March 2, 2021 – Second Reading

[0:00:00 Speaker 0] Welcome to the second reading podcast from the University of Texas at Austin. The Republicans were in the Democratic Party because there was only one party. So I tell people on a regular basis there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called Texas. The problem is these departures from the Constitution they have become the norm. At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room? And welcome back to the second reading podcast for the week of March 1st 2021. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. We are back today from an extended winter weather and power outage hiatus. So, uh, thanks to all our crew in the College of Liberal Arts Liberal Arts development studio at UT Austin for helping us get back online today, Uh uh, today I’m joined again by Josh Blank, research director for the same Texas politics project. Welcome, Josh. Thanks for having me back. Glad to be out of the winter weather. Yeah, it’s very looking out of my window. It is very nice out there. So today what we’re going to start with anyway and probably spend a lot of time with this is to do something of a breaking news podcast. We’re recording this mere minutes after Governor Greg Abbott made a series of announcements in Lubbock, Texas, on ships in the state’s covid policy. I mean, this was no secret. The there have been trial balloons galore going into last week about this, and the governor announced that he was going to, you know, open up Texas. That Texas would be 100% open next week. We’re recording this Tuesday afternoon. Uh, he said that, uh, they will that the state will be open for business, that all statewide mandates and and executive orders setting, you know, capacity levels or or closures, uh, would be rescinded by that in that executive order. So Texas would be quote unquote 100% open and then in the in the perhaps more symbolic realm to a lot of people. He also said that he would be ending the statewide mask men mandate. And the messaging was pretty interesting in the sense that he was, as he has done through much of this trying pretty hard to not tell people everything was okay. And so the way that he did that today was to say that removing state mandates does not end personal responsibility. And there were some fall backs that if the hospitals rise above, I believe he said, Josh, and correct me if I’m wrong. This is basically notes that from the speech, uh, that if the hospitals rose above 15% of occupancy attributed to covid that county judges could could could engage in what would be limited mitigation efforts close, let’s say, 15% for a week in the and then in the hospital regions that have defined the closures. So yeah, and then actually they don’t know. And I was just that County judges can’t just use the mitigation standards they can apply to be allowed to actually use the mitigations man. So it’s a little bit different, But yes, well, yeah, that’s good. So the overlay here, of course, is you know, not not allowing what many Republicans, including the governor at times have considered overreaching, if not to coin a phrase, tyrannical local authorities from running roughshod over over people’s rights in the name of public health So, you know, in the initial speech, not much about schools and teachers, Uh, in an interview shortly after on site with Chad Hasty, um, become kind of the coat, the go to guy for Republican radio interviews. Hats off to him. He’s got a lot of good stuff. It’s become a good outlet. You know, They said that that would be mainly up the th and we’d be hearing the Texas Education Administration That was basically and we’ll be hearing more about that. And that was basically the answer across some of those areas. So what about schools? You know, th What about prisons? It’s like, Well, you know, the c d J D C D. J, and so on and so forth. So that is a little bit of the answer here. You know, the response that we’re getting and we’ll talk about that is is has been predictable so far, I think, at least in the last, you know, half hours. So I’m watching Twitter and then seeing what what the what the Twitter group with Twitter crowd is saying on both sides of the of the ideological I’ll you know, the other news tie in for us here is that we’re in the midst of releasing the February UT Texas Tribune poll in which we once again did a big battery of covid. 19 questions are fourth pole over the course of the pandemic, looking at at attitudes, Texans, attitudes on the pandemic. And so we’ve got a lot to kind of bring to bear here. So I’m wondering, Josh. I mean, what do you you know? What do you think? Um, you know what kind of strikes? Let’s put it this way. What kind of struck you in terms of the context of public opinion context of all this, at least at first cut? Well, you know, I’m sort of I don’t want to sign it. I’m having trouble characterizing the public opinion response. That’s not really it. It’s, I think, I think, deciding what aspect of the public opinion response to characterize is sort of the difficult part here. And so I think there’s sort of two ways that I’m inclined to look at this right, And one is to say, you know, we’ve been measuring attitudes towards covid since April. This will be our fourth time measuring attitudes specifically towards different aspects of covid and people’s lives during it and, you know, to 1 to 11 aspect of this is to say, Boy, you know, people are still pretty concerned about this. You know, people are still living their lives differently. They’re still, you know, taking a lot of precautions. I mean, speaking of mask mandates, I mean that the mass query and you know, it was treated as though it was some kind of big political symbol. But, you know, we know from our polling here in Texas that basically after April, you know, four and five Republicans were wearing masks and about almost 100% of Democrats. Let’s not say there’s not a difference there, but ultimately, you know, it’s not as though most Republicans are running around massless or that’s the flip side of this. It’s not clear to me that, you know, most Republicans are now going to throw their masks into a big bonfire and start celebrating right. I think you know there still is. You know, you know, there’s still a certain part. I think, of the adherence to the to the social distancing guidelines or that were or mandates former mandates that are honestly I think people just doing what they know to keep them healthy. And I don’t think that’s necessary. Going to change, you know, And I would say in a in a massive way immediately. But we’ll see, You know, we’ll see. Mhm. You want to comment? That’s my Well, yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, there’s a lot. I mean, I think that’s an interesting question. I mean, you and I have talked a lot and we talked on the podcast before about, you know, I I don’t I don’t want to be to Austin centric in terms of thinking about what the social norms around mask wearing are going to be in the rest of the state. I mean, I remember you driving, you know, out of town. When was that around in the summer. I’ll tell. You know, I’ve done to try and I did a trip. I did a trip up north, so I had north out of Austin and, you know, and I think we were in and around, Uh, you know, Waco very different, you know, approached the masks there. I did a trip in the summer down to Puerto Francis. Very different. You know rates of mask adherence there. So I mean, no, I mean for sure. But I also think that, you know, at this point, I mean, I think that the initial idea that this is some sort of, you know, that mask wearing was a, you know, a purely like, you know, an expression of political ideology. Number one, I think, was always overstated. And I think the data has shown is consistently, you know, not entirely the case. And so because of that, I only think that there’s some share of Republicans, you know, at this point who are wearing masks because of the mandates. Because ultimately, even in April, when Republicans, you know, quote unquote weren’t wearing masks, 69% of them were still wearing masks. Even even, you know, so I mean, you know, So even before it became, you know, even if incorrectly characterized as a political expression, even before then, the vast majority of Republicans were wearing masks. So, you know, I’m just, you know, I’m a little skeptical, but, you know, anyway, so okay, But you’re right. I point taken. I mean, so the one side, the one side is to say, Hey, look, you know, there’s still a lot of people who are super concerned about this, you know? I mean, one of the things I keep taking away from this is that, you know, people on the whole don’t necessarily seem to be feeling significantly safer now than compared to the last time that we pulled in them. To be clear, the last time we pulled was in October, which is before vaccine distribution really got underway. And so a lot has changed and technically has changed for the better. And yet people don’t necessarily feel safer. I think you know, I saw something on Twitter. I don’t take credit for this, but it is. It isn’t I don’t remember who said it, but it is an odd point to say, Like, we’re basically saying, Hey, nobody needs masks anymore. But actually vaccines are only available to us narrow slices of the population, which is an interesting policy statement, which again, we’re not well, and I think the governor was trying to, you know, to get on top of that. I mean the messaging in the governor’s speech and which he reiterated and then expanded in the common in the radio conversation immediately afterwards was to say that you know, vaccine distribution is going swimmingly in Texas. He focused on you know what he presented as a high rate of vaccine in the highest in the oldest groups of Texans. He’s singled out over 65/80 is you know, the people. You mean the people who can get vaccines, the demographic slice with the highest fatality rate. Um, you know, and also, you know, promised that they would be, you know, at the same time would be opening up the categories. And I think this is another interesting element that’s not going to be the headline, because it was also not elaborated. But he also said they would be changing the categories next week and broadening access to the vaccine at some point and that that announcement, the specifics of that would come later. So, you know, I I think the the message is supposed is supposed to be that the combination of the vaccines and there was discussion of how many people have already had it, and you know that this is going to be okay, and I and I do wonder a little bit if there’s not going to be some interaction. I mean, yeah, more, You know, I mean, I I agree with you and we’ve made this point repeatedly, and I think it’s right that all things being equal, you know, the difference between, you know, in mask wearing between Republicans and and everyone else was never as huge as people presented and never as symbolically inflammatory after a certain point, Um, as as presented by people on both sides, I mean, look, there were Democrats. I think that we’re, you know, painting with too broad a brush brush about Republicans. But I think it’s also fair to say and some of this is anecdotal and some of it is looking at the other parts of the data that we have that you know, that a lot of the mask wearing was probably as certainly somewhat begrudging and the function of public health guidelines that made it more socially difficult to not wear a mask in public places. And that now that if the context of that shifts, I mean again, you know you need to take another trip and we’ll see. But But, you know, I mean, you know, even in Austin, it’s becoming It’s become a little evident that there was uneven application of this. If you got in an even, you know, semi private setting, yeah, I think that’s right, you know. And so and so I don’t know and I don’t know. So I’ll just be interested to see and and we’ll be able to pull again relatively soon and we’ll see. We’ll ask again. So I mean, so again, you know, there’s part of me that’s kind of, you know, a little bit perplexed, given where we are and where the attitudes are. But then there’s another part of me that’s, you know, almost, you know, not surprised. It’s almost not even the right way to put it. It’s almost like it took so long in that, you know, we’ve been asking a series of questions over these polls, you know, and sort of the top line item that kind of gets at this as we ask people. What’s more important is it, You know, uh, you know containing covid, even if it hurts the economy? Or is it more important to help the economy even if it hurts efforts to contain covid? You know, the reality is even though more Texans have been on the side of containing covid than helping the economy throughout polling, you know, the balance has been shifting more, you know, over the last four poles towards more towards the toward the economy. Even though covid is still, uh, you know, more important to people. But among Republicans, supporting the economy has always been more important than containing, uh, the coronavirus. This is in the polling. I’m not saying this is a general thing. This is on on the survey items, and it’s grown, and it’s grown over time. And then you know, more to the point, really. You know, we ask people, Are you living your lives normal? You know, basically, what are you doing in response to covid living your life normally, And then various levels of, you know, restrictive movement and behavior beyond that and the share of Republicans who are living their lives, Uh, normally, you know, throughout the crisis has continued to go up well, the share of Democrats who say the same is basically remained, you know, below, about around 10% range, you know, And then the last sort of piece of this is you know, we asked people about a range of activities they could they could engage in, you know, going to work, going to grocery store, going to movies, a bar, restaurant, you know, a sporting event, etcetera, etcetera. And really, you know, in the last poll, when we asked this, the majority of Republicans said that each of these things was safe, except for going to a sporting event at an arena. We didn’t even that was 48 49%. So it wasn’t like so. I mean, so that’s one of the things I think, you know, to the extent that you know, you said the Austin centric We’re in Austin, you know, And to the extent the Twitter universe and the Democratic response versus the Republican response, I mean it’s worthwhile to contest, take a step back and say, You know, regardless of what let’s say if you’re a Democrat, you think about this. Whether you think this is ill advised, whether you think it’s too soon, whether you think we’re going to be repeating what happened in the summer all over again, you know, it’s kind of you kind of have to acknowledge the fact that for for most Republicans. This is not the life there leading during the virus. This is not their level of perceptions. And not to say that app doesn’t represent everybody. But ultimately, you know, he’s a Republican politician leading a majority Republican state where the vast majority of Republicans think that it’s already safe to do all this stuff that he’s basically, you know, putting a rubber stamp on now. Yeah, and I would point people to I mean, you know, this point that, you know, there’s already, uh, a set of attitudes about this that are very different among Republicans and among conservatives. Um, that is probably driving a lot of this behavior already. You know, whether they’re wearing a mask while they’re doing it or not. And that would reach people to to go to the Texas Politics Project website and look at our latest poll session and look at there’s a There’s a graphic that says, Is it safe or unsafe to do each of the following? That’s got this list that Joshua was referring to, and it really is to me and and has been since we asked this kind of battery the first time. I guess the last poll two polls ago, two polls ago. You know, it’s this is the easiest way I think, to look at a broad number of a broad range of activities and attitudes and see just just where there is a difference between Republicans and Democrats and independence conveniently kind of snugged up between them in the middle and again also, you know, tellingly, in most cases, a little closer to the Republicans. And they are the Democrats, which is pretty consistent for most things, which is what we think about Yeah, Independence. More and more generally, Um, so you know, you you know, you raise the politics of this. You know, Houston County Judge Lina Hidalgo’s on Twitter fairly quickly. Saying what you know, providing a response that I think we will see a lot of later that this afternoon, which is that, you know, the governor is now trying to deliver good news and pivot away from the bat. The more recent bad news of the power outages last week, you know, there wasn’t a to my mind. I don’t think there was any mention of the outages other than a brief kind of joke about the cold or something. at the beginning. Um, hashtag too soon, you know? And look, this is, um you know, this is not you know, this is not something that the governor has has not done before. I mean, you know what he was, You know, he spent some time in the fall pivoting away from covid to talk about other things, uh, during a period in which the pandemic was was really at its height. Um, so I You know, the politics of this I think you know are interesting is as as we pivot towards, you know, as we continue to see the governor try to set the agenda and the legislature, you know, in terms of where this positions him and vis a vis fellow Republicans, You know, I mean, when you mentioned the politics of I mean, there is sort of a weirdo bank shot kind of policy aspect of this. If you want to give the governor a little bit more benefit of the doubt, which I’m I’m somewhat willing to do because I don’t think that, you know, the power outage all of a sudden made you know, Republicans in the state or the governor more inclined or more, uh, you know, desirous of opening the state up and getting rid of these covid restrictions. I mean, this is I mean, this has been an ongoing peace, you know? So But, I mean, there is something I think in the data that’s interesting, You know, that I’ve noticed in terms of the safety battery, talked about this range of issues. And it’s the fact that, you know, after the first measurement, we did have it in in June, and then we go to October. And now here we are in February. Between October and February, there has been a ton of movement ultimately, you know, and just what it seems like is that, you know, it’s a little bit stalled out, and that sort of surprised me only to the extent that again, you know, we have vaccines out there. More and more people are getting vaccine. Presumably there should be more people who feel safe doing, you know, engaging in these behaviors, and it really hasn’t moved yet. And so I mean to your point earlier about you know, the signal, you know, what kind of signal does the governor or what kind of effect does the governor’s signal have two people who maybe begrudgingly, wearing masks and not because they acknowledge that there’s a, you know, a threat to themselves or their family members or others, but because, you know, there’s some sort of social pressure. It’s the law, whatever. You know, your point being, you know? Well, look, he’s saying to them, Hey, look, you know, I expect you to do this, but it might send us to kill people. Yeah, but you don’t have to. I think the same thing might be true here, to some extent, right? Which is to say, Yeah, you know, for Republicans you’ve got three quarter, you know, between a half and three quarters of which you are basically living their lives normally doing all these things. And what you could say is, you know, But the thing is, it hasn’t moved since October since before the vaccines get out. So to be out there saying, Hey, vaccines are just going to keep coming. We’re going to start vaccine. More and more people were gonna expand the groups and you know what? I think it’s safe to open everything up for business is long, you know, and I leave it to those businesses operate safely. It’s sending a signal. I think, to those people. Hey, you know, if you’re still feeling reluctance don’t. And since the economy has been the driving underlying factor in a lot of this amongst the Republican response, you know, Yeah, I mean, there’s a certain reliance on individualism here, but, I mean, one might argue that, you know, they, you know, it kind of tried that before in the aftermath of the July peak. And what we got was, you know, the more massive peak. I’m not saying that we were starting to measure. No, no, I know you’re not. I’m not saying it’s good policy. I’m just, you know, and I mean, that’s and that’s the whole I mean, that’s that’s the trouble with all this, right? I mean, you know of a pandemic is a collective experience, So ultimately it’s not about individual responsibility. It’s about collective responsibility. Yeah. I mean, you know, we don’t you know, we don’t call it private health. We call it public health. Um, you know, for and and there’s, you know, there’s a distinction between the two, you know, I would also note that you know, the seven day averages in both deaths and cases have actually increased again. Are on the increase again in the last few days. Yeah, that doesn’t You know, that doesn’t mean that that’s going to continue, but I think you know, and again, you know, they pivoted to looking at hospital hospitalization rates quite a while ago, so But I You know, it seems odd to me. Well, I mean, you know, I mean, not odd. I mean, I know I understand. The politics, it seems perhaps ill advised. Well, you know, I I don’t even know if it’s, you know, to me, I’m not even sure. You know, I don’t even necessarily think of it as I mean, there are the politics of it, but, you know, one of the things I find increasingly as part of it is what we do, what we do for a living, right? So we’re looking at attitudes all the time. You know, people come up with their pet theories about other people, you know, i e for e g, for example, right? Like, well, Republicans don’t want to wear masks of Donald Trump, and it’s like, Yeah, but like, 70 plus percent of Republicans are wearing masks. It’s like it doesn’t match your perception, You know, for something like this for me, you know? I mean, I think part of the benefit of the doubt here and being fair is that, you know, when we talk about Republicans and Democrats and as we talk about the politics, I mean, you’re talking about you know more about, let’s say, 40 to 45% of the voters in the state who share a consistent set of attitudes about the virus, and it tends to minimize the overall concern. It tends to, you know, he’d towards, you know, engaging in more behaviors. And it tends to, you know, again elevate, you know, regaining economic strength over. You know, limiting excess death and being being less sensitive to risk being less sensitive to risk. And, you know, and you can kind of say, I mean part of me saying, you know, if you if you told me Hey, look, 100% of the people who lived in this town feel this way and this political, you know, this politician when and decided he was going to open up the town, no mask mandates, Whatever I wouldn’t say That’s, you know, politics per se. I say, You know, well, it’s a representative government. What are you going to do? And I mean, it’s not as though Abbott has. I mean, look, I’m not saying it’s good policy, but But, you know, Abbott has been taking arrows for even the lightest restrictions that he has placed. And so, you know, I’m just I’m just a little, you know, I don’t like the outcome per se myself, because I think the viruses more dangerous than that. And I think the threat is more collective. But, I mean, it’s hard to look at this and say, You know, he’s pandering because it’s not like it’s some small group of the Republican coalition that is, you know, living their lives. Normally, it’s 40% who are just living their life as if the virus doesn’t exist according to the polling. Well, I mean, that’s generous of you. I think the general I’m feeling generous today. I guess you know, I mean, I think that, you know, I mean, there’s a weird kind of, I mean, the politics of it, you know, if you know, just going on the kind of numbers you’re talking about would have then theoretically allowed for saying, Yeah, we’re going to open everything else up 100%. But the way that that works is that we’re going to keep the mask mandate in place. And for him to have you had people in the room with masks and saying, Yeah, we’re going to do this. We’re going to open up businesses. But the only way this is gonna work is if people wear masks. And if we keep it, you know, if we keep in place a bunch of habits that many of you are already following because you are individually responsible. I mean, it’s a slight tweak in the message. Um, but, you know, as we talk about the politics of this, you know, you talk, you know, we talked about the the small share of Republican voters who report not wearing a mask. You know, the the increased ability that the increased perceptions of safety and very public and social activity, perceptions of safety and all of this. I mean, I think you could acknowledge that and probably try to do this in a slightly different in in a slightly different way. policy. And I think what it does is it opens the governor up two. I think the legitimate criticism that he has been overly sensitive to a very, you know, I mean to say, make your point a slightly different way to a to a very to a very small share of Republicans. Yeah, but right. I mean, if you’re really worried about, you know, I mean, if you’re worried about criticism of, you know, like people that don’t want to wear a mess, you’re just not talking about you’re talking about a small, you know? I mean, as our friend Ross Ramsey also often says, you know, a small but very small but loud group. And the loudness is serving them. I mean, the you know, I mean, and there’s always the sense that the governor’s team incorporates, You know, the criticism, you know, in a in a very front and center way that’s not doesn’t always feel in proportion to its two. It’s real potency. Frankly, I mean, you know, there’s a real I mean, you know, there was a real emphasis in in today’s events on saying that, you know, we’re going to we’re going to urge you to wear masks and and restaurants, you know, can can Businesses can ask you to wear a mask. You know, it’s a good idea, but hey, no one’s getting arrested ones getting find. You know, no one’s putting, you know, their boot on your neck. No enforcement is basically and that’s, you know, it’s It’s it’s, you know, it’s only barely passes a basic rational sniff test. Unless you’re thinking in largely political terms. To my mind, you know, from a public health policy perspective, it just doesn’t really make any. But let’s just pause. That train left the station a long time long time ago. I mean, you know, that’s not I mean, you know, I mean, this is one of those sort of odd things I think, in politics and policy, where you start to say, like, you know where you start to play with the counterfactual, and it’s like, you know, and it’s fun, right? We can say, you know what would have happened if But the reality is, is that you know, we haven’t been following clear public health guidelines, you know, such that they’ve even existed throughout most of this pandemics and cherry picking the data. Despite all the talk about science, I mean, for all the talk about how great the vaccine distribution is going, you know, we are still, as of this morning, I believe 49th out of Yeah. I mean, yeah, yeah, in the in the measurement that can, Which is, which is the share of the population that are getting vaccines, You know, we’re at 49th, and, you know, forgive me if we slipped or if we gain some ground overnight, which, as happens in these ratings sometimes, and we’re maybe 47 or 48 right? But it’s really not actually leading the nation in, You know, the race to combat covid and the justification for reopening again. Yeah, you know, the Yeah, the point being, if that’s your that’s your rationale is that we’re doing so well. It’s not. We’ll see. But this is the thing, you know, and I just you know, I mean, I know that there’s the politics of this, which is to say that we’re doing so well no matter what, but the reality is to go back. I mean, you know about the public health train that left the station is that the state’s approach to this has basically been to bear it. I mean, once, you know, once once that it was basically Abbott past, you know, control of the response to the local governments and then didn’t like their response and then opened things up in the suburbs. We know what happened. I mean, the basic response has been we’re gonna wait till we get vaccines. We’re going to try to keep people going to work, which is important, right? We’re gonna try to keep the economy going. Uh, and I think, you know, this is just a further example of that. I mean, it’s kind of been ahead of the public health data and the actual, you know, facts on the ground. It seems throughout this, and this is really no different. I mean, the argument is Well, look, by July, everyone will have access to a vaccine so we can open up now. Doesn’t make any sense. Well, and I also know, and I also think you have to put this in, you know, in the general context that Judge Hidalgo was trying to raise. But I think I would do it a little differently. You know, I’m in a different position than the Harris County judge. Um, but But I mean, I I do think, you know, this is, you know, this is signaling and everybody wants to talk about the or not everybody. There’s lots of people that leap immediately to the whole. You know, Greg Abbott wants to run for president and all this, and I’m just setting that aside yet again for the moment. Um, but I do think that if you look at the pandemic and you look at the power outages and the general sense, not just the power outages, the general sense that you know, the infrastructure, you know, collapsed in a lot of parts of the state and came close to a catastrophic collapse in the aftermath in conjunction with what we’ve seen in the pandemic and and the response to the pandemic is that there is a real overall, uh, dissonance between what we’ve seen in Texas in the last year. But in particularly in the last few months, say the last, you know, two months of time or three months If we go back to December, there is a real problem for core Republican ownership of the quote unquote Texas model and the Central General Election peel appeal that Republicans rely have relied on for the duration of their hegemony in the state, which is, you know, Texas is open for business. You know, we talked. And I think the last podcast we did was after the the state of the state address before the power. You know, the power outages and the, you know, the clearly what the governor was trying to convey there was that we’re kind of past this pandemic thing. It’s been tough. Um, but Texas is open for business and, you know, slides of companies coming to Texas, the 12 of the pandemic and the power outages is a real problem for that image in that argument. And, you know, the rest of the country, including other states competing with Texas for business, are are not being shy about noting that. And so, you know, I think this is a way of, you know, uh, returning to the brand, that the for the state and for the for the Republican Party and for the party running the state that they’ve worked very hard to establish. And and I think we’re going to. We’re going to see more of that and that, you know, that doesn’t bode well for public policy. I mean, in the in the way that it’s being implemented. You know, you I think you know what you raise is. I think one of the central questions kind of looking at the sort of this next two year stretch between the last election and the next one, right? You know, and it’s this And I think, you know, I would expand it even further to say which is, you know, it’s the state’s response to Covid. You know, we’ll see how the continued vaccine distribution goes, and and you know, the efficiency. And of that, you know, the power grid. Failure is one thing, but, you know, I think what some people have pointed out about about covid and its impact is it’s really pointed is it’s really emphasized. Other areas in the in the infrastructure, broadly understood that are lacking, right? And so you know, I think you know, on on on the left, you know, Democrats are licking their chops, saying, you know, finally, right. Finally, you know voters are going to realize that Republicans are mismanaging the state. But the thing that we always find, you know, this is something I think I tell it to a lot of out of state visitors often, you know, I get again some version of a question, you know, you know, this is crazy. That is crazy. This is crazy. Why do Texans put up with it? And this is usually someone from New York or somewhere else. And you know my basic response as well, Because this is the government that they want, you know, And we can see that both in, you know, questions specifically asking about the policies that they’re talking about, but further. You know, your point is the Texas model, which is basically low taxes, Low Services State. And, you know, we asked a question about that regularly. We don’t see a lot of movement on it in general, you know, a good share of people think that the way the Texas does things as well, does it well, and I increasingly think that part of what that means is that they don’t have necessarily high expectations. You know, for a lot of this is where the problem comes in. As you pointed out, in two ways, which is in a comparative sense. I think, within Texas, I’m not sure that any of this necessarily hurts Abbott in his position. We’ll see. I mean, it could eventually accumulate, but it hasn’t yet. I think you know the out of state messages harder, right? I mean, when you’re basically saying, come to Texas for business, you know? But our power grid went down, and we have no way to, like, fix it immediately, you know, or something like that. That’s the point. I mean, that’s the problem. And then further, you know, then the question because, you know, Okay, you know, you’re worried about running for president, and there’s Rhonda Santas, and there’s other people, and they say, Hey, aren’t you the state that I can’t give your people like power and water? Yeah. Yeah. So that’s the point. That’s the point. Um, you know, you know, and we will see, you know how that you know how it plays internally. I think you’re right. I think that, you know, there’s a, you know, remains to be seen what the internal, what the internal reaction will be and whether these things can all be put together. But I guess my point is, this kind of move directs attention internally away from all that right? And and, well, you know, and we’ll see if they can continue the momentum on that. Um, lots of other stuff in the poll. We’ll get back to to that next week. Uh, watch the Texas Tribune on Wednesday for release of the final trench of results. Go to the Texas Tribune website to see Ross Ramsey’s write ups of the poll. We’ve begun slow rolling out the data and and some of the graphics for this. For those of you that teacher give presentations, you’ll find all that stuff on our website, and we’ll have much more kind of drill down into that over the next couple weeks, including on next week’s podcast. So Jim Henson Josh Blank uh, thanks to Josh for being here, thanks to our crew at the College of Liberal Arts and Liberal Arts development studio at UT Austin, thanks to you for listening, be safe. Now we have to say, you know, stay warm, hoping utility. Stay on and we’ll talk to you next week. The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.