May 10, 2022 – Second Reading Podcast

Welcome to the second reading podcast from the university of Texas at Austin, the Republicans were in the democratic party because there was only one party. So I tell people on a regular basis, there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called Texas. The problem is these departure from the constitution.

They have become the norm at what. Must’ve 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. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin. And glad to be joined again today by Josh blank research director of the same Texas politics project. Welcome Josh. Thanks for having. Well, it is nice to see you here in the studio where it’s almost beginning to feel like a normal thing again.

Yeah. Well, I’m glad that summer just started. So it feels like a normal thing, but in the way that I like, okay, and now we’re going to take a break for three weeks, which we’ll get back to, um, exactly, but diving into it last week, we talked with our esteemed colleague and longtime collaborator, Darren show.

About the April UT Texas politics project pulling went through a lot of results in that. But, you know, with three of us, you know, weighing in it, we don’t, we didn’t always cover a lot of ground per se, at least scope of the poll. And the poll was very, and the poll was a big one. It had a lot of interesting stuff in it.

You know, we ran over a little bit at a good chat. Um, but there was a lot in that poll and a lot that we didn’t talk about last week are going to in much depth. So. Um, I want to dive back into the pole, but with some, you know, some current events, pegs, um, and I think education is a good place to start. We, we had a few education items in that poll, but once we had, I think we’re pretty potent and, and there are a couple of things immediately in the news that we can talk about.

Let’s start with, uh, the local elections that took place over the last, this past weekend. Um, One of the outcomes was wins by conservatives in some of the big exurban and rural districts in the state, particularly north Texas. Um, and there was a good Dallas morning news story that you were quoted in, um, that really did seem to reflect some of our polling results, but through the filter, as you pointed out in the story, Of very low turnout, localized elections.

Right. And, and, and not in a part of the state, that’s really not terribly representative of really even many other parts of the state. I mean, I would say, I mean, if you think about kind of the political trajectory that we’ve been talking about in the suburbs in Texas, it sort of is the story of which is about increasing democratic competitiveness in these areas.

But if we talk about what are like the suburbs that are sort of the Republican strongholds in the state, These are the counties it’s, you know, circle Dallas and circle Fort worth. And these are really the, where the focus was on these, on these school board elections, right? These were north Texas counties that we’re talking about north Texas counties around Dallas and Fort worth.

And in particular, you know, the reason that there was a lot of attention going into these races because essentially, you know, a conservative business owners. Slash activist or have you basically pledged to contribute about a half million dollars, uh, to the election of sort of a slate of conservative candidates up there, uh, across multiple school districts, actually.

And then I think there were some reinforcing support from some other parts, but they had, you know, basically professional campaign consultants, they were spending, you know, let’s say, you know, tens of thousands of dollars in races where candidates usually raise, you know, maybe a thousand or a couple of thousand dollars.

And so, you know, on the one hand. Yeah, there’s sort of two things going on here. I mean, on the one hand and say there’s definitely, you know, something going on in education, politics in the state and the way that attitudes towards education are being mobilized. Around the election. Right? And then there’s sort of, you know, the results of this race, these races and the servant and the winds by, again, most, almost the entirety of the conservative slate.

And, you know, it’s just say this right now. When, whenever we get these questions, whenever an election comes by about, you know, what does this tell us about everything? You know, I can’t help it being like someone think of a survey Saster and say, well, how representative is the election? The people you say that it’s telling you something about it, right.

And in this case, we’re talking about a Saturday election in may, right. And very, you know, you were calling them they’re suburban, but you know, also kind of ex-urban district. So these are relatively homogenous districts. You know, and, and particularly that region that has been kind of ground zero for conservative politics in the state.

I mean, I think because of like my data perspectives and as I can be a little bit heavy handed with my categorizations, cause I’ll rely on the counties a little bit more than I should, especially with these school districts, which I mean like, and these are the, the, the, and these counties are the counties where they are both suburban and exurban.

Exactly. And I think people can kind of underestimate this too, especially talking about school districts. I mean, Travis county, I know just for various reasons, I think has five or six different school districts in it where Austin is. So just as an example, this is, you know, there’s a lot of school districts in Texas, but the point is, is do these, you know, sort of very low turnout off year elections.

And then the other question I said, you know, is there a big resource, uh, you know, uh, uh, Inequality here. Right. And again, we had one side that was something distinctive about the resources that good. Yeah. Right. I see what you say balance between two sides. Yeah. So you’ve got, you know, one side spending $500,000 and you’ve got the other side where maybe all of the candidates combined, you know, an opposition spent less than a hundred I’m sure.

So needless to say, not terribly. Reflective of stuff, but, but then the question is, well, how else do we know is not reflecting? Part of is we’ve asked all these questions, right? And so we’ve been asking questions about some of these sort of issues do shore around public education, particular parental involvement, uh, you know, people’s feelings about the, uh, teaching of race.

Uh, you know, I think sexual identity, I would say more tangentially to this, a little bit sexuality and sexual identity, right. And when we find him, we found this. We’ve been doing this now because the education issue has increased in salients. I mean, we obviously regularly pull that education, but we tend to find is, you know, I would say in terms of the direction that Republicans are taking this debate, you know, I would say we find, you know, at best a certain amount of ambivalence and it, you know, and it works for the Republican sort of direction of this probably, you know, slight majority opposition in some of these spaces.

But the main thing is like a lot of this is really. Right. Right. And so, you know, that’s the other piece of this is, you know, finding kind of the most activated, uh, engaging. Voters on the one hand, you know, small election where you have a bunch of resources, not a heavy lift. The thing that I’m kind of looking at in an electorate that favors your activism and an electric that favors your well.

And I’ll say this should say this too. I mean, I think we’ve said this before, but I’ll just go on and say it, which is, and also on an issue that the Democrats have been stymied. I mean, you know, our cluster of issue, the Democrats that had been stymied by, and there’s not a counter, there’s not a counter message.

That’s been, that’s sort of been apparent. The Democrats have really mobilized in response to basically greater calls for parental involvement. They can’t say, well, we think actually parents should have less say over there till next thing you know, it’s like, uh, well, and in fact, there’s, you know, there’s the, obviously the prominent example of, you know, when people have said that out loud, like Terry McAuliffe, they’ve really, you know, they’ve taken, they’ve taken a beating for it.

And then. You know, I would say. Not substantively, but rhetorically kind of deserved it. I mean, if this is something you have to obviously approach with some care in your messaging. Yeah. And I would say the other thing I would say is, you know, what Democrats could say is they could say, Hey, look, you know, looking at our polling again or anybody say, Hey look, you know, Texans have consistently failed to rate the Texas public education system as a high quality system.

Right. You can look at how, you know, Per pupil spending, you can look at a lot of different metrics. Generally, when people talk about the Texas education system, it’s not to say, boy, this is a great public education system. Democrats could make the argument that we pulled in, what they say is. Yeah, it’s good.

It’s good enough. You know, but the thing about Democrats, they could say, Hey, look, you know, after all of the COVID related learning loss, you know, the fact is, you know, with all the inflation going on, you know, these aren’t the issues we should be talking about, but the problem is, is even, I mean, this is just a basic kind of psychology politics messaging thing, but even this, you still have to acknowledge.

The arguments that they are making, that you still don’t have an answer for it, your Democrats, well, you know, to continue on education for another beat or so, I mean, one of the things, you know, we’ve been talking about, we’ve talked about it in the podcast, you know, we’ve now pulled on this a few times, I guess.

Right. Um, you know, asking the parental involvement question, you know, a variation of. No, the teaching racism in the classroom, et cetera. Um, and whether parents should be involved in that, we’ve also not directly related to this, but certainly have a piece talked about one of the, one of the weaker points that, that Republicans have launched on this.

And that is the school library book monitoring, you know, but I was trying to remember when it was on the podcast a month or two ago, we talked a bit about. You know, the theory that this was really the leading edge, you know, not that these issues in and of themselves don’t generate political momentum within a certain political cohort, partisan, ideologically, but also that this was also smoothing the way for a more traditional, uh, Republican and conservative issue in public education.

Um, that has not always been over weirdly well, mainly popular, but it’s divided the electorate and that is vouchers. Right. And, you know, a shoe dropped on this last night in that, you know, Greg Abbott speaking in San Antonio promised to support full funding of public ed, but also added that they wanted to reboot, you know, to paraphrase.

They wanted to revisit vouchers and, you know, the, the language quoted in the first, in the corner. Uh, blasts that first broke this last night, empowering parents. This is a quote from avid empowering parents means giving them the choice to send their children to any public school charter school or private school was state funding following the student.

And that’s why a minute ago, when you talked about kind of student empowerment, I was like, no, we’ve, we’ve seen this language before. It’s just in a different kind of setting. And should also say that, you know, this was really picked up with a lot of contexts. Piece in the Houston Chronicle this morning, we’re recording this on Tuesday, may PO posted late last night.

I think it was this morning, uh, by Edward McKinley. I would urge people to look at that because it does a, a good job of putting together the issues that we’re talking about that are kind of on the table in these school board elections, but then putting together a larger package that includes and vouchers.

And so I want to mention that in part is like, Hey, you know, I’ve told you so, but also I will say I. I didn’t think that they would necessarily pull the trigger on that this quickly. I thought they would let it simmer on the back burner with these other big issues. You know, the other, I shouldn’t say big issues with these other hot issues of parental involvement and, you know, quote unquote CRT and books in libraries, and then use that to smooth the way within the context of the COVID stuff.

And, and, and, and, and let this other shoe drop once the session started. Uh, I think they’ve probably done some polling and, and look, the polling, we just did, did show a little bit of movement on this. We wouldn’t, it’s one of those things, we wouldn’t call it a trend. Yeah. It was a result that followed a result from, I think a few years ago.

Right. Yes. Right. And so, you know, but, but you know, it is there. Yeah. Okay. I want it. So let me tell you what the result is. Let’s do that. And then I want to go back to your point because I think it’s, I think it’s, I, I agree with you and I, but it’s a little bit, I have a little bit of a different view on it.

It’s probably that probably it probably consistent, but anyway, in our most recent poll, we, we, we, we don’t talk about vouchers because vouchers is a loaded term. So if you that’s basically for a long time, the voucher people are actually now the bathroom people don’t use the term voucher come a negative coding.

Yeah. Right. It’s a pro-choice position. So we ask about redirecting state tax revenue to help parents pay. Some of the costs of sending their children to private or parochial schools now include some of the costs because in a lot of cases, the money that would follow a student is not going to cover the total cost.

So we don’t want to misrepresent that the idea here is, you know, Abbott only mentioned private schools, but a big part is going to be parochial schools as well. For sure. So anyway, in the most recent polls, Uh, plurality 45% of Texans were supportive of redirecting. The Texas state tax revenue. 40% were opposed.

Unsurprisingly 59% of Democrats were opposed, but 25% were in support among Republicans, 61% supported 27% oppose the dynamic that kind of comes up most often. When we talk about this in the legislature is the difference between urban, suburban and rural voters. But here, you know, we find less difference, I think, than we used to in some, to some extent, although, you know, they look pretty comparable.

I mean, you have plurality. Urban suburban and rural voters say they would support vouchers, urban voters, or almost even 43 support 41, oppose Republicans are suburban similar 45, 41, rural, a little more supportive, which kind of aligns with the partisanship that we’re seeing that sort of has a geographic component.

So 48 support, 35 opposed. So, you know, I mean, it’s not an issue. You win an election on, or you build a campaign on, obviously right now you were saying before, you know, you’re surprised that they move so fast and you let this and that they didn’t let these. You know, cluster of issue, simmer. And I think what’s interesting is one how quickly they’ve taken this cluster of issues and sort of manifested it into a state level kind of policy responses, which I think is, you know, and this is, and again, I said before, I think this is the best time to do it.

Cause I actually think you are going to find a number of Democrats who are gonna say. Go ahead at the site, you know, I mean, just cause I mean, in a very natural, non, you know, big picture sense, but in a localized sense. But the other thing I was thinking about with this is, you know, people were saying, you know, we’re talking with us yesterday.

Well, you know, okay. So they’ve had all this success now, you know, does this portend anything for November? And I said, well, you know, this is, I feel this way in a weird way. Like I feel about the abortion issue in some sense that you, in the last podcast you use the dog catches. Reference for the abortion reluctantly.

Now I saw I’ve seen it everywhere. I’ve seen a very conservative, very pro-life Republican state legislator used the same term about basically Republican’s position. Having found this, having found themselves here. So now I feel like it’s totally justified for anybody pretty fresh when we, when we were talking about it last week and it felt like maybe it was a little too soon, but I think once you have, you know, Yeah, no, you’re well, you’re very sensitive.

So now that you have, you know, conservative Republican house members saying, yeah, we caught the car. It’s like, okay, we can all, we can all acknowledge that. But I think, you know, so in thinking about, you know, the, the response going forward, I think part of this is saying, okay, well now if the court is going to say, okay, states it’s up to you.

Well, how the state responds becomes part of how we’re going to have to incorporate the impact of that decision into the 2022 election, the. That though is that’s going to be a response it’s driven at the state level with all of the resources that Abbott and Patrick can bring to bear on that. All of the message testing all of the polling.

The thing about local school board races is this is not necessarily the same quality or caliber of elected officials. As your statewide candidates. Right? And so now you have a bunch of school boards who have been stocked with ideologues. These are not ideological positions. These are really, you know, nuts and bolts like constituent.

They weren’t, well, they weren’t, but the that’s the point though, these are nuts and bolts, constituent facing positions where it’s pretty easy to mobilize again, an angry slice of that electorate. But then the reality is, is that, you know, if these school boards start going ahead and implementing, let’s say, who knows what.

In the advancement of sort of the things that they’ve ran, ran on, that’s going to happen in the fall. Yeah. And I would say it’s possible that then you see a backlash in some of these communities, if they go too far, too fast, and a lot of these issues where one people are still trying to figure it out, but also the, whereas, you know, at the state level, when you talk about the manifestation of this and to sort of a school voucher, school choice, whatever discussion, that’s a discussion.

I think that, again, we knew we were heading towards, yeah. We knew that there was, you know, again, a desire to do that among the leadership. And they’re prepared to have that discussion. What goes on in these school boards and these competitive suburbs. Now that you’ve basically stocked it with these people.

That’s a big open question. It could become a new fast. So that’s why I would say, you know, yeah, I agree with you. But on the one hand, I wouldn’t go on a different scent. I think it’s actually a way to take control of the discussion a little bit before it gets out of hand, but, you know, just wonder. Yeah, well, sure.

The flip side of that, I’ll just say, you know, another way that it kind of relates to, well anyway, now let’s, let’s, let’s leave it there. Well, I mean, I, you know, I mean, I’m sort of sitting here pondering that. I mean, You know, I mean, I, they may have just thought that, that it was better to do this all along and I just share, I was just wrong.

I mean, um, but I, you know, the other thing I do want to touch on, on that is, is that we were talking about before we started recording, is the interesting sort of the, the tension between what I’m going to call. The rural kind of elite traditional, rural elite position on vouchers, right. Which has been to be dead set against it.

And it’s part of the lore of the legislature. That one of the reasons that you can never pass a voucher bill, no matter how much energy there is among some fairly powerful interest groups within the Republican party is that it can’t get past the interests of. The rural, rural legislators interpretation of their interest, particularly in the house, in both parties, in both parties, but there aren’t any rural Democrats left.

So, um, historically I think the historical. Yeah. But historically, yeah. And so, you know, it’s an interesting, in terms of other broader issues that we’re talking about that among voters, you know, is this a. You had another instance of a growing tension between what some elites in the Republican party want and what rural voters are responding to in terms of ideological queuing and you know, their application of these, you know, very powerful cues about CRT and education, because I would argue that in a lot of ways.

I mean, certainly if you’re a parent and you’re an activist parent. Yeah. You, this may very well. I feel like a matter of direct interest into her and of what your child is being taught in school. But we also know that there is a, you know, a lot of older Republic, older Republicans, presumably would not kids that don’t have kids in school anymore, right.

That are responding through from a different ideological or political perspective and context here. And I’m wondering, I mean, you know, we go through this all the time. We don’t, you know, the kind of with kids without kids thing, doesn’t really work very well, given our data. And we’ve often seen that there isn’t that much difference, but on this, I wonder if there, if there is.

Yeah. And I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know, but I mean, there’s something interesting going on there in terms of the fact that, you know, the polling on some on, on this issue on the times that we’ve asked has generally. At the voter level, not matched what you hear from inside the legislature and inside the political arena about what w w w why you can’t get vouchers to now, it’s traditionally been an, you know, kind of an Alliance between rural and rural now, rural Republicans and urban Democrats, but you’ve also seen some very high level urban, democratic defections.

They’re still at the state people, you know, you can, and there are a lot of reasons. That one can derive this. I’m thinking of, you know, Harold Dutton in Houston. Now, again, Harold is kind of in many ways, a bit of an outlier in the democratic caucus, representative Dutton, but nonetheless, that’s why he, why he has had the position he had on education.

But, um, but, but it does, you know, I, again, I don’t wanna, you know, do what we always tell people not to do, which is over-interpret this result, but I am, I think it’s fair to wonder. And you kind of alluded to this in passing, just how much the experience of the pandemic shifted some of the attitudinal terrain, particularly among people with kids in schools when it comes to public ed.

And we’ve talked about that a little bit. Maybe not on the podcast. Yeah, no. I mean, well, the flip, I mean, the folks that I’ve been doing in sort of a, I’ve been doing it in a half joking negative sense from the, you know, the, the potential for democratic openness to basically, you know, Uh, probably certain Republican parents and their districts, you know, taking their kids elsewhere at the same time though, you know, we’ve just gone through this humongous disruption where, you know, a bunch of the, what you would think of as urban Democrats might not be living in urban areas anymore, or the people who move to Texas aren’t necessarily moving to city center.

And the idea of more flexibility with education dollars might, you know, sound attractive. But, you know, I mean, I mean, you know, people had an experience with more flexibility in making education. I mean, at some basic literal level, a lot of people have now more experience in thinking about their kids.

Learning is more than. I get my kid up in the morning. I pack them up. I send them to school. They come home, they have to do a bunch of homework. I help them with it. I don’t help them with it. They do it on a computer, a pad books, whatever. But you know, that model, a lot of different things have happened in the last few years.

Right. And so it’s interest. I mean, there’s a bunch of stuff. I mean, there’s so many interesting things here based on what you just said and this discussion that the cross-currents are kind of amazing when thinking about the previous, like discussions that have gone on about this. Right? So on the one hand, you know, you think prior discussions.

Picture Dan Patrick talking about how, you know, will the rich parents just already have school choice and it’s, you know, this is for the, for the non white kids and the poor kids. And, you know, in Texas, almost really talking to the, you know, it’s a way to kind of create a wedge in the democratic coalition.

But in some ways it’s almost like, you’d say, well, actually this it’s like, well, actually, you know, it’s actually the, the sort of well-off college educated, you know, remote working. Pair of tech Democrats now, right. Who’s they like, Hey, maybe you want your kids to have the same kind of educational flexibility that you have with your work or whatever.

I mean, there’s all sorts of different things. The other side of that, that I also think kind of weird kind of crosscurrents is, I mean, you mentioned and thinking about where Republicans were on the immigration issue on this sort of cluster of sort of really clustered it to it as like culture, war, like sets of education issues in the school in some ways, you know, it’s interesting because you’ve gone from a set of issues that, you know, I think.

The boundaries are a little bit sharper and potentially a little more dangerous if you go too far, potentially. Yeah. But at the same time, you know, when you’re talking about it, you’ve got all the energy in the world. Just part of what this, like these election results are about. Right. I mean, you can talk about, you know, the future, you know, the nature, you know, the, the nature of the nation’s future and children’s souls and their education.

Right. And in some ways you’re almost. And not to say that they’re not still gonna take all these issues. We’re not going to further, you know, CRT bills or whatever in the legislature next session. But by shifting the, you know, the education lift to a voucher program, which would be a heavy lift, I think in some ways you’re almost neutering.

A lot of that argument you’re saying, well, and not that you can’t do, but in someone’s like, yeah, no children’s features are important, but what if we just like give them the chance to go somewhere else? Yeah. I mean, that’s the soft sell. I think we’re past the moment of the soft cell. Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s another interesting aspect because I think it’s going to be hard to turn off, put it this way.

I think it’s going to be hard to like, turn the spigot off on CRT and quote unquote CRT and, you know, uh, uh, greedy teacher unions and, you know, I mean, And it’s. And is it it’s I guess the interesting thing to watch will be how Sally will, this will the kind of ideologically charged frame that Republicans have put on the public education issue through discussion of critical race theory and curriculum and parental choice and all this yeah.

Will that, um, Will that make the issue more salient for voters that are voting not on the substance of public education, but on those issues. And when I see that voucher result again, I don’t want to over-interpret it, but it does make me think that, you know, if you move, if you make this issue more salient and more of a, you know, more of a test, the party lawyer of, you know, Republicanism and conservative bonafide is for your older activists, ideologically driven, conservative, Republican voter at the same time that you have.

People that were more for various kinds of reasons, more likely to reject out of hand the notion of vouchers and for similar reasons, right? I mean, you know, partisanship, partisan framing of that on the democratic side is also a real thing between those two things is, you know, how has the ground shifted?

And I, you know, I don’t know, but I think, I think I suspect that. I mean, I, my interpretation would be not so much, you know, per your earlier kind of speculation. I know you’re not putting this in the bank, but yeah. You know, I think it’s more likely that team Abbott and the statewide officials see the opportunity now and feel like they have softened the ground rather than wanting to move away from the other stuff.

I, they seem pretty comfortable with the more ideological arguments. I think they probably see them as. Uh, as part of a successful strategy. And I suspect that there are advisors and entrepreneurs that have been pushing this that are encouraging that, that interpretation, you know, inside. Yeah. I think the difficult, I mean, look, we should wrap this up soon.

I mean, I think the difficulty that they face with that, you know, I mean, look, there’s a lot of advantages to which one you’re the majority party. And the states and you’ve turned out more voters on the other side regularly, so full stop. Right. I think, you know, what’s interesting in this moment is, and I still, you know, there’s a lot of ways in which, you know, the, sort of the way with the abortion movement and then the sort of aggressive move potentially in the education space.

I think you do lay the ground for a potential backlash when you’re playing in a space where it seems like in most instance, Either, you know, you’re breaking even with voters on the issue or a plurality or slight majority kind of oppose the area that you’re working in. And so, yeah, it may activate, you know, the majority of the majority party vote.

But, you know, I think once you start, you know, and we always say this, once you start getting into schools or messing with kids and, you know, you’re, you’re activating a large constituency of people who probably weren’t going to show up on May 7th for like a random school board, race and Carrollton. But if the school boards, you know, in a couple places or even multiple places start, you know, You know, beyond the pale, beyond the pale and summer, which again is kind of already happened in some instances.

Right. You know, then you’re activating the everybody else. Right. And you know, again, we’ve seen this happen for, it doesn’t mean that Republicans lose the election, but it could make for a closer haircut. Right. It’s easy to underestimate counter mobilization. I mean, when you look at your own mobilization and it seems successful and you’re feeling it.

I think there is sometimes a tendency to miss that there’s a counter mobilization potential in what you’re doing. And what I’d say is, you know, in as much, you know, research and resources as the, you know, Abbott and Patrick and all them have to look at this stuff, you know, more, most often from what I’ve seen from what they release and what they show their testing, messages, messages, and their testing and their, and their primary focus is the how that message.

They’re voters. Yeah. And so that’s where I say like, yeah, they make us like, Hey, we’re happy doing that. Me I’m, you know, Dave Carney has had plenty of tweets where he said, Hey, we’re happy having this discussion. We’ll do it. It’s like, yeah. I mean, look, I, it’s very easy to write a message that you’re going to get 70, 80% of people to say like, yeah, we shouldn’t be teaching, you know, second graders had, you know, how to transition, like whatever.

Yeah. We get it, but like, that’s not, that’s not the real environment that we’re going to be in. And so I, you know, that’s why I’m a little bit more cautious about, you know, in terms of thinking that this necessarily is like so obvious for them as a, as an advantage, at least not as competent as they seem today.

And I think Dave Carney and the Republicans right now, and with some degree of justification are pretty confident though, in your ability to drive those messages in a way, and, and to. I had to drown out counter messages. Yeah, I think so. And the thing is the counter messages are not only going to be drowned out by the messaging that they’re going to be placing, but also that’s, as you know, all the bigger issues we’ve been talking about, like the economy about the border.

So this is, I’ve been just, this is, this is secondary. All right. Well, that was a good talk about education. Um, and you know, there’s. We’ll be back. I mean, I, you know, we were going to talk about a couple other things, but I think it makes sense to have like, you know, air that out a little bit, cause there’s going to be a lot going on and we’re going to, there’s going to, and, and it is, you know, I mean, it is interesting from an inside perspective that they are, the team Abbott is testing, you know, moving, you know, the messaging on vouchers now, right now, I think frankly, they want to talk about anything.

That’s not abortion. But nonetheless still interesting. So we’ll leave that as a teaser, a programming. Uh, I’ll be out of the loop for a few weeks. Uh, so the podcast will be on hiatus, but we’ll be back probably the first week of June. You know, classes will be started again for summer. Uh, one podcast audience there.

I should be back in, hopefully decently rested. So thanks to Josh and to our excellent production team in the audio studio, in the liberal arts development studio here at UT Austin, you can find all the data we referenced today and much, much more including. All these education results we talked about today and, and more, uh, at the Texas politics project website, Texas politics dot U texas.edu.

Thanks for listening and be. Well, the second reading podcast is a production of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin. .