June 26th – Wading through crosscurrents in the latest UT/Texas Politics Poll to understand Texans’ seemingly mixed reviews of the legislature

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[00:00:36] Jim Henson: 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. Happy to be joined today by Josh Blank, research Director for the Texas Politics Project. I’m not gonna mention the weather. How are you doing today, Josh?

[00:00:51] Josh Blank: I’m doing pretty all right.

[00:00:52] Jim Henson: I’m doing okay. All right. Good. Well, You know, we recorded late last week and our recording early this week just because of our enthusiasm for the work we do.

[00:01:03] Josh Blank: It’s not even a joke. It’s not even a joke. I, I almost said, I almost said to you last week on Thursday when we finished recording, should we just record another one?

[00:01:11] Josh Blank: Or should we come in tomorrow and record another one? Should we

[00:01:14] Jim Henson: just get Darren outta here and record another one? We’ll just do another one. It’s like, uh,

[00:01:17] Josh Blank: yeah.

[00:01:18] Jim Henson: Well, you know, uh, we recorded late last week with, um, with Darren Shaw, our, uh, carm Matt in arms when it comes to the polling, among other things.

[00:01:28] Jim Henson: Um, And so not a lot of time has passed since our initial discussion of our June poll, but as, as we’re discussing, that’s kind of the point. There’s a lot in the poll. Uh, there’s a lot going on. And while we managed to cover a lot of ground last week with Darren, uh, much of that discussion was understandably focused on the impeachment and, and trial of suspended Attorney General Ken Paxton.

[00:01:53] Jim Henson: I’m thinking today we can try to accomplish a couple of overlapping goals. So one step back a bit, look at what the poll tells us overall about views of the legislature in the wake, uh, of the regular session, and how much those views now are a break from what we usually see or not. And over the way and, and along the way kind of.

[00:02:15] Jim Henson: Touch on some of the results that we didn’t get quite get to last week. Um, and just generally kind of think about what the poll told us about views of the legislature and views of legislative performances. I mean, look, as we record this today, I think we have every expectation that the first special session called by the governor is going to.

[00:02:40] Jim Henson: You know, Peter out this week, you know, the clock’s gonna run out, uh, without anything having gotten done. Um, you know, and, and we ended the last podcast talking about the support for specific policy proposals that we tested in the poll. Um, and we were talking about those views, you know, I think not just among Republicans, but uh, among Texans overall and looking at the comparatively lower levels of enthusiasm and confidence in the legislature.

[00:03:11] Jim Henson: I. When we asked about approval for the legislature’s behavior and broader policy areas, now where we, I think we wanna land today is to also look at some of our more specific mm-hmm. Our results on some of the more specific policy proposal proposals, which we hit last time and, and talked about a bit.

[00:03:28] Jim Henson: But that dynamic is interesting as we’ve been talking about both in terms of, you know, kind of the. Some of the subtleties that work here in, in, in Poland, but also in terms of talking about the broader cross currents and public opinion on policy performance. Right. I mean, so we’ll, we’ll, let’s unspool that.

[00:03:48] Jim Henson: I think we wanna start, you know, most directly, if we’re gonna talk about, uh, how people view the legislature, we should just start with overall job approval, which we’ve asked a bunch of times, and just to do that quickly. Overall job approval, 33% approved, 45. 40% disapprove, which is on the low end of what we’ve seen over the last six or so sessions.

[00:04:10] Jim Henson: Right?

[00:04:11] Josh Blank: Yeah. We’ve seen, you know, again, we’ve been doing this for a while now, and so we can, we can make good comparison points at sort of the June, June polling end of session and, and approval. You know, over this time period, over 10 years has ranged between a low of 28%. Uh, A high of about 42% disapprovals range between 29%, uh, and 48%.

[00:04:31] Josh Blank: We can talk about which specifically, which years there words were. But it’s a little bit of, little bit too much depth here. Yeah. Strangely enough. Let’s not get too deep. Let’s not get too deep on this. Um, now it’s almost

[00:04:41] Jim Henson: 4th of

[00:04:42] Josh Blank: July. Well, I was wondering, you know what I mean, and again, it’s, it’s interesting because I think, you know, there are a couple sort of, I think.

[00:04:49] Josh Blank: Quick take reactions to some of these types of numbers that I think are fair if you don’t dig into it very much. Right. And one of, you know, I think one of, and we’re gonna kind of, I think we’re gonna address both of those reactions today. So one reaction about the general numbers might be to say, Hey, you know, yeah, well, of course approval numbers are a little bit low.

[00:05:08] Josh Blank: They’re in a special session, they didn’t do what they said they were gonna do. And then generally, you know, I think if you’ve, I mean, I’m sort of feeling like this is probably true, although I need to, like, I’m gonna say this is a. A guess, although I think the data probably is supporting this. Mm-hmm. You know, the longer the legislature’s around it generally doesn’t.

[00:05:26] Josh Blank: Add to, you know, positive evaluation. I’m not saying it’s impossible. It depends on the circumstances, I think, in which the legislature gets called back. But if you think about the last session, and again, the circumstances were very different, having multiple special sessions that time, and the causes of those special sessions, both from a policy stand,

[00:05:40] Jim Henson: I mean the Democratic flee, you know, breaking Quorum in 2021.

[00:05:44] Jim Henson: Definitely colored that,

[00:05:45] Josh Blank: right? But I think, you know, You know, interestingly enough, you know, given how often we talk about how little people pay attention to this stuff, it seems like in a state that sort of expects its government to be at least somewhat limited and only kind of there and active for a long period of time, the longer they stay around, it does seem to start to test people’s patients a bit, right?

[00:06:04] Jim Henson: Yeah. I mean, I, I think, you know, You know, that’s an interesting response. I mean, I think, um, well,

[00:06:09] Josh Blank: I mean it’s actually, it’s, well it’s, I lemme finish the point. It’s a little bit of, I mean, it’s not a straw man, but it’s a little bit of it. I think that’s out there. And I think that is definitely, you know, it’s, it’s coloring some of the negativity.

[00:06:20] Josh Blank: But I think the point is you gotta dive into the numbers and say, well, wait a minute, is this just because, you know, they haven’t succeeded on some of the things they say they were gonna succeed on? Or is this more broad? Yeah. And when you start to look at these, this data, and as we’re gonna go into a little bit deeper, what you find is that the discontent is a little bit more broadly distributed and more focused on a number of areas.

[00:06:39] Josh Blank: At this point. That’s not just about property taxes,

[00:06:41] Jim Henson: right? Because it’s more broadly distributed. There’s a lot more places for people to rest. You know, to, to park. I shouldn’t say rush to park there. You know, look, this is Texas and this we are living in the moment that we’re in. You know that, I think that’s a good, that’s a good way of putting it.

[00:06:57] Jim Henson: That broader array that we can look at in part because we poll on so damn many things. Right. But also, you know, it gives a lot of different people, different places to park their discontent. And that discontent I think is part political culture in the state and part the immediate. Kind of circumstances.

[00:07:18] Jim Henson: I mean, if you go back to the, that range of approval numbers that you talked about. Mm-hmm. I mean, I. You know, nothing in that range said, well, you know, there have been times when 70% of Texans approved of what the

[00:07:28] Josh Blank: legislature was doing. Right. Ex Exactly. But, but so, and this is the point though. So when we start to, we’ll keep kind of coming back to this.

[00:07:34] Josh Blank: Now, look, it’s, that wouldn’t be surprising to say, yeah, there’s overwhelming disapproval among Democrats because Democrats are out of power, so their voters are negative. But a, but a majority, you know, but the plurality of the sample is made up of Republicans because the plurality of voters in the state are made up of Republicans.

[00:07:47] Josh Blank: And when we look at their numbers, it’s not as though they’re. Brimming with approval of what’s gone on here, right? And so what we see is we find, you know, 50% in total g o p approval of, of the job the legislature has done. Uh, only 9% of that is strong approval. Right. Oh, I’m sorry. Is that wrong? Do have that right?

[00:08:05] Josh Blank: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:08:06] Jim Henson: Didn’t, if you were looking at something else from your, I’m looking at the wrong notes. Yeah, no, 40%. I’m sorry. It’s 52%. It, it’s, you know, what I have is 50, 52% approved. Right. But you know, the point I think you’re heading to is that 42% of Republicans only approve somewhat. Right. Only 10% of Republicans approved strongly, which is interesting, but also not.

[00:08:27] Jim Henson: Totally off the line.

[00:08:28] Josh Blank: Well, yeah, I mean it’s interesting. Not totally off the line. I mean, you know what’s interesting about it is, you know, when you think about it, if I was sitting here and I’m like trying, you know, just I just putting myself in the position of, you know, sort of let’s say a Republican leader in the state, knowing that I have total control over the agenda.

[00:08:41] Josh Blank: I have the votes to pass what I want to pass. I can’t look at these numbers and say home run. The other piece of this that’s interesting is you’ve got about, you know, a quarter of Republicans who are just kind of. Not, not offering up an opinion at this point, or not holding one about it. Right. Which is also kind of problematic given the, you know, the, the role that’s sort of mobilization in this state plays.

[00:09:00] Josh Blank: So it’s not a ringing endorsement. And I think what you’re gonna see as we kind of go into these numbers a little bit more is that, you know, it’s hard to just say, well, this is about the special session. This is about the fact that they didn’t do this, they’re gonna do, but it’s like, yeah, we start to dig into these numbers, these pockets of discontent.

[00:09:15] Josh Blank: Where I think if you are a Republican leader in the state, you wouldn’t expect there to be keep popping up. Right? Yeah. And that’s, you know, I think that’s what’s sort of, you know, so interesting here in a lot of ways. And I think it does relate in some ways to policy, but in a complicated way.

[00:09:29] Jim Henson: Right. I mean, so I think, you know, one last kind of point, a couple of small points about the general, you know, these kind of general reads.

[00:09:36] Jim Henson: I mean, you kind of, you know, you know, you put, you put it forth as a little bit of a straw man. And I think that’s right, but only a little bit, I mean, You know, I think two things to note here is, you know, one thing that we notice probably, maybe, maybe more closely, and maybe in being fair, we overestimate it a little bit, but I think again, as you were saying, I could, I could find data certainly on media use patterns to back this up.

[00:10:01] Jim Henson: Yeah. You know, whether the coverage is intensely negative or you know, whatever the tone of the coverage allowing for, you know, eliminating outliers. Mm-hmm. Um, You know, as summer, you know, sets in and then you’ve got a special session. Mm-hmm. And this is the point I’m saying from our, you know, reflects our experience so, A lot of the local news television stations are covering what’s going on, the fact of the special session, what’s going on, and you know, that’s bound to be a little bit negative.

[00:10:35] Jim Henson: And it taps into, again, the, both the negativity of the moment, as I was saying earlier, and activates that kind of wellspring of negative predispositions towards government or mediocre predispositions towards government in the legislature. And I think that’s one, you know, so there’s that. And then the other piece, just to kind of peel off something that’s the, that’s the.

[00:11:00] Jim Henson: Traditional media piece. Yeah. And then there’s the social media piece, which is, you know, I mean, if, if you’re somebody who is still on Twitter, and we said this, we’re watching social media, you know, one of the arguments being proffered for this dissatisfaction by interested parties on the f. You know, on the far end of the, the far right end of the Republican party is that this is a result of dissatisfaction among conservatives and the fact that conservatives are, you know, the, the people that are really feeling betrayed on this and that is not indicated

[00:11:36] Josh Blank: in the data.

[00:11:37] Josh Blank: Yeah. There’s no, I mean that’s, I mean, what I love is, first of all, that argument is made at the end of. Every single session no matter

[00:11:44] Jim Henson: what. Yeah, certainly for the last, you know,

[00:11:46] Josh Blank: yeah. Five to six successions, several sessions. This, this idea that somehow the far right has been let down and therefore they’re upset.

[00:11:54] Josh Blank: Now we ask a bunch of questions that kind of get at this. We ask about, you know, the, whether or not conservative. Or I’m sorry, whether or not Republican elected officials are conservative enough or not, we ask us among Republicans and we look at, you know, the views of extreme conservatives and everybody else.

[00:12:05] Josh Blank: And there’s not a lot of sense that Republicans are not being conservative enough. And when we look at the results across, you know, multiple dimensions of evaluation, it’s not as though, you know, the extreme. You know, people who are the identify as the most conservative in the sample hold less positive views than Republicans overall, in fact, For the most part, they hold more positive views.

[00:12:24] Josh Blank: It’s the opposite. Yeah. They look, I mean, if you look at some of the policies that are pursuing that are the most controversial, those are. Direct shots to this group of voters. And it’s not as though they aren’t, you know, they don’t look like Republicans. I mean, for the most part, again, the, the, the, the, uh, majority trajectory within the Republican party is aligned with these extreme conservatives.

[00:12:43] Josh Blank: But when we look at evaluations of the legislature in these key areas, and, you know, reactions to policies, you know, this is, this is the target market for a lot. So these guys and gals are basically fine. Right.

[00:12:55] Jim Henson: And look, I, I, I, I really, I think it’s important to. To really underline that. Yeah. I mean, because, and underline the fact that they’re, you know, the, the data on this are pretty unambiguous.

[00:13:07] Jim Henson: I mean, if you look at those legislative underneath the hood of those legislative approval numbers that we were just talking about, you know, as you say, people that identify as extremely conservative on our seven point ideology scale. Um, The approval level is, you know, the aggregate approval level is highest among those who say they’re in, they’re increasingly con, they’re extremely conservative, and the overall disapproval level is highest among those who say they only lean conservative.

[00:13:38] Jim Henson: Mm-hmm. So it’s actually the opposite of that narrative.

[00:13:41] Josh Blank: Right. Exactly. And this is look, and like, you know, it’s like there’s sort of a. Duh. But I mean, we’re trying to, you know, disentangle what, what people say about the electorate and what’s actually going on here. And the thing is, we’ve been talking about this for a while after, you know, at this point, now let’s, I say two sessions in a row, that that really leaned heavily conservative in a lot of the focus that was, uh, I would say highlighted by the media, highlighted by leadership, made to be, you know, presented in a positive light to these voters.

[00:14:13] Josh Blank: What you end up with. And we talked with, a lot of times there’s not a lot of low hanging fruit here for like, you know, conservative leading Republican voters. You know, ultimately a lot of the stuff that they’ve been going after the last couple of years have been enacted. We have permitless carry, we have a ban on abortion.

[00:14:27] Josh Blank: And so at this point you find yourself reaching for like, you know, things like. I mean, you know, we can not to whatever I’m gonna say, you know, like gender affirming care. And you start worrying about what books are in the libraries and this starts to make these sort of, you know, conservative by nature, but not ideal.

[00:14:41] Josh Blank: You know, not overwhelmingly ideological Republicans a little bit squeamish. Yeah. And you see that in the data.

[00:14:47] Jim Henson: Yeah. And you’re, you know, you’re beginning to search for either those niche issues or you know, you’re looking to open up. Kind of new beach heads, if you will. But

[00:14:55] Josh Blank: here’s the real issue with this.

[00:14:57] Josh Blank: When you’re searching for niche issues, the problem becomes, how does, how do those niche issues align or, or fail to align with people’s overall evaluations about the direction of the state and about areas of. Big policy. Right? And I think that’s where you can start to say like, well, you know, we sort of ended with this last week, but when we look at the specific policy areas, we see a lot of approval for these policy areas.

[00:15:20] Josh Blank: But as we pointed out last week, that’s endogenous to the process, right? Not only to the overall, you know, it depends on, regardless of what timeframe you look at. And there’s two points to this. One, it’s very introduction to the process at the beginning is a reflection of the fact that these are issues that leadership have determined.

[00:15:35] Josh Blank: Right, based on the coalitional, politics within the state are winning issues for them, right? Whether because it’s overwhelmingly pop popular with Republicans, it’s overwhelmingly popular with Republicans and breaks off a significant number of Democrats. Or in some cases it’s just overwhelmingly popular with the most conservative voters, right?

[00:15:51] Josh Blank: In the electorate. Right? But then also, Yeah. Then we learn about these policies, we hear that these are going on, and then what happens? They get refined throughout the process to become even more palatable to the electorate. Right? And so we see this in this terms of like the, the most obvious example that comes to mind is, is the drag show bill, right?

[00:16:08] Josh Blank: Yeah. Right. So prohibiting, you know, drag performances, you know, in public places in front of a minor. And then over time that Bill became, well, let’s just prohibit sexually explicit performances in public places in front of a minor. And just like, you know, look, even if you don’t study public opinion, You could understand how this very specific, you know, instance of saying, you know, drag shows are the same.

[00:16:28] Josh Blank: The idea of we’re gonna put into law a definition of drag shows so that we keep minors away from this. And some very funny testimony, to be quite honest, if you watched it right, in terms of people you know, I mean a lot of Democrats asking people, well, where did you see a drag show? On the internet. So you watch drag shows on the internet, you know, these funny interactions to like, Hey, look, who’s against, you know, keeping sexually

[00:16:48] Jim Henson: explicit performance.

[00:16:48] Jim Henson: Right, exactly. And just, you know, I mean, in some ways it’s a, it’s some kind of combination of, you know, the, all the discussion of 20 or 30 years ago about a subtle shift in language or to something, you know, the semiotics of this are pretty basic. Oh, semiotic, right? Yes. In terms of saying, you know, look, one, you know, you start off saying, Drag shows.

[00:17:08] Jim Henson: Yeah. Loudly, you know, and children Yeah. To saying sexually explicit. Right. A broader category, but you crank up the exposure to kids and you know it, you know, why wouldn’t that work? Yeah. And, and also, and start and stark political terms.

[00:17:23] Josh Blank: Right? Well, and I mean, something you have to ask yourself regardless, you know?

[00:17:26] Josh Blank: I think if you’re listening to this, you’re obviously probably have a pretty developed ideology, but the thing you need to do is you need to sweep that away for a second and say, forgetting, you know, downstream consequences, second and third order, you know, argumentations about these things. Does that sound like a reasonable policy?

[00:17:41] Josh Blank: And you know what? To most people it’s gonna sound like reasonable policy, but. The question is, is that a policy that addresses a broader area of concern in terms of the way that people are thinking about the state and thinking about the issues? Yeah. Or is it so niche that it doesn’t really address it?

[00:17:57] Josh Blank: Right.

[00:17:58] Jim Henson: And there’s, you know, I mean, I and I, what I like about that point, and, and you know, as we were talking about how to approach this a little bit for the discussion is that, You know, what that brings out is the nature of, you know, one important aspect of political discourse, right? Mm-hmm. Which is it’s recursive.

[00:18:14] Jim Henson: Yeah. You know, there’s a bit of ongoing trial and error or, you know, whatever your sort of figure of speech is, you know, you on something like that. The, so, uh, particularly in the middle of a session mm-hmm. You know, you’re kind of building the airplane while you’re flying it. Mm-hmm. In terms of going, oh, we we’re gonna start this way and the process is gonna play out.

[00:18:34] Jim Henson: Yeah. And through what we think of as some of the normal mechanisms of the legislative process and the public response to the legislative process, you make course adjustments, pass these compromised bills, and then declare victory. Right. And you know, or the plane

[00:18:49] Josh Blank: never gets off the ground. Right.

[00:18:50] Jim Henson: And Or, or it crashes.

[00:18:52] Jim Henson: Yeah. Right. Depending on I love that. Yeah. There’s a lot of different ways you could torture that metaphor. So, um, So let’s you know, I mean, let’s put a little, let’s put a little bit of meat on these bones. But I do wanna flag at this point, you know, production note. Um, you know, we will post this. We’re gonna probably go through a few more numbers.

[00:19:12] Jim Henson: We’ve talked about some numbers already. If you’re listening to this on one of the podcasting platforms, as always, we’ll have a post at the Texas Politics Project website, Texas Politics dot u texas.edu. Uh, you know, you may have to write this down. You know, you, you know, follow the polling link. You’ll see a link, a, a, a menu choice to go to the blog, the, the podcast, the supplemental, you know, podcast plus post.

[00:19:38] Jim Henson: We’ll be in that blog session section and we’ll have links and, and graphics. So, so let’s, let’s talk a little bit about these. So legislative efforts you were talking about. You know, sort of general policy areas a minute ago versus these specific proposals that evolve more specifically in the process and the cross currents we see in this data.

[00:19:59] Jim Henson: So let’s, let’s start with kind of the bad news in a way. So, legislative efforts in general policy areas that we tested looked at 16 policy areas in the poll. Right, and the legislature’s efforts failed to earn approval from a majority of Texas voters in any of those policy areas. Only three policy areas found more voters approving than disapproving.

[00:20:25] Jim Henson: That is in net positive territory, mm-hmm. Of the job performance of state leaders and the legislature.

[00:20:31] Josh Blank: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I mean, beyond that, I mean, we’d say, you know, go further. You’d say seven of those issues saw, you know, a net negative approval between, you know, minus one and minus seven points and six issues saw, uh, a gap of 10 points or more where, you know, the share disapproving, disapprove by 10 points or more than the share who approved.

[00:20:47] Josh Blank: But here’s the, the real problem when you look at this now, again, take a step back. It’d be very easy to say what you know, I’ll just put this out there real quick and then we’ll move on. Was democratic disapproval overwhelming for almost all of these issues? Yes, as we would expect, but there are only five issues in which 50% or more of Republicans approve of how the legislature did on these issues.

[00:21:07] Josh Blank: Right, right. So five of the 16 areas. Okay. No issue saw net positive approval among independents. And you know, we brought this up a little bit last week, but this is important for those who follow political geography in the state, right? Only two issues saw net positive evaluations in the suburbs. And the issue that was sort of one of the higher ones, the economy.

[00:21:27] Josh Blank: You know, that’s not really in control of the legislature, right. I mean, ultimately, you know, sort of in some ways the legislature benefits from the fact that, you know, inflation has been cooling a little bit over this time period. And so in some ways, you know, that’s almost just a benefit they get. It might be worse if it weren’t for that.

[00:21:41] Josh Blank: So they’re

[00:21:42] Jim Henson: getting the benefit of the economy and, and for the most part, the Democrats are getting don’t blamed for the downside. Right. Right. Yeah, so that’s that, you know, the lag, et cetera, et cetera. And just to give people a, a, a sense, right, of what we’re talking about here, we’re talking about policy areas cuz we’ll move on in a second.

[00:21:59] Jim Henson: You know, in terms of the language on the poll, we’re talking about asking people about things, and I’m just kind of randomly pulling these, you know, so that you could get a sense of the generality, you know, abortion policy, school safety, healthcare, K through 12 education, mental health services, the electric grid, and what you’ll notice, so there’s no directionality.

[00:22:18] Jim Henson: Right. In those terms, we’re just saying, thinking about this general policy area, based on what you’ve heard out there, based on what you, what do you, you know, what do you think? And so, you know, you’re ba I mean, I, you know, to be fair to some degree without discounting, and I think the, the way that you said where the, the different level, you know, the extent of disapproval was, you know, I mean, we’re picking up on what is still a generally negative political environment to some extent.

[00:22:43] Jim Henson: Yeah. And, and I think the other, but the legislature ha I mean it’s fair to say the legislature hasn’t really helped themselves on that. Well, and this

[00:22:48] Josh Blank: is sort of the thing, I mean, you know, if we sort of think of like a, I mean, I don’t know how to, I dunno how to like say this out in any sort of meta, we use a lot of metaphors here, but the things I’m thinking about are three sort of buckets, right?

[00:22:58] Josh Blank: Uh, and, and it sort of spans time and space a little bit, right? And one is something we talk about buckets that span time and space. Space. It’s buckets that span time and spa. Well, that’s what happens when you don’t have a good metaphor at hand. Okay? Okay, sir. I like it. No, uh, I like it actually. So one thing we haven’t brought up here, but we bring up a lot is, you know, and we talked about this a little bit last week, but just was the overwhelming sort of negative assessments towards institutions broadly that have been going on for a number of years now.

[00:23:24] Josh Blank: Right. And we’ve talked about sort of the right direction, wrong track numbers, you know, we see about a majority of tax ands who for a while now have said the state’s on the wrong track, you know, negative evaluations of institutions, of all kind. And it’s sometimes, you know, we’ve talked about this previously, you know, and because cuz I mean, I would say this, I was thinking about this this morning and I, you know me, I like to be fair.

[00:23:41] Josh Blank: It’s not as though both parties over time haven’t contributed in one way or another to sort of fomenting a certain amount of, uh, you know, antipathy towards traditional American institutions. And if you, you know, even though the right has been more, much more at the forefront of this recently, you know, you can think back not long ago.

[00:23:59] Josh Blank: And again, and I would say also, you know, a lot of the time that these are, you know, this is the nature of a pluralistic system to the extent that, you know, there’s. Uh, antipathy on the right towards all institutions, let’s say. That’s a small share of Republicans, but it’s part of the discourse, right? To the extent that there is antipathy, let’s say on the left towards like capitalism.

[00:24:16] Josh Blank: Yeah. That’s there. It’s a small share, but it’s still, yeah.

[00:24:19] Jim Henson: Look, look, I, I would summarize that by saying, look, you know, a generation ago, maybe a little bit more so I get older, you know, systemic critique was much more in the United States. Yes. It was much more a feature of the left than the right, right.

[00:24:32] Jim Henson: As we fast forward to the present, um, There’s at least parity, right? And, and perhaps even, you know, I mean they’re moving in different directions for the most part,

[00:24:43] Josh Blank: but Right. And so on. So I think, you know, if you think about what is the broadest context we could look at, we could say there’s these incredibly negative and increasingly negative evaluations of all institutions.

[00:24:52] Josh Blank: And we’d asked the question a couple times, you know, throughout the course of, as we’ve been watching public opinion in the space develop. How long can you criticize institutions, let’s say, as the party that’s in charge of all the institutions broadly, and not have that eventually. Seep into your own actions, right?

[00:25:07] Josh Blank: And then we look at this, right? Which is saying, okay, let’s look at gen, you know, broad evaluation of the legislature, how they did, let’s look at evaluations in all these areas. And then you find, again, really negative evaluations for the most part, right? And that’s what the central thrust, and then we have to come to this third piece where it was like, well, yeah, but they, but they deal in concrete policies.

[00:25:27] Josh Blank: So what are the reactions to those policies? And there, what’s interesting, this is maybe the most complicated piece of this, which is to say, yeah, in general they’re relatively positive. I. But this is where we need to kind of go into some speculation, right? This is where the politics of this really, you know, come, comes to the fore.

[00:25:45] Josh Blank: So let’s talk a little bit, I guess, about the policies for a minute. Yeah. And then we can kind of get into like how we think about the dynamics of this. And I mean, the one thing I wanna say out loud so I don’t forget, but the question of, you know, can you mobilize these specific policies during the campaign season to change people’s views in terms of these broader currents?

[00:26:04] Josh Blank: Right, right, right. So the idea is, you know, you know, for the, the most obvious example, maybe we’ll come back to school, you know, education maybe a little bit later cause it’s such a complicated area. But for example, you know, does requiring an armed guard on every public school campus during school hours, which saw 76% support, including 59% of Democrats, right?

[00:26:24] Josh Blank: Does that make Texans feel like schools are safer?

[00:26:28] Jim Henson: Well, and then if we go back then to the other side and say at the issue level, Do you approve or disapprove of what the legislature has done on school safety? 35% approve, 42%

[00:26:40] Josh Blank: disapprove. And further, fewer than 20% think the legislature has done anything sufficient to improve school safety when asked about their confidence in that.

[00:26:49] Josh Blank: Right. And so and so that, and I mean like that’s such a great exa, I mean, it’s a great example because it really lays out this dynamic here, right? Now, it doesn’t mean that this is fixed for in perpetuity. And that’s, that’s sort of the point going forward is, you know, it’s gonna be the job of legislative candidates to come out and say, not only did we fix the grid, but this is how we fixed the grid.

[00:27:09] Josh Blank: This is how we did it. But I think, you know, looking at this data, it sort of makes you, I mean, I think the question, and I mean just makes me wonder is how effective are they gonna be at that, given this sort of overwhelmingly widespread, uh, You know, set of attitudes.

[00:27:25] Jim Henson: Right. And you can, you know, I mean, you know, it’s interesting.

[00:27:27] Jim Henson: So you could basically, and we haven’t quite done this, this is really for us, it’s a whiteboard exercise. Yeah. That then hopefully would result in Yeah. Some kind of making sense of this. But you know, as I’m sitting here looking at my notes, you can probably hear me writing on the recording. Sorry. They’ll probably edit it out cuz they’re so great.

[00:27:43] Jim Henson: But you know, I mean if you look at for exam, you, you can find all these examples where either there’s something. The approval levels on the, on the specific issues, more or less correspond to the general policy, but then you to the general policy approvals. But you can also find the opposite and sometimes within the same area in a way.

[00:28:05] Jim Henson: That’s kind of the point.

[00:28:07] Josh Blank: Right, exactly. So, so this kind of goes back to, I think, how we think about. About maybe poll, you know, about polling and maybe, maybe about politics in some ways. I think it’s related here. Yeah. You know, and how and why we ask so many questions and why we ask it in different ways.

[00:28:19] Josh Blank: Right. So on the one hand we have this, you know, 16 policy areas where we ask people to approve or disapprove of the legisla. Angela, we have these 16 specific policies that we think, you know, we’re, uh, in the discussion enough that people should, you know, have a reaction to, or might have a reaction to. In some ways, you know, we’re trying to do a lot of different things with both of these, both on their own and together.

[00:28:39] Josh Blank: And I think it’s worth just for a moment kind of trying to explain that, right? I think, you know, when we’re looking at the broad policy areas, what we’re tr and even broad evaluations, what we’re really trying to understand is what are the cross currents here? As you, as you pointed out, you said something key there before we just, you know, there’s no direction in the question, right?

[00:28:52] Josh Blank: We’re asking the voter to provide us the direction. You know, there’s another question type of question we ask a lot. Uh, Which is about, you know, whether or not a law or you know, should be more strict, less strict, or left as it is now. For example, should abortion policies and laws be more strict, should gun laws be more strict, less strict?

[00:29:06] Josh Blank: And this gives us just a sense, what’s the temperature? Yeah. And what we’re trying to figure out here is when we talk about cross current, we’re trying to figure out what’s the temperature, you know, what’s important to the electorate, where are they leaning on that policy? But it doesn’t tell us where we should land, right?

[00:29:20] Josh Blank: The policies are gonna ultimately be the political, you know, the, the, the pol, the elites. Interpretation of how they can best, you know, mobilize what’s at their disposable to deal with the current cross currents. But really when we assess them all we’re kinda looking is, well, what are the guardrails? And sometimes we find a guardrail, sometimes we don’t.

[00:29:37] Josh Blank: Right. You know, so for example, Abortion’s an interesting area where there’s a clear guardrail and we’re all, we’re over it. We’re past it, right? We crashed through that a while ago. We crashed through that a while ago and Ultimate about a year ago. About a year ago, and, and ultimately we’re actually in

[00:29:49] Jim Henson: Texas.

[00:29:49] Jim Henson: We crashed

[00:29:49] Josh Blank: through it. We crashed it a while ago, several years ago. But, but the thing is pop, but, but views in that policy area have remained negative. They don’t change doesn’t, because we’ve gone through the guardrail and some of this stuff we see, you know, just cuz you haven’t hit a guardrail doesn’t mean that you’ve necessarily like done a good job.

[00:30:03] Josh Blank: And that’s kind of part of the piece here. Right. You know, we, I think, you know, transportation policy is like the great example of this. And we’ve talked about this before. Speaking of guardrails. Yeah. Well, no, listen. Hey, yeah, that’s, see that’s a, I

[00:30:13] Jim Henson: got a good night sleep. That’s a good consonant. That’s a good consonant metaphor.

[00:30:16] Josh Blank: I got a good night’s sleep here. You know, we talk about polling in transportation’s. Interesting. Because essentially what you find is, is that whatever you ask voters, You know, do you think we should add more roads? Do you think, you know, we should, uh, increase ho V lanes, so on and so forth, whatever. And generally people will say, yeah, I support all those things.

[00:30:36] Josh Blank: I support anything that might reduce traffic. And then we say, you know, like, do you think this is gonna reduce traffic? No. No, I don’t. I don’t think so, but I’m happy to see you try. Right? And I think, you know, there’s some. Since with some of these where you kinda look at it, you say, well, yeah, sure. I think it’s a good idea.

[00:30:51] Josh Blank: I mean like who again, I kind of think go back to the beginning of this. You know, it’s like, you know, it would take, do I think that keeping, you know, an armed guard on school campuses might increase safety? Yeah, I think it might. But do I think it significantly improved safety in campuses? Probably not, but that’s where the, the political dynamic comes in, in terms of mobilizing this.

[00:31:13] Josh Blank: But you look at the set of issues and it’s hard not to come away and say, you know, like from my perspective and say, I’m curious to see how the campaigns treat this set of issues, the things they’ve done. And whether or not the voters, both Republicans and Democrats, and that’s the key here. This is not just Democrats, whether republicans, democrats, and Independents buy that rationale, right?

[00:31:36] Josh Blank: We’ve made schools safer because we did this. We’ve made the grid more reliable. Because we did that, we, you know, lowered your property, we lowered your property taxes because we did this, and this is why property taxes is such a, a difficult issue because you know what, the voters are gonna get a scorecard back and it’s called their property tax assessments.

[00:31:52] Josh Blank: Right? And it’s

[00:31:52] Jim Henson: not, that doesn’t come from an interest group, or that’s just us. Somebody that half, you know, a third of the elect, two-thirds of the electorate is gonna ignore while a third

[00:31:59] Josh Blank: may. It doesn’t come from attention or msnbc, right? It comes in your

[00:32:03] Jim Henson: mailbox. And so to, you know, to, to kinda wind this together, I mean, having.

[00:32:08] Jim Henson: You know, swimmer. Yeah. You know, gone waiting around in the subtleties and the complexities. You know, we started with thinking about where people are with the legislature in this moment. I think it’s worth pointing out that when you tile these things together, despite the differences between the specifics of policy and the assessments in the general policy areas and all of the dynamics we’re talking about, um, you know, Ratings were pretty relatively low within the logic of each battery.

[00:32:40] Jim Henson: Yeah. Um, in areas that have been either demonstrated as salient to voters mm-hmm. Or important in a way of having staked out public attempts to set the agenda by elites and opinion leaders. So if you look at the specific policy proposals, You know where we said they were significantly higher and we went over the, you know, several of those were in the seventies.

[00:33:07] Jim Henson: Yep. Et cetera. But the ones that were, that scored the lowest are pretty interesting. Mm-hmm. Right. So only 41, the ones

[00:33:16] that

[00:33:16] Josh Blank: scored the highest were pretty

[00:33:17] Jim Henson: interesting too. Well, but Well, yeah, but go ahead. So, At the bottom. Mm-hmm. Only 41% supported and f and 35% opposed. Reducing the power of cities and counties to pass laws and regulations in areas where state and local, uh, governments have traditionally shared authority.

[00:33:37] Jim Henson: Right. In other words, the preemption bill, right. State preemption beer bill, or, you know, if you must, the death star bill, um, you know, Uh, you know, second from the bottom, 49% sup supported and 34% opposed prohibiting, d e i at universities and colleges. Now, both of those passed, right? Um, and then to round that out, 55% supported and 37% opposed prohibiting public school libraries from containing any materials that describe, depict or portray sexual content.

[00:34:12] Jim Henson: Now that’s a good example of a bill that evolved over the process, right? And was made more palatable in a way that is actually less draconian, I would argue, in terms of being a direct prohibition in terms of the language of the

[00:34:26] Josh Blank: question. But what we know about both of those issues is an example is that, Neither were very high on voters’ list when we asked specifically.

[00:34:33] Josh Blank: Right. Either, you know, you know, in reference to the preemption bill. You know, we asked open-ended questions on both polls about, on both the February and April poll, about what the legislature should be focused on, as well as sort of an assessment of, you know, what? Should be the most important priorities of the legislature in closed ended questions.

[00:34:50] Josh Blank: And this idea of preemption or, you know, basically, you know, cities run amok did not come up. Right. Did not come up. And also when we talked to, when we looked at, you know, priorities for the public ed space in the Texas legislature, you know, removing these books from libraries. Did not come up. Now, ultimately, again, to speak to your, you know, idea of the, the evolution of this, you know, we were pointing about this previously because the, uh, the scope of it was broader, not in the legislature, but in the discussion.

[00:35:16] Josh Blank: Right, right. The idea was, you know, you had, uh, county IT library systems who were taking books off the shelves. Right. And in general, when we asked about that, that was not

[00:35:23] Jim Henson: popular. Right. Okay. But to connect us in that, so now to connect us with the other more general policy areas, if you look at the lowest assessments in those general policy areas, right?

[00:35:33] Jim Henson: We saw a combination of things that they didn’t do, but also things that they did sort of tr that they did try to do to some extent. But this is also, you know, suggests also why these overall numbers may be low. So, uh, again, going roughly from the bottom of the assessment of general policies up. Only 25% approved of what the legislature did on wait for it.

[00:35:57] Jim Henson: Property taxes, 45% disapproved net negative 20. Right. Pretty close to that. On mental health services, and this is an interesting one, I think, that we haven’t talked about much. Mm-hmm. But is worth putting a pin in. Same 25% approved slightly, you know, but statistically similar. Lower disapproval, 25 38, net negative 13.

[00:36:18] Jim Henson: Mm-hmm. And then the grid at 28 approved 44 disapproved. Now that’s something they did act on. Um, net negative 16. Um, and then we can pick one of the 28. So we’ll go to political corruption and ethics. 28% approved, 42% disapprove net negative 14. So what do we have if we step back and look at that? You know, you know, and it’s worth then saying right behind all those.

[00:36:47] Jim Henson: And just to make the point, public education and gun violence, were both at

[00:36:52] Josh Blank: 30%. And you know, I’ve been talking about, um, You know, the political geography and the importance of the suburbs, right? So what’s really interesting is there were six issues that saw at least 47% disapproval among suburban voters.

[00:37:03] Josh Blank: And they’re important ones, right? They were school safety, gun violence, immigration and border security, political corruption and ethics, the grid in property

[00:37:10] Jim Henson: taxes, right? So, so for, all right, so for, and, and the suburbs obviously kind of ground zero for where you know, what fights there are electorally are taking place.

[00:37:21] Jim Henson: But if you take a look at then, so if you then look at those specific issues and look at where the negative ratings are on the general issues and the specific issues. Yeah. You know, it’s not shocking to see that the overall assessments are not very good and a little bit, again low, a little bit lower than we’ve seen.

[00:37:42] Jim Henson: For the, in, in the historical trajectory of these kinds of ratings.

[00:37:45] Josh Blank: Yeah, and I mean, look, I think it would be unfair not to acknowledge the fact that a lot of the issues we’re talking about here that seen these negative ratings are tough issues, right? I mean, and they’re sure they’re tougher still in Texas maybe than in some other places because of the specifics of the state.

[00:37:57] Josh Blank: But you know, if you think about, you know, property taxes, we’ve gone over, you know, ad nausea about the com complexity of that. But anything having to do with, I’m the same with the grid. The grid is incredibly complicated, right? And they actually

[00:38:06] Jim Henson: did something on

[00:38:07] Josh Blank: that, but. But again, we’ll see if voters feel, I mean,

[00:38:10] Jim Henson: well, we, we see that so far they don’t feel particularly

[00:38:13] Josh Blank: reassured.

[00:38:14] Josh Blank: Well, the, the, the grid is the greatest example as a way to illustrate all the others, which is, you kind of have to ask yourself this question, you know, if explained what the legislature did, if explained in, in simple terms what the legislature did to a normal person, would that normal person feel more confident that their power’s not gonna go off?

[00:38:28] Josh Blank: Yes or no? Right? And if you feel like they might not even understand the explanation, Yeah, that’s probably a problem. Right? And so that’s, I mean, that’s sort of the, the, the thing here is, you know, how do you translate this into the feeling of voters that this thing got yeah, dealt with. But none of these issues are simple.

[00:38:44] Josh Blank: The border is not simple. Public education and school safety, not simple. And we’ve gone through why it’s would be so difficult to craft a policy solution in some ways to the idea of like gun violence in schools or gun violence generally. And so, Part of this is, is the fact that, you know, the legislature has some really tough issues in some ways to deal with, but the constraints of the state, you know, in terms of the political culture, in terms of, you know, our revenue mechanisms and all these other things make it, you know, right.

[00:39:11] Josh Blank: Just sort of a state of affairs at this point that, you know, they’ve got a. A tough job, really kind of for the foreseeable future. I mean, even if there’s some big sea change all of a sudden then, you know, Texas turns blue finally. Like people ask about all election. Is that your prediction? No. I’ll make predictions, Jim.

[00:39:28] Josh Blank: No predictions here. And, but let’s say Texas turns blue. At some point in the next few election cycles, Democrats are gonna have a real hard time dealing with the same set of issues, right? It’s not like Democrats are gonna come in and have all the solutions on this stuff, right? Because it’s just not

[00:39:40] Jim Henson: possible.

[00:39:41] Jim Henson: Well, I think that’s, you know, I think that’s a right, and b, you know, that’s, that’s, that’s given some love to the governing class and the difficulty of their job. But I think it’s also, you know, you know, it’s, it’s what makes this interesting, but also this moment very difficult is that, you know, and I think we sort of, you know, it’s good to return to something that we just observed in passing a few moments ago to kind of get the closing out.

[00:40:09] Jim Henson: Is that, You know, there is a, a kind of decline. I don’t know, a decline may is probably not the right way, although it empirically verifiable probably. But you know, the fact that the base level of, uh, expectations that government institutions are going to effectively address problems. You know, we’re in a trough right now.

[00:40:36] Jim Henson: Right. And I, and I think, so when I think, you know, I was thinking about your grid example, for example. Um, you know, yes, political leaders have tried and will continue to try to find a way to summarize this incredibly complex. Mm-hmm. Solution, quote unquote, or you know, whatever the action that they’ve taken, simplify it to try to reassure voters.

[00:41:05] Jim Henson: I think voters’ openness to reassurance, not particularly high right now, independent of, yeah, you know, almost, almost entirely independent of anything they’re doing at this point in time because of the long. You know, various factors that have evolved running up to this. So I, you know, look, I, you know, I’m sort of, you know, I tend to like political people.

[00:41:29] Jim Henson: Yeah. And elected, you know, they’re interesting people. I think they, in some ways, they suffer from people not. They suffer from a, a, a lack of realistic assessment of what motivates political actors and elected officials and, and, you know, a lot of low expectations there, some of which are deserved, but some of which I think are sometimes a little bit sideways about what you, what your expectations should be of an elected official to begin with.

[00:41:58] Jim Henson: Well, I

[00:41:58] Josh Blank: mean, in, in an environment in which, you know, a lot of times elected officials are the ones cultivating those low expectations. Right. You know, it kind of. Ultimately, well, I mean,

[00:42:07] Jim Henson: you know, actually what I would say is cult, you know, Simultaneously cultivating the low, you know, earning the low expectations while, while cultivating the higher ones.

[00:42:15] Jim Henson: Right. Exactly. Or it might be kind of how I would think about it, but Exactly. So take away, you know, I would say go, you know, have a look at this data. You know, I hope, hopefully this will help sort it out. As with a lot of the podcasts we do shortly after the polling data, uh, is released, helpful to have something to follow along with at home.

[00:42:36] Jim Henson: For sure. And so, you know, again, I’ll, I’ll urge you all to go and, and our listeners to go and look at the data that we’ll post with this podcast, but also generally, you know, we’ve got a lot of ways to go find the data at the, at the website, there’s a polling search engine. In that polling section, there’s a data archive, there’s a latest poll page that will present all of the stuff we have here.

[00:42:58] Jim Henson: That is, you can search it by keyword, searchable by keyword, title E. Exactly. So I urge you all to do that. Um, I think with a holiday week coming, we’re also, our, our, our schedule for July will be pretty slim, so you may not hear from us for a while, though. We may wind up fitting one more in. We just like it so much.

[00:43:17] Jim Henson: We’ll see what, yeah, we’ll see what people like. They like the, we may be back tomorrow. Who knows.

[00:43:22] Josh Blank: We’ll do another right after this. Well,

[00:43:24] Jim Henson: we’ll, uh, um. So we will be a little spotty in July, you know, as summer sets in. But keep an eye out and please keep, you know, keep an eye out on the website. We’ll continue to probably put out some content on the website over the summer cause we can’t really help it.

[00:43:38] Jim Henson: So, at that, at the same url, if you go to Texas politics dot u texas.edu on any of the blog posts, you’ll find a signup sheet for our mailing, which is, you know, a little irregular. But you know, I say that in a good way that, you know, if you sign up. You’re not going to get stuff every day. I actually signed up for a couple of things on one of the posting platforms and I’ve gotta go shut off notifications cuz it’s making me crazy.

[00:44:02] Jim Henson: We

[00:44:02] Josh Blank: guarantee you, you will not get something every day from

[00:44:04] Jim Henson: us, right? You will not get something every day from us. So with that, thanks again to Josh for being here, uh, on a, on a hot summer day. Thanks again to our excellent production team and the dev studio and the College of Liberal Arts here at UT Austin, who has done just a great job over the, the.

[00:44:22] Jim Henson: The life of this podcast, but the, the team in, in the studio right now I think is particularly good and we really appreciate you. Um, thank you for listening. Stay cool and healthy out there, and we’ll be back at some point in the not too distant future. With another second reading podcast.

[00:44:45] Outro: The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.