that is, you know what to do with kids that were brought under conditions beyond their control to the United States, air technically undocumented, undocumented naming technically but have been given leave, given some policies from before and whether to make those policies permit or not, that tapped into that as well. Now I think it’s a little more partisan but still divided like the light like two separate, like the family separation

[0:06:31 Speaker 1] we had to Texas governors in a road George Bush and Rick Perry, one ran successfully for president. One ran unsuccessfully, but both sort of ran into the same problem when they took a Texas sensibility about dreamers and the border to places like Iowa and New Hampshire and the States were you campaign for president and you know they’re take was I think the Rick Perry version of dreamers was, You know, if you don’t support these kids getting an education and becoming part of the workforce than you just don’t have a heart and got him in big trouble in the debates. But if it had been a gubernatorial debate in Texas, you would have probably seen an audience full of nodding heads, both of Republicans and Democrats just saying, Yeah, you know, they’re here. We might as well, you know, make them productive.

[0:07:17 Speaker 0] Well, that’s where I wanted to go with this. Let’s, you know, talk a little bit. I mean, got to make you the old guy in the conversation, even though you are. Yeah, thanks. Um, talk about that kind of arc of views of immigration in Texas and end. You know, our assumptions about that for a long time that I think in some ways were being tested a little bit that that you know what I mean by that. Is that the particular history of Texas, the incorporation of, you know, Mexican and immigrant culture? Let’s call it what it is. We

[0:07:54 Speaker 1] were. We were we were in Mexico

[0:07:56 Speaker 0] before we were the United States, right? And and that and I think there’s always been this assumption that even among conservatives, that it created kind of a distinctive brand of conservatism on these issues and particularly among among Republicans. Once the Republican Party became more prominent that somehow this decision this issue play differently in Texas. I mean, do you think that’s under pressure? Is is still operative. I mean, when in the conversation we’re having, it seems to me it’s a little weird little in the middle there.

[0:08:25 Speaker 1] Well, I think there was a lot of you know, how to articulate this necessarily. But, you know, there was a lot of accommodation, of cultural and racial differences because of economics and because of how things work. You know, I’m from El Paso, Um, but it doesn’t really matter. I mean, the biggest Hispanic population in Texas is in Houston and that the cultures have blended so much that most of the time you’re not paying attention to it or a lot of people who are not paying attention to it. It wasn’t political

[0:08:56 Speaker 0] talking about you’re talking about on the Anglo Hispanic axis.

[0:08:59 Speaker 1] Yeah, and on the, you know, on the whole, you know, well, you know, I’m gonna go into the store, but wait, the proprietor isn’t an Anglo. I mean, that just didn’t happen that much. Didn’t seem to happen that much. Maybe I’m, you know, leave open The possibility on blind

[0:09:13 Speaker 0] it was probably gives me a little uneven, but

[0:09:14 Speaker 1] it wasn’t. It wasn’t, You know, the kind of political issue that you could take a campaign into El Paso and campaign on it, or take a campaign in the San Antonio or even Dallas and campaign on it. You had, of course, all of the regular issues of this community in that community. Gentrification and those kinds of things. Not saying there wasn’t anything

[0:09:34 Speaker 0] there a history school, segregation. I mean, it’s not like it wasn’t there at all, But

[0:09:37 Speaker 1] there was an ability in some situations to go side by side. And, um, the Texans who left the state to campaign for national office rather than taking that idea and planting that seed in places like Iowa and New Hampshire instead, went up there and came back with a a kind of a virus of, um you know, um, these air aliens and these air others, and we need to draw a hard line between us and them. And, you know, that’s where we are now, where the Republican Party, you know, voters seem to have formed around the ideas brought to them by their candidates. Um, at the national level and in the beginning and now at the state level of, you know, this is us, and that is them. And and that seems to be the war we’re fighting now. And that is not the doesn’t seem to be the way to a solution that would involve how do we go? How do we put us in them together,

[0:10:34 Speaker 0] right? I mean, I think part of unpacking that is toe also notice that on the side of Hispanic public opinion and his Hispanic attitudes in Texas, it is distinctively, you know, a notch further in the conservative and the Republican direction. Then it is, and lots of other parts of the country. So if you compare, you know, policy positions and ideological positions among Hispanics in Texas versus Hispanics and comparable states like California, you know, to some extent, Florida, um you know, But you know, higher levels of Republican voting and Republican Party identification in Texas, then you see in these other states so that traffic is. Actually, it’s not just the story of how the majority population interacted with Hispanic population, but things that are distinctive about the Hispanic population in Texas, like longer term residency, different immigration patterns, which all kind of come together in this, you know, this kind of center right political culture in Texas And you know, to me the question of the moment in a lot of ways is how is that actually gonna hold as we move forward in 2020 and then in 2022 in the Texas elections, depending on how this border situation does or does not get resolved? Because, you know, you and I have talked about this a lot before, You know, I think one of the things that was distinctive about Rick Perry, who was governor from basically 2001 to 2015 right, Um, was his ability to politically manage. I think I think he caught that shift. Whether intuitively or not,

[0:12:16 Speaker 1] he had. You know, Rick Perry’s Rick Perry’s superpower, I think, was a really great knows. He had a really great, you know, seeing things before others were seeing. And we saw the tea party before the rest of the Republicans woke up about it. I think you’re right about these issues. He was talking about rural and urban issues in, ah, you know, nuanced way a long time before a lot of people were, You know, I think his ability to, um kind of suss things out. You know, What’s the what’s the lay of the land politically in a superior

[0:12:48 Speaker 0] school? I mean, I think I think he really I mean, I think one of the ships they

[0:12:51 Speaker 1] has, he’s not dead yet.

[0:12:54 Speaker 0] He he’s just the Cabinet secretary. Um, you know, I think what was interesting about that was his ability to split off immigration and border security because he talked aggressively about border security, supported spending, more money on it, deployed the guard was willing, frankly, to be lurid on the crime issue, crime and drugs on the border but was less likely to take hard lines as you were pointing out when he went national or tried to go national on things on immigration, on things like kids, dreamers, you know, things like this. And I think that.

[0:13:30 Speaker 1] And it’s a distinction that sold below below I 10. You know, if you if you draw a line starting in El Paso along I 10 and then follow, you know, was 37 down from San Antonio Corporates everything underneath that line. If you make that distinction between sort of that these people argument of immigration and the crime argument or, you know, a border security people below that line are receptive to that.

[0:13:56 Speaker 0] Yeah. I mean, they don’t you know? Yeah, they’re just like everyone else. They don’t want crime in their communities anyway and are are willing to, you know, you are willing to respond to that. I think all of this points us then to the election landscape and where we are right now. I mean, if I don’t sort of pivot a little bit, I want to start a little bit gossip on the gossipy side. Since we have you here, Um one of the big questions at state level politics for insiders right now is you know what happens to the partisan balance in this state Legislature, and I think there are very understandable differences of opinion and and projection on this is as background for people who have not followed this up to this point. The the Democrats is people probably heard at a Goodyear at the state legislative level, um at in both the House and the Senate closed the gap to nine seats in the State House. Nine of the 150 seats gained two in the Senate and our typical expectation in Game two, but lost one game to yeah, right, right, yeah. So they so Basically, if you look at the arc of this, our expectation normally would be while they had a good midterm election, right? We expect more Democrats to turn out in a typical presidential election year. Maybe they can build on this this year. That’s not It’s clear, because of, frankly, just the trump effect. Well, somebody So what do you What do you think is going on? What your expectations.

[0:15:28 Speaker 1] So part of what happened in the midterm election was that We got a presidential level turnout and you know, in Texas for a long time it has been true that the state is very red in midterm elections when turnout is lower and not as red but still red in presidential elections, when turnout is higher and we got instead of getting the normal number of around five million give or take voters in a midterm election, we had 8.28 point three million. I don’t have the number in front of me, but above eight million. And so we had a presidential level turnout and we got a presidential level, um, result, You know that we didn’t expect in an off year. So the question now is and

[0:16:09 Speaker 0] my value mean at the top of the ballot. Better work almost beat Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz only lost by only won by less than three less than three

[0:16:17 Speaker 1] points. The races were very close at the top. Governor Abbott had a terrible opponent in Lupe Valdez on and won by 14 points. That was the high water mark, right? I

[0:16:28 Speaker 0] need one by 20. This, like the gubernatorial election before

[0:16:31 Speaker 1] Dan Patrick for lieutenant governor, won by less than five points. The attorney general won by less than four points. It was a bad year for Republicans. As you said, there were pickups in the Legislature. There were some pickups in Congress, couple of rug three, I think. And so the question is, was 2018 the beginning of a trend, And that’s how the Democrats will pitch and are pitching the 2020 election. We need to keep this train rolling. We gained 12 seats in the House. If we gain nine more, we have a majority in the House. We elect a speaker weaken, begin to play in issues we can begin to play, in particular on redistricting, which comes up in the next legislative session in the Senate. The only senator who is in a troubled situation, and I’ll explain that in a second as we go into the 2020 elections, is Pete Flores of Pleasanton. He is a Republican elected in a special election in what had been a Democratic district and in a district that votes strongly Democratic.

[0:17:32 Speaker 0] It’s pleasant in adjacent Senate. It’s that Sen Antonio

[0:17:35 Speaker 1] right, it’s it’s it’s one of those big districts that goes from San Antonio almost to El Paso. It mirrors in some ways the 23rd Congressional District that will hurt holds. But it’s more democratic than that desperate. And so the Democrats think they can take that back. So that gives them some more leverage in the Senate, where Dan Patrick, lieutenant governor, enjoyed a super majority for a period and doesn’t look on the horizon like he’s gonna have one for a long time again going into a redistricting year. If you’re the Republicans in this situation, you say, Well, you know, 2018 was a bad year for us, but it was an anomaly because of this high turnout and because of Trump and, you know, stuff like that happens. But we’re gonna bounce back. And not only do we not think that the Democrats are gonna pick up these nine seats, we don’t think that they’re gonna hold all 12 that they got from us last time,

[0:18:24 Speaker 0] because we should. We should. We shouldn’t. We shouldn’t reject there. Yeah, that because of the high turnout because it was good, Democrats or the Democrats took some seats in water, arguably at least competitive. But maybe even Republican districts that they now have to hold on to

[0:18:38 Speaker 1] a lot of, Ah, a lot of the district. A lot of the people that were watching this closely and these were, you know, guesses. But they were smart people guessing. We’re saying probably a 5 to 7 seat Democratic pick up in the 2018 elections. This was before the election, and they came out and picked up 12. They did better than expected. And so the question is, will will they continue to do better than expected? Is this a change in the electorate? Was this an anomaly? You know, what have we got going forward? And they’re both kind of playing those hands. The D Triple C, The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has sent some migrant political workers down to Austin. 1/2 dozen folks, I think, to try to build the case for five or six Congressional seats now held by Republicans trying to take advantage of this. Looking at the numbers from the Cruz and O Rourke race in particular, saying if these numbers pertained, didn’t will win some seats and again they’re going for, you know, in Congress they’re going for a majority in the House and the Legislature, where a lot of national money, I think is going to turn up. They’re going for a voice in redistricting, particularly with regard to

[0:19:49 Speaker 0] the congressional. We mentioned redistricting a couple times. You probably just lay out the fact that you know redistricting happens every 10 years in the wake of the census required by the Constitution. This is done at the state level. When it’s done in Texas by the state Legislature, right asleep, they get the first crack at it. Um, and so the partisan balance in the Legislature. When they go in, they re, and they redraw the districts for both the state, legislative and the congressional seats. It sets the pattern for the coming 10 years, and the course is a lot of variability in how you can draw those districts, and they are generally drawn to partisan advantage by the majority party. They are in control of the process,

[0:20:33 Speaker 1] and the only constraint on it right now is the Voting Rights Act in the in the Civil Rights Act. And, you know, are you giving minorities the voice minorities deserve in your state? And the Supreme Court just ruled that you know, if you discriminate on the basis of partisanship. You know, that’s just that’s being back, man. That’s that’s that’s within the rules. So really, the only restraint on this is the, um, Voting Rights Act. And because of another ruling that happened after the last redistricting, the state doesn’t have to go to the federal government for permission on changes in election law and on redistricting maps and instead puts them in the force. And the feds can come after him if they want to.

[0:21:15 Speaker 0] Okay, so you’ve done a good job of explaining this. But now what do you think? So what? I mean, in other words, a little bit it this way. What are you watching? As we as we sit here in summer of 2019 and at least in the folks you know, I spent several days with one of your colleagues at the Tribune, and when we were talking about this, it was yak yak yak about rumors about who’s gonna who’s gonna resign and who’s not right. I still find that some of that pretty unreliable. Let me ask what you

[0:21:46 Speaker 1] really early for that?

[0:21:46 Speaker 0] What do you watching right now as the gauges of how the cycle of shaping up at the state level.

[0:21:53 Speaker 1] So the, uh, you know, I think a couple of things let me start at the end. If the Democrats win the Texas House, then they will have a say in how the maps were drawn. You’ll have a Republican Senate. You’ll have a Democratic House. They’ll draw new congressional maps. They’ll draw new Senate maps and they’ll draw Newhouse maps. And here the roads diverge. If the House and Senate agree on those maps and send them to the governor and the governor agrees. Bada bing bada boom. We’re done. Chances are that they don’t agree in that the Democratic House doesn’t go along with the Republican governor in the Republican Senate. In the case of congressional maps that sends the maps to the courts right to draw in the case of legislative maps, it sends the maps to this weird five member thing that, you know, regardless of what happens in the 2020 elections, will have at least four Republicans on it, right right now has five on it’s called the Legislative Redistricting Board. So the legislative maps they’re gonna be drawn by Republicans. However, these elections come out unless some, you know, unless something completely turns over the apple cart. So you’re watching. Ah, what happens with the congressional stuff? And that’s where a bunch of national money comes into this. A lot of people are trying to raise money right now. If you if you are in any way political and you have an email account, you’ve been getting besieged by a particular kind of fundraising request which really has ah lot of its basis in the Beto O Rourke fundraising campaign against Ted Cruz. Raise little amounts of money persistently and effectively over a period of time. And you don’t need packs and big donors and stuff. And so you see everybody trying this now. So what worked in 2018 for one candidate sort of operating alone is now being tried by everybody in the field, which is going to dilute its effect. Um, and you know, So I’m watching the fundraising. What I call the financial primaries. Who’s got the most money who’s gonna be ableto have the money to mount serious bids? What’s the environment gonna be? We don’t know exactly. You know, you don’t know until eight weeks before an election or six weeks. What the elections Really? About this, This wouldn’t be going to be about economy, immigration, war, something we don’t know about. I do think that Trump is gonna be it center of it, though. And

[0:24:04 Speaker 0] I was going to say, you know, we know it’s going to be at least to some degree about the incumbent,

[0:24:07 Speaker 1] right? And if the economy is banging and you know that usually reflects well on an incumbent, um, the way to bed in these things historically is. You know, if you’re if you’re just putting an even bet on a presidential race, don’t bet against an incumbent seeking re election. They usually win. You know, the two exceptions in my lifetime were Jimmy Carter, who had a terrible economy and 52 hostages in Iran, and George H. W. Bush, who had the misfortune of running in a year when Ross Perot, ah, independent billionaire who just passed away from Dallas, got 19% and probably took it out of George Bush. And that’s how Bill Clinton became president. Unless you get something weird like that, you know the way to bet here is probably to figure out OK if Trump wins. How does he win? And with what? How much does he win by? One of the things that was notable in the 2018 election in to some extent in 2016 election was how much other Republicans outperformed Donald Trump on the ticket. And the question, If you’re running a Republican campaign now, going into 2020 is how is Trump going to perform? And by what margin do I have to outperform him to get my candidate across the line in in this congressional district or this Senate district with this House district?

[0:25:23 Speaker 0] And what’s your sense of, You know? I mean, you’re I know that you’ve been going around this state a bit since this since the session was the legislative session ended at the end of May, talking to groups. So you’ve been out and about a bit. You know, you and I have talked about this. I mean, my own sense is that part of the theory of the case for Republicans in the Legislature was to do what they could to insulate themselves from the national dynamic that you’re talking about being both trump on the Republican side or trump on both sides and outside money flowing in that then, you know, trickles down into shaping the electoral terrain. You know? So and so you know, the argument would go. The legislature did things that they thought people wanted at the state level. They worked on public education. They did things on property taxes. In the hope that if you’re a guy or a woman just running from the Texas Legislature, you could go back and go. Oh, yeah, this is all going on. But here’s our thing. This is what we did, right? I

[0:26:25 Speaker 1] think it’s gonna work. You know, I think it

[0:26:27 Speaker 0] is that. I mean, I think you think that there is probably about right.

[0:26:30 Speaker 1] Well, yeah, I think a lot of this was cleaning up the bathroom. You know, they came. The king has

[0:26:34 Speaker 0] explained that

[0:26:35 Speaker 1] Well, they came out of the 2017 legislative session, and, you know, they had this piece of legislation everybody that came to be known as the bathroom bill and it had to do with who gets to use. Which restroom is it? According to your birth, gender or your gender identity? What, exactly? And it really knocked a bunch of other stuff out of the center of the table and became the sort of the prime issue in a legislative session. And I think when they got home and this is anecdotal and, you know, um, just talking to legislators and candidates over the last two years, they got home the Republicans and the Democrats and everybody. You know, even people who were for the bathroom Bill were like, What are you doing? You’re doing all this crazy stuff. We have all these serious problems. You guys were up there, you know, moving around with this, you know, culture, war thing. And they were also doing it at a time when Donald Trump waas re arranging the furniture in politics. You know, in a way where a disruptive kind of politics. And they came into this session chastened by the you know, what happened in the 2018 elections and by chasing I mean, the Republicans were chasing assure people who were in charge and having heard all of this about bathrooms and having seen the results in the 2018 elections, said, You know, we need to basically straighten up and fly right, and their version of Straighten Up and Fly right was Let’s do property taxes and school finance those air very salient issues for voters. The Legislature can talk about immigration, but we really don’t have much power to do much about it. We’re certainly not going to talk about bathrooms again. Let’s just keep a focus. And they did keep a focus and they came out. And I think, you know, unless those changes that they made to property taxes in school finance Ah, I find an un receptive audience. I think people are kind of willing to look at it. You know, at least a dis early stage and say, Well, they did what We set him up there to dio,

[0:28:33 Speaker 0] And so is your sense that have you got any sense of how it’s going over having been out there? Yeah, we’ve got some sense, more polling, but

[0:28:40 Speaker 1] a little bit. I mean, you know, the sand and the sand in the oyster here is on property taxes. The Legislature would love to lower your property taxes, but really doesn’t have the power to do that. They have the power to put some incentives in that might, you know, get some localities. Whether that means school District’s counties or cities toe lower their property taxes, but in terms of getting a property tax cut to voters in a way that they feel it and they say, Wow, there’s a chicken in my pot I don’t think they did that. And so if voters were expecting a tax cut, there’s gonna be some push back there on the school finance thing. The Senate voted out a bill unanimously Democrats and Republicans that said, every school teacher in Texas should get a $5000 teacher pay raise. And at the time everybody was saying, You know, this isn’t gonna happen because it takes all the money off the table that we need for other things and you know, it’s crazy. But they passed it and they got a lot of publicity. They got a lot of headlines. They all talked about it a lot. And now that the session is over, and that’s not what happened, the teachers all over the state not all of them, of course, but enough that you know it’s noisy. You’re going to their school boards saying, Where’s my 5000 bucks? The Legislature did leave it to school boards to say, you know, which teachers get the raise is how much raises they get, how they use the money yada, yada, yada. And if people voters air happy with the way that that all sorts out. And they feel like the state has leveled the game between how much local property taxes have toe support schools and how much the state support schools things like that, then that will benefit the state’s top officials. But the problem with bread and butter stuff in politics is that it’s hard to get voters to reward you for doing the job they think you’re supposed to be doing in the first place,

[0:30:27 Speaker 0] right? I think that’s right, you know, just is your explaining that, you know, you comport you compare that explanation as a pitch to voters to the volume and intensity of what’s coming nationally, I think they’re in trouble. Well, you know,

[0:30:46 Speaker 1] one of our one of our, um, one of the candidates who ran in an election, you know, several cycles ago. But this this applies forward is he was running as a statewide official, but not at the top of the ticket. And I said, you know, how did that go? And he said. What didn’t go well? It’s a Democrat said it didn’t go well and I said Why? And he said, I could’ve spent 10 million more dollars, but I wasn’t the guy at the top of the ticket, and everything that happened to me was a result of something at the top of the ticket. And I think that’s gonna be true in a Trump election, for better or for worse. For Democrats and Republicans,

[0:31:17 Speaker 0] that’s a clear position. Ross. Thanks for coming by.

[0:31:20 Speaker 1] Yeah, happy to do it.

[0:31:21 Speaker 0] You’ll have a good week. Jim Henson here and we’ll talk to you next week. Second Reading Podcast is a production of Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.