May 4th, 2021 – Second Reading Podcast

[0:00:00 Speaker 0] Welcome to the second reading podcast from the University of texas at Austin. The republicans were in the Democratic Party because there was only one party. 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. Welcome back to the second reading podcast for May 4th 2021. I’m Jim Henson, director of the texas politics project at the University of texas at Austin today, joined again by josh blank Research director for the same texas politics project. We should know, I don’t want to violate ferpa, you can do it not for a hip, a hip hop, you’re not a student, your patients. Uh josh. It was just saying these little fatigued having gotten his second shot. So congratulations. And if josh just kind of nods off, you’ll know what happened. Maybe maybe have you. It depends on if they listened to the podcast before. Right. Well, you know, be that as it may today, we want to talk about the results from the april 21 ut texas tribune poll that’s been released over the last few days. We did the last podcast on the covid results uh, which was one of the multiple, you know, things that we that we pulled on this time will be minding this and going back to the, well for a while probably. Uh, but for today we want to look at the multiple ways um in which the poll tells us some things about the public opinion, context of the legislative session. Currently entering its final weeks here in texas. Now on the off chance that you’re listening to this and not from texas or of this subculture. Maybe you’ve been driven to this by the Eliana plot story in the new york times, which is a real barnburner. Uh texas has a biennial legislature that meets for only 140 days every other year, hence the term biennial. Um and we are at a kind of, we’re getting close to, we’re not quite at crunch time, but there are 27 days left at this recording until the legislature adjourned sine die on on May 31st. We haven’t started hitting the big legislative deadlines yet, but we will soon. So suffice to say that that tensions are beginning to mount here. I was watching the legislature the house right before we came on and there were some relatively heated exchanges going on over health benefits. Um so we want to start the discussion. Uh so I want to start the discussion in which we do a deep dive into public attitudes on issues before the Legislature by starting with the results from the poll that sets it up on an ironic or at least the kind of qualifying tones. So one of the items that we asked fairly early on in the poll for method logical reasons was, you know, whether we asked our sample of self declared register voters how closely they were paying attention to the Legislature that was now in session. Um, only 10% set extremely closely. About half said not very closely at 33% and 17% said not at all. Um and I kind of think that we even have to take with a grain of salt, the remainder that said they were watching somewhat closely. Yeah. I mean, this is a pretty easy question to lie on, you know, and I like, you know, I like to say like, this is there’s not much conscience here. Yeah. And like, you know, it says, you know, you know, sometimes there’s a period in my life as a pollster where I might have been uncomfortable saying that, but it doesn’t mean that these aren’t broadly true ultimately, what this tells us, I think is right, right? Not a ton of people are paying attention to the legislative session because really, I mean, unless you’re people like us to sit here and put on the livestream during the day, you know, and you can actually say it’s part of your job, which, you know, maybe you can, if you’re listening to this, but the most normal people outside the process, it’s totally opaque. It’s very confusing. But what’s also true is the fact that people are probably likely to like overstate their attention just because, you know, you’re, you’re in a political survey, you’re telling us all your attitudes about the president, the governor, what have you say? Hey, are you paying attention to the Legislature, nope. A lot of people don’t want to do that, so, but anyway. Yeah, yeah, sure somewhat. And it is going, it did go up just as, I mean, you know, it is working in the right, you know, in the right way. And then we asked it also in March, Oh, in february? No, I think in March, I think it was March, March february. It was probably must have been March, March and april and in March, doing so many polls now in the first quarter, it was one of those polls, uh, you know, in March, 44% said they were following the session either extremely or somewhat closely. It’s up six points since then, I think, you know, that makes sense. There’s more going on, more things to grab people’s attention. But again, it’s it’s a small share of the electorate who even says they’re paid really close attention. So with that, as a as a as a as a backdrop, you know, we asked, you know, we then proceeded to ask people a lot of questions related to legislative policy. Um, I really know how to set this up well. Um so why don’t you talk a little bit just a broadly about how we structured this so that people have a sense of what we did. Yeah, sure. So, I mean, essentially, you know, the polls structure kind of follows a rather similar pattern broadly and then some other patterns in a little bit deeper. So that the broad pattern is we ask, you know, about 15 what we call trend questions every time we always want to know what people think the most important issues are facing the state in the country. Their evaluations of the president and the governor and lieutenant governor. More recently, we’ve also included in every poll evaluations of the President and the governor is handling of Covid because that’s been so central to the last year. Um you know, we asked about the direction of texas and you know, their personal economic situation, things like that, and that just gives us something that we can look at it every poll and see what the trends are. Because we think of these as fundamental attitudes. You know, if you take what we just said about the fact that people aren’t following the legislative session that closely. That’s true. What’s also true is people do know what they think of the president. They do usually have a pretty good sense of what they think of the governor and they certainly know what they think about their current economic situation and the economy internationally in texas. And we also that drives a lot of politics ultimately. You know, I was it was funny after, you know, after the 2020 election, and we’re still talking about, you know, the accuracy of election model, but you see these comments from, you know, some of trump’s supporters who would say, you know, how could joe biden have won this election? It’s like, hey, you know, you’ve got hundreds of thousands of people dead from Covid, you’ve got an economy in the tank, how could any president of any party under that scenario? Winning elections? You know, and that’s just just just just to set that aside, that’s why we always ask about that. Then, you know, this is an interesting poll for us because we’ve increased the number of Poles were doing so. We’re actually normally we had traditionally asked in our surveys at the beginning of the session in february that usually around the end of june this mid session culture requires us to think a little bit more about what we want to do in the middle and all that kind of forces. This is where if you look at, if you look at our polls closely, you know, the first poll in february was very much about broad attitudes towards spending levels priorities here. We’re digging in a little bit deeper now and we’re kind of still want to figure out what the priorities are. So after we asked people about their attention, we asked them in an open ended question, what should the legislature be focusing on? And that’s the entry point, uh, you know, without putting any issues before anybody, without priming anybody to think about anything, what should they be doing? Then? We asked a lot of question about Covid, which we discussed last week, and then we really had to dig into legislative proposals. And this is hard. I mean, honestly, because, you know, the difference between the politics of policy and the actual policy itself, you know, and the way that you map those things onto assessing public opinion is not obvious all the time. And so, you know, what you find is that, you know, we essentially did was we dug into some of the policy proposals floating around in a number of areas. And so the questions are actually pretty specific, but I still think in total, you can actually pull back and take a 30,000 ft at the sub total of the questions on voting on police reforms, on guns, on abortion, and kind of get a sense of where the electorate is broadly and specifically on some of these issues. Yeah, so, I mean, you know, so basically, we gave people sets of batteries of loosely related questions that were pegged to specific elements and policies that were floating around in the legislature. A lot of them we in a sort of handicapped from legislation that was out there, or, you know, debates that we know we’re going on, um, and then with some more, you know, specific standalone items that didn’t work well sat in those in those more brief, more schematic policy idea batteries. And so we come away, come away with, you know, we like things are fairly nuanced, you know, set of responses um, that, you know, have worked out, I think so far more or less in terms of, you know, a lot of, a lot of the ideas that are being floating around, inevitably, you feel like you missed some things, etcetera, and, you know, maybe maybe at the end we’ll go what was on your wish list, but I mean, but that kind of, you know, gives you gives people a sense of what we’re looking at it. Again, all of these results are at our website at uh texas politics dot utexas dot e d U. When you go there, there’s the latest poll uh section that will have graphics of all this. We also have a polling archive in which will have an entry for this april poll. Like we do for all of our other polls in which you can get a comprehensive tab file also, uh access hundreds of graphics for, you know, all of these items or, you know, the vast majority of the items and by particular subgroup, and can even access the data, uh, the data files and code books. So I just want to follow up on one thing you said there, just to be specific about something, you know, you said, you know, the ideas that are floating around out there. And in fact, actually, that’s not exactly what we do, right? I mean, it’s one of those that we actually do is we’re actually going to read the legislation that’s moving through committees. And they said that we look at the bills, you know, you didn’t, you said the ideas are floating around. I wanna make clear we don’t pull every every idea that’s floating around out there. In fact, we specifically look at the bills to try to see what’s hard is to figure out what bills matter what’s gonna advance and what’s going to die. I mean, ultimately said, you know, what do we not as you know, we didn’t ask about, like, what people think about transgender kids playing sports, A bill that just actually got voted down in the public Education Committee as of today, as I believe. So, I mean, you know, this is this is what we do. So what do we, what do we what do we find? Let’s let’s get going, what do you what interested you? Well, I think we should start with just the open and what the legislature should be doing. We asked this question back in february and at that point in time, um, you know, uh, Covid was still high on the list is driven primarily by democrats. You know, republicans were starting to come back around to immigration border security when I say come back around all I all I mean to say, is that immigration, border security always a big, big issue in texas. Always a big issue for republicans during the trump presidency because of, you know, just say trust in the executive branch probably, and the seriousness with which they’re taking the issue, it sort of receded a little bit. And in terms of its importance since the bio administration is taking back over. And since all the attention that’s been paid to the influx of unaccompanied Children on the border, the issue is really ramped back up in 2021. So, you know, again, open into question which of the legislature address top issue Immigration or border security, 36% of texas, 61% of republicans, when I think was so interesting about this idea, we were talking about this earlier 61% 1st of all, on an open ended question is kind of amazing, shows, you know, just a homogeneous city of attitudes. Just it’s just apparently asked me to give him a choice. This is what people said when we asked we look about the democratic attitudes. It takes five different issues to get to 61%. And it’s the five top democratic issues. And, you know, essentially kind of speaks to the differences in the party coalitions in some ways. You know, if you’re a Republican that you’re doing your business on, uh, you know, immigration and border security, you pretty much can go and kind of pick and choose what else you want to work on for democrats, 22% want the legislature to deal with, covid, uh, 16% the energy, energy, the system in the grid, 13% gun control, 11% voting rights, 9% healthcare. And so the democrats have a bigger plate. You know. What’s interesting about that, though? You know, I mean, as as I was I was talking to having a conversation with somebody else this morning for an interview and, you know, it was David Brown on the texas standard, but he was making the point that, you know, we may, you know, widely observed that, you know, that question keep people up for the texas legislature, which really doesn’t have a lot to do in the realm of immigration and border security, just spend a ton of money, you know, fund the hell out of it and talk about it. And, you know, there’s not a lot of not a lot of action that you can really get into, you know, you know, making sure that that undocumented people don’t get government services, you know, some kind of, you know, attention to the state side of enforcement, but even though, you know, and so it’s an interesting posing of what we’re seeing in the Legislature right now, which is republicans looking republican legislators looking for other things to please the base on, because they can only do so much on immigration and border security. Now, that’s that’s a hypothesis posing as an observation. But, you know, as we look at what we’ve been seen going on in this session, you know, it’s an interesting refraction of that result, you know, that, you know, I think we typically, you know, think, well, you know, the it’s the democrats that have this problem of their base and their constituents being scattered among all of these different interests and and priorities, which is true, but because republicans can only do a limited amount about the top priority, that virtually, you know, that a huge share of their voters consistently have, you know, that may be part of the explanation for what sets them loose on the hunt for what else they can provide in a public way to their constituents. I think. I think, you know, we’re talking about, we’re on another podcast, we’re recording with the texas tribune earlier today, you know, in our collaborator Darren Shaw, Professor Darren Shop brought up the idea of issue publix, you know, which is more or less just think of his issue voters, you know, sort of people for whom, you know, who vote regularly and there’s an issue or two that really motivate their voting. And I’m out here. Look at this, I mean, I agree. I mean, this may be a slight difference here, which is, you know, for the Democratic Coalition. It feels to me like all of these issues are important and essentially they have to choose, you know, which wanted a given time. I think, you know, gun control really jumped up in the most important problem given, you know, the mass shootings that occurred really close proximity around when we were, uh, in the poll. But it’s always an issue for Democratic voters, whether it rises to the top or not, you know, whereas for Republican issues, for republicans in texas, the consistency of immigration and border security to my mind actually provides more flexibility for member is not necessary to go looking for issues, but for looking for issue Publix to please. And they exist in the Republican Party around guns in particular, which we’ll get to abortion is another one these sort of cultural issues and then really, you know, things having to do with business and taxes. And ultimately, they can really do this almost in some ways under the radar, because as long as they’re maintaining border security funding, you know, you know, and it’s waving their fists at the federal government at the same time, because we’re having to spend this money. Well, you know, they are doing what they’re supposed to do according to a large group of people. And then they can go, kind of, focus on the people who get real intense around Republican primaries, on some of these other issues. Well, and of course, the whole, you know, the, you know, we’re talking a lot about public opinion and public constituencies here, and of course, the whole mass of of organized interests that populate the legislature every other year. You know, actually take up most of the time, right? And and and and frankly, from the perspective of the institutional, you know, you know, the institutional interest groups, it’s a it’s a headache or at least something of just a tactical consideration when these huge issues that aren’t really about the trade groups of the organized interests or, you know, the material interest pub, you know, segments of, of the legislature in the lobby. It’s kind of like, hey, I’m either trying to kill this. And so if they’re going to spend all day on voting and I’m trying to like kill legislation, that’s great. If I’m trying to pass something and they’re going to spend all day on abortion, that’s less good for me because it’s kind of chop chop. I got something I’m trying to get through here. Yeah. And those things multiply, right. I mean, you know, as the session gets kind of, you know, as the session inevitably gets a bit nastier, you know, as we get near the end. And, you know, for whatever reason, you know, partisan wins and losses. Just the tension of the calendar, what have you? It seems like those things multiply. You know, yesterday’s nasty fight makes tomorrow that much harder, right? And, and you know, you get what you get is that, you know, you, you know, it’s the job of the leadership to manage an inevitable kind of fragmentation that starts happening. You know, and and it’s aggravated by the fact that one of the, one of the big cleavages that inevitably emerges and we’re beginning to see it now break into slightly more semi public view is the tension between the House and the Senate. So, right. So what else do we, I’m speaking of all these issues. So, you know, one of the things that God and one of the issues that got national attention has been guns. So maybe we move into guns. Uh, h B 1927 is the unlicensed carry bill in the move that surprised and we hear irritated, certainly some people that measure made it to the floor fairly intact and then was passed to the House and, and sent as a little gift to the Senate, which has created headaches for Lieutenant Governor Patrick Patrick. So what I want to talk a little bit about the, what we know about the public context, public opinion, context of this, which is very different and will bring us back to issue public. So I think, right, so, you know, generally, you know, in a more general question, only 20% of texas voters in april wanted to make current gun control laws less strict. So 80% of texas voters basically wanted them more strict left alone or just didn’t have any opinion. So it’s not like there’s a clamoring to loosen up the gun laws here. And the truth is, this has kind of been the case basically, since texas passed open carry, there’s a pretty big, you know, desire, especially among republicans to loosen gun laws in the state once they passed open carry, we saw that opinion shift and it hasn’t really moved back at eight point time. So this is the broad context to the specific proposal, uh, you know, and how to talk about this. But ultimately, the thing to know is, you know, strong majorities of Texans support universal background checks for all gun purchases, as do strong majorities of americans that includes 92% of democrats and 64% of republicans constitutional carry, unlicensed carry, whatever you want to call it, as opposed by 59% of texas voters, 34% of support. There’s pretty much no majority or overwhelming opposition amongst every group, except for a slight majority of republicans, 56% support permit, let’s carry, 39% opposed. The most remarkable results in all of this is that is the gender gap in republican support, so. Well, 70% of republican men support, uh, permit. Let’s carry the plurality of republican women, 49% oppose it with 43% in support. And so this is, you know, not a popular policy proposal. I mean, you know, you’re talking about the whole this is the job of leadership is to protect people from taking 10 votes. I mean, this is kind of a really good example of what we’re talking about. Right, Right. Yeah. I mean, just to decompose that, I mean, again, I mean, I don’t, you know, there’s a subtle point in here. I think that can be lost. Which is that we’re not saying that, you know, look, it’s only like a very small handful of republicans that want this. It’s still, you know, a pretty popular proposal among republicans right now, it’s become associated I think with, you know, however you want to you want to frame it the republican brand republican identity for ideological foundations of of republicans. But, you know, the other side of that is that there’s not a consensus, particularly, as you say, when you compare the magnitude of opposition to this among democrats, I mean, I think something like 90% of democrats oppose this, right? Yeah, yeah, 85% of post. But the other point is, you know, but, you know, would you really want to stake too much on an issue that your your voters are 56 39 support, oppose on, right? I mean, this is not something, you know, if you’re, you know, to think about this from the pragmatic view of a candidate or incumbent looking, you know, to run for office or to run for re election, and you’re looking for an issue that you think is a good general election issue, This isn’t one of them. But if you’re looking to run in a primary, you know, it’s still not the best for a primary, but, you know what, but, you know, what your position is going to have to be if you are going to run in the Republican primary, which is you’re going to have to, you know, you’re going to have to you’re gonna be inclined to toe the line on this. Yeah, I mean, I have, like, a, you know, you can apply this to a number of the issues that we, kind of, looked at in this poll, but, you know, you’re not gonna, you know, you’re not gonna have a lot of success as a Republican elected official, going back to your primary voters and say, I went to the legislature this year, and I didn’t and I didn’t, you know, make gun control laws here more strict. So you guys should realize me, I didn’t, you know, I didn’t loosen up. You know, I made sure that abortion laws didn’t get any looser in texas. It’s like, well, you know, there’s someone who wants to make them stricter, right? And so they’re there to run in the primary. And I think that’s right, context is everything in that, because, you know, you know, all things being equal, You could you could you could imagine a universe in which that would be sufficient. I can imagine. I mean, in other words, if you look at the laws in texas and you look at a state in which it’s already pretty difficult to get an abortion and a state in which you can open carry. You know, the barriers for license carry have been decreasing. You know, it’s, you know, saying, look, you know, this, you know, I’m proud of what texas is, and I and I held the line, it’s intuitively not a terrible position, but if you know that unless you know that the environment is what it is in texas, that there are people for whom, you know, and those two issue examples are very important and it’s not going to be good enough for them and they will go and they will make you look like it’s not enough to make it look like it’s not enough uh in a in a primary election in which turn out is, you know, well, less than half a minuscule, you know, in a in a in a very homogeneous Republican district, which many of them are, and, you know, they will be even more so after the next redistricting round, um you know, you set up a dynamic that pushed, you know, that this is the mechanism by which, you know, the system gets, you know, more more ideologically sorted within the parties. Yeah. You know, I mean, I think that’s one of the values of, you know, that comes out of this, but when you’re in the session of, you know, but when you’re in the legislative session, uh you know, it poses problems for, you know, managing these kinds of issues when they come up. So what, you know, another issue? Well, let’s just jump through abortion then, I guess we just touched let’s just jump through abortion. That’s what people do. So, you know, when it comes to abortion, we we tested uh three of the proposals making their way through the legislature outdoor outlawing abortion after six weeks, allowing anyone in texas the right to an abortion provider. They perceived to be violating state law and then banning abortion if the Supreme Court overturns roe v wade, which is sort of out there in the ether is a possibility. It has been talked about for a long time. And again, something that was seen. I mean, you know, I remember people being worried this might pass about 10 years ago, but you know, the so called trigger bill, right? And so, you know what we find with the results of these is kind of, you know, I would say what we generally tend to find with abortion attitudes and really, no matter how we ask about them. And this is something that, you know, we said it before, but like nobody’s following the Legislature as an example, abortion is not like that, not that abortion people are following abortion policy, but people know what they think about abortion. It’s not like all of a sudden, like something’s going to happen and someone’s going to flip on their view on abortion. It really doesn’t work that way. And there’s a lot of really, there’s a lot of reasons for that reinforces itself across, you know, culture, party religion, there’s just a lot of other reasons anyway. The two sort of, you know, I would say restrictions versus the banning right, outlawing abortion after six weeks, allowing someone to an abortion provider are basically controversial, but more popular than unpopular. But neither of them received the support of the majority of orders. 49% of Texans would outlaw abortion after six weeks, 41% would not oppose that. 44% would allow anyone to texas the right to sue an abortion provider, which I just the parentheses here, I think is one of the craziest policy ideas I’ve ever heard. 37% of poses. Yeah, I’m wondering where Texans for lawsuit reform is on this. Yeah, I mean, I’m listening. What do I hear? Oh, wait, you know what I hear? Those crickets josh, okay. Those are crickets in the Tl are building over the over this abortion bill. Yeah, Well, anyway, whatever, whatever the whatever legal standing means, I don’t know anyway, but apparently neither do the lawyers in the legislature, so, and then the last one, you know, so those are again, broadly acceptable to voters. Obviously, much more republicans and democrats, 74% of republicans support the six week ban, 66% support allowing anyone to sue an abortion provider when it comes to the trigger bill. A majority of voters, 54% oppose it. Again, this is pretty common, you know, when we ask, you know, the quote unquote standard abortion question that you find an academic literature to kind of get one question on abortion, the position of banning abortion completely in all circumstances, really only selected by about 12 to 16% of texas voters. It might, you know, among republicans, it’s usually about 18 20% so one in five, give or take texas. Republicans are usually in support of completely banning the procedure. And this is, you know, it’s it’s like a lot of things where, you know, you start talking about little tweaks around the edges, potential restrictions, another hurdle or something, you know, to jump to jump over. A lot of people say that’s okay. I think we should say comparatively what can be marketed as comparatively small tweaks. They’re not they’re not they’re not experienced as tweaks by all. No, you’re absolutely right that I should be more careful. But what can be described as, you know what I mean? What I like to think what people who can be framed as it’s just call it what it is. I mean, well, I was going to say, I mean the framing that I think is most often used that I hate is the one of, well, this is common sense, which were common sense means, you know, whatever I think you should do is common sense. But generally if a lot of people can see something as common sense, like for example, a good example of this would be like parental notification requirements for minors. There’s a lot of democrats were going to say, yeah, I think, you know, a minor who wants to get an abortion, you probably get the parents involved, right. Things like that. generally or not, if not overwhelmingly popular or more popular than not. LTD removing access as opposed to limiting access. We’re making it more difficult. Is another question entirely. And so even though a majority of republicans support this is 58% versus 29% who opposed it actually looked kind of a lot like permit. Let’s carry in some ways, almost, you know, a little bit a little bit more opposition to permit let’s carry, actually. But, you know, large majorities of other groups opposing this. And, you know, I think this is kind of common. So the question becomes, is it worth it? Right. Yeah. I think, you know, and I think the experiments that we’re seeing here with different, you know, where, you know, it’s kind of a search for the boundary on these proposals, you know, I mean, you were mentioning, you know, the slim number of people, you know, it’s really in the teens that in the standard abortion question would sign off on banning abortion outright and all circumstances, you know? But if you look at then the trigger bill, you throw overturning roe v wade into the mix. You know? I think of it almost as like a stimulus just say, okay, so what can you do to support, You know, I mean, you know, the support for that was at 34%. Right? So you pick up some independence. You don’t really pick up very many democrats, but that’s, you know, that’s an interesting piece in terms of, like, where, you know, and I think that’s what we see in a lot of you see it with guns, you see with abortion, we’ve talked about it before. You see, even to some degree with some of the policing stuff, not quite as clearly, but it’s a matter of where can you find a spot where people will allow some slippage? You know, and what are otherwise seem like pretty set attitudes we’ve seen in immigration, right? We’ve seen a lot in a lot of areas of, you know, where we expect otherwise polarized results. Um, we’re gonna come down to the end here. What else, what else you want to give pride of place? I mean, you know, we did this in the tribune podcast, but you know, you have to consider what everyone else was doing. You know, what else would you say from the, you know, within the realm of the legislative stuff you found really interesting. You know, I think, you know, the questions we asked on Medicaid expansion were really interesting. And I think partially because uh huh maybe, you know, I had, I probably had internalized a view of the politics of this a little too much and I’m happy to admit when I’m wrong and you look at this and it was sort of a surprising result. So we have two questions about it. First, we basically asked, you know, what we call salience question, how much have you heard about? Basically? You know, texas decision not to expand Medicaid eligibility to more people explain what Medicaid is, who it serves. And this is kind of what we found was kind of similar to the legislature. Only 10% of people said that they’ve heard a lot about this. And this is despite the fact that, you know, we’ve had a decades long plus discussion over texas is large uninsured population. Nations leading uninsured population about texas decision not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act despite, again, this, you know, large, low socioeconomic status, low insured uninsured population in the state. And you know, and I remember, I mean, I started here working with you about 10 years ago and, you know, the rick perry years, it was very common to sort of here Medicaid talked about as you know, failed program, an unfunded mandate, something bankrupt the state, if they if we let it, etcetera, etcetera. Um, and so you think that the idea of even talking about Medicaid was impossible. And yet when we asked them on the follow up, would you support expanding eligibility for Medicaid? A majority of Texans, 55% would support it? 26% oppose it. The remaining about 20% don’t know or don’t have an opinion on it. But what was most surprising to me was that, you know, while 41% of republicans oppose Medicaid expansion of plurality, 32% were supportive of it, which I think kind of goes against this notion, you know, in texas in particular, that Medicaid is just untouchable. Yeah, dead on arrival. And and I mean, there are reasons why, I mean, honestly, you know, there are budget reasons why I think, you know, there’s more there’s more actually legitimate concern about Medicaid expansion in texas than, you know, I think even proponents have give credit for. But the idea that like this can’t move because republican opposition to it is overwhelming is kind of wrong. It looks like now if a real debate started on this and both sides mobilize and started making, you know, the claims that they made in the past about the pros and cons of this, I’m not sure that republicans wouldn’t polarized to the republican position of democrats. Likewise, But it’s interesting nonetheless, you know, after a year of covid in which the sort of the medical system in texas has been put on full display for tax ins that there’s, you know, there’s support here and allowed to this something I said to you, which was, you know, when we ask about universal, like a universal system versus the current system, you know, we also find slight majority support for the universal system. And so what’s interesting about all that is just, I think, you know, there’s certainly some something under the surface here, if not at the top, may not be under the surface about Texans dissatisfaction with the current options for health care. Yeah, I think that’s right. And you know, I mean, it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s it strikes me as something that’s another one of those things that I use, you know, a questionable metaphor, but nonetheless, I’ll use it anyway. But it’s one of those things where, you know, it’s there, how deep are the roots cognitively? I’m not sure because it seems like, you know, you can you can touch you can you can detect that in the ways that you’re talking about. But it’s also easily yanked out or, you know, re factors or the metaphor breaks down. But, you know, it’s easy to kind of overwhelm that with something else. So people are thinking, yeah, you know, you know, my dot this experience of healthcare is really not very good. I have had a lot of, I’m not happy with this, but then, you know, socialism, socialism, socialism, Obamacare, obamacare, Obamacare and well, yeah, you know, I’d like it to be better, but I certainly don’t want socialism, Right? Right. And so, you know, there’s it’s just it’s there, but I get the sense it’s one of those things, it’s easily redirected, reframed. Um, you know, I think for me is thinking about this and then, you know, we wind up pretty quickly, but you know, the police numbers, I think we’re very interesting. Um, given, you know, this is obviously so connected, two other things that are going on that are important right now. Obviously, the discussion of race, we’ve talked about, you know, how if you think about the police, you know, if you ask about the police and the context of the death of black americans in the custody of police should get highly polarized responses. Um, you know, obviously sort of activated by the discussion of race in the context of policing, but I was struck by how much support there was otherwise in this poll for some of the police reforms that around the table, and the George Floyd act, including among republicans. You know, bani, you know, we asked about banning chokeholds, you know, we asked about duty to intervene laws and we found, you know, a lot of support, including substantial support among republicans and conservatives, which I think, you know, to hear the debate to here, and we talked about this in the last podcast, went to rehearse it. But the, you know, to hear this, you know, the kind of rhetoric suggesting that you absolutely unconditional support to the police and to grant them like unlimited latitude is actually not a characterization of what’s out there, a fair characterization of what’s out there. Yeah, I think the best way to link those things together, and I hadn’t really thought about earlier today. But as you said, you know, when asking about the deaths of black americans at the hands of police, 82% of republicans say that they’re isolated incidents as opposed to 87% of democrats who see them as broader problems. But what’s really, you know, consistent about this? And I say this almost like I always say it’s nice, but I mean, I said, say hello to pin you don’t consistency is not a requirement for people’s attitudes. Trust me. But, you know, the most popular proposal we tested was required an officer to intervene when another one is misusing force. Um, and I think, you know, if you, you know, whether you believe that, you know, these deaths are a sign of systematic racism or they’re isolated incidents. This is something that, you know, everyone should be able to get behind and they do. And I think that’s what it shows you is that, you know, there is a sense that, you know, at least among republicans, that, you know, there is a, a certain pocket who definitely doesn’t want to place any sort of restrictions on police officers. But it’s also coming from the belief that the, that basically the vast, vast majority of police officers are doing well. And if you just give them a couple more rules, it will take care of the bad ones, you know, you know, and you obligate people to, if you will police themselves. Um, you know, it’s, I think, yeah, it’s interesting to pose that in terms of consistency, because, you know, it’s not entirely consistent, but it does help smooth off the rough edges of what might be, you know, a lack of fit between accumulating evidence and some pre existing beliefs about this. Can I add one more thing before we wrap up? I know we’re running along, come on, come on, boss, please. You know, the other thing this poll, and it’s one of the things, it’s not just in this poll, but you can see it because of the number of poles we conduct both this year and over time. I mean it’s a lot. I think we’ve done over 40 surveys over the last 10 years of texas attitudes. But you know, the other thing that was really notable in this poll and its relatives related to legislative session is, you know, Greg Abbott’s net approval has declined from plus 24 so it’s 56 approving 32 disapproving of plus 24 at the start of the pandemic last april two minus two in this poll among republicans has dropped from plus 82 2 plus 64 among democrats has gone from minus 35 to minus 76. Similar pattern with his handling of Covid. I think the covid is really what has driven down, you know, Greg Abbott could regularly, I think up until recently, rely rely on, but count on, let’s say the support of somewhere between 15 and 25 30% of democrats paid on what just happened moment. We’re in time. Not so to vote for him, but certainly to approve of the job he’s doing. Some of them certainly did vote for him. Probably. You know, what’s interesting now is that Greg Abbott is looks like as polarizing of a politician as anybody. Um you know, you’ve got 83% of democrats disapproving of the job. He’s doing 88% of republicans approving. And so that’s a pretty big shift. There’s been a less of a shift among the other elected officials. Patrick saw a much smaller decline from plus four to minus four plus 60 among republicans to plus 53 minus 55 among democrats to minus 70. So he also saw has seen a little bit of a dip through all, like he had less far to fall. Well, Patrick Patrick was not, you know, anyway. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yes, he had less part of all. He is less well known. He’s also not the face of the party and the pandemic response in the state. And what I’m not sitting here, you know, I’m not passing judgment on Abbott’s response either way, but I would think it’s not surprising to see a governor who’s been in the lead figure in the state’s response to a massive pandemic that’s claimed 50,000 lives related economic fallout from all that, you know, it’s not surprising to see him taking some hits at this point after a year of this. Yeah, I think. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s, you know, this is this has been an ongoing trend I think for him, I mean, if you look at the trend lines, which you can see at our website, you can see this, you can see this happening pretty clearly in the trend graphics. We risk there and the real shift among democrats. And you know, be again, we can never know for sure just to be all science, if we don’t know anything for sure, but just to be science. But the real, I think the real shift comes after the opening of the state, the removal of the mask mandates and the opening of the businesses which were extremely polarizing decisions between democrats and republicans. And then after that, you see the democratic evaluations drop. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think you see there’s a couple of little drop offs among democrats, I think, um, on that note, uh, thanks for listening. Thanks to josh for being here. Thanks to our excellent technical staff in the liberal arts development studio, in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of texas at Austin. Thanks to you for listening again. Uh We rolled out all the support material and lots of elaboration of these results at our website texas politics dot utexas dot e d. You look in the poll archive, look in the latest poll section and check out the blog. We’ll have more drill down into this in coming days and weeks. Thanks again for listening, 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