November 10th, 2021 – 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 part. So I tell people on a regular basis, there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called the problem is these departures from the constitution.

They have become the norm. Point 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 for the week of November 10th, 2021. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin.

And. Really enunciate the university of Texas at now, um, given the, the new market entrance I’m joined this week by Josh blank research director of the Texas politics project back again on campus in the liberal arts development studio. It was great to be here. It’s fun. It is. Um, I, you know, you feel not that we didn’t get really good service via zoom, but you just feel more coddled than person.

I like being coddled and I get coddled here, you know that. So, so during the last week, we’ve, uh, been a little busy rolling out the October, 2021 university of Texas, Texas Tribune poll. The Tribune published a half dozen stories on the results over the last week or two to, uh, look at that by a wide array of excellent Tribune reporters and writers.

But we thought we’d unpacked some of them today. More or less from our perspective in terms of sequencing and, and what people are interested in. I really love that setup because it’s like, you know, I don’t really get to speak from my own perspective enough. Right. You know, we just always, yeah. We’re always just hold up.

Um, it’s so internally, uh, thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. You’re welcome. So, um, So let’s, let’s do that. Let’s start with the issues that have been at the center of the legislative world for the last year or so we did a battery of questions on, I mean, we did a few batteries of questions related to the legislature, you know, in a lot of ways, the heart of it was, you know, this battery in which we gave people 13 issues, uh, and policy areas.

And in some ways, and we can talk about this, I guess, you know, so. Frames of the issue in a, in a couple of, in a couple of areas. And we can talk about the logic of that and ask people whether they approved or disapproved of how state leaders and the legislature had handled each of the following in the state.

And, you know, To be, you know, wonky, which I guess is our prerogative here in our own, in our own little gig here, our joint, you know, we got a lot of, uh, you know, I was really, you know, we were both, I think really happy with the way this turned out in the sense that we got a lot of variants. We got really good spreads.

To be able to read into this, right? Yeah. I mean, I think that’s, I mean, that’s, what’s kind of great about something like this. I mean, on the one hand, I think when the legislative session started, we took an approach that kind of looked like this and a couple of different points throughout the process.

We’re kind of here at the end. Now it allows us to look back and, and kind of see, you know, in some ways what, you know, what worked, what didn’t work, what broke through what didn’t break through. And I think in the case of this battery, what’s really, you know, most interesting to me in some ways. Almost the exact same battery back in June.

So we’ve got to enter the regular session. We gave them, I think, 10 of the 13 areas that we, that we ended up assessing in October, we assessed with the exact same word in June, so we can say, okay, you know, they spend an extra three sessions here. Right? What did they get out of it? And what you find is that I think at the, at the top level, the most notable thing is that they bought a certain amount of Republican support that was not there.

Now, this is not to say it was lacking. But what I would say is this, if you look at the democratic numbers in June, you look at the democratic numbers in October across most of these issue areas, the shared disapproving didn’t really move much. It was almost, it was pretty much the same, which means, you know, Democrats kind of said, okay, you know, what do you think about how to legislate your hand election voting laws while 73% disapproved, you know, in June.

Get to October 76% disagree. That’s kind of the story among Democrats among Republicans. It’s I think it’s a little more interesting here, right? So we look at, you know, second amendment rights, 70% approved in June 80% approved in October 57% approved to have the legislature handle and state leaders handle public safety in June 69% in October on elections.

63% approval to 75% approval on immigration border security perpetual big issue. 62 approval to 73 approval is a really what they did in a lot of ways was they actually got the approval among Republicans on these key issues to the same level as disapproval among Democrats. But it took a little bit longer.

Well, and as we think about that, I mean, there’s a lot to be said for that. I mean, I was talking to somebody to a reporter this morning and was talking to. I think I used the phrase, something, it might’ve been a little, I don’t know, more or less diplomatic than this was something like, you know, the perpetually unsatisfiable far right.

Of the, of the Republican party. What’s interesting as you’re going through that list and you’re talking about those numbers, I’m in my head and you know, if we had prepared better, I thought about it more. We’d be able to parse this out a little more, but so how much of that was June ended and Republicans felt like there was unfinished business.

With the assumption that. There’s that much cognition going on that much attention. And what if it was one of those things? Did they get it done and that it, you know, then they sold it right. Or word. And I think it’s a little bit different, you know, I was thinking of public safety. Thank you much. They didn’t do all that much in the regular.

Well, I guess in the regular session they did some and then, but then they really brought some of it home on the bail reform. Well remember, did they pass the, uh, basically the bill that would make it impossible for cities to decrease their police budgets? So, I mean, that’s a pretty big one, but your point is well taken.

I think that’s right. I mean, but, but, but they waited to do the bail thing, right? I mean the bail thing didn’t get finished until. You know if we’re just, yeah, I mean, we could, I mean, there’s probably some ways, as I said, I’m skeptical that we have the data to parse it out and I’ll tell you. And the reason is just because we’re talking about trying to figure out the difference between you, that that 10% that we did, we didn’t observe in June that we do observe and in October, but I think the point is important and I would say.

Oh, I’ll speculate. Can I speculate please? Okay. My speculation is that the increased attention is what did it, not the substance. Cause I think that’s the thing you look at. It’s like they pass permitless carry during the regular session, they were at 70% of their 80%. That has nothing to do with what they did during the special session.

I think that had to do with the fact that in a lot of ways, even if you were paying, like, even if you weren’t really paying a ton of attention, there was so much coverage to the fact that the legislature was still here. They were still dealing with. After they’ve already done all these other things. I mean, that was kind of the tone of the coverage.

And so I think more than anything, I think it probably just increase the salience of a lot of this stuff in a session that we’ve been saying, it’s like, that’s the sold it part, right? That, yeah, that’s what I agree. That’s the sole department, again, it may not have even been a direct sale so much as the fact that it was just being around and having, you know, again, the legislature’s activities continuously talked about.

For 10 months kind of jam this up. And the thing is, it’s not because I think necessarily there was a huge number of Republicans out there who were like, oh, I’m disappointed. They didn’t finish the job. Or we didn’t get to, you know, an, a plus per se. I think it’s actually because they covered so much stuff.

It takes time for people to hear about all of it even, or even to be kind of made generally aware of it. And we’ve been kind of dealing with this, the whole session. It’s like, what is a normal voter? Not like us. No, it’s somebody who’s reading all this stuff. What, what were you supposed to pick out of this session?

If you just kinda. Lance at the evening news, you know, a couple of things here and there, but by having again, the conversation go on for so long, I think it sort of probably ratcheted up those numbers from sort of ambient general awareness. And, you know, I don’t, you know, this is where, you know, I don’t feel too deficient because it’s not something I’m supposed to know necessarily, but it would be interesting to have, you know, like Brian Jones or, or Chris lesion in here and ask them like in your subfield, what is the, is there, there must be research on this.

What is the. Right. Or, you know, or is that construct even correct? Right. That basically they pass it, then it takes a while for it to be sold to their base, to their constituencies or not. You know, it’s an interesting kind of question. I mean, I’m thinking about it just as we were, I was raising it, you know, it would be.

Put a grid together and kind of say, okay, how done was this in June? Right. Did they do anything else? And then some rough, you know, and I don’t know how we do this, but you know, some rough estimation of, you know, and then how hard was it? Right. You know, and I just don’t, you know, I don’t, I don’t know the answers to most of those questions right off the top of my head.

I mean, I would say that, you know, just, you know, sort of in terms of thinking about the, the work of the selling, whether it’s director, just ambient awareness, you know, the negative attitudes among independents went up across that time period on a lot of these issues too. So I think that sort of speaks to the ambient awareness piece.

If you think about independence as being sort of loosely, kind of, you know, usually loosely affiliated the political system broadly. They learned staff and they decided that they liked it less well and are more in our more derogatory moments. We’ve called thrive called I won’t rope you into this, although it’s true to say, you know, we have referred to independence is kind of soft headed is almost like a positive spin of independence being soft headed.

Right. That, you know, I was trying to explain, I was talking to another reporter about this yesterday, that. Since it’s not mediates since their responses are not so mediated by partisanship. If I might use a crude cognitive model, you know, it comes in, you know, something happens and they kind of go, they don’t go, oh, what do Republicans and Democrats think.

Oh, that sounds bad. That sounds good. Right. Right. And that’s where you are. Right. And so we should, you know what, we need to do a video in the next couple of weeks. We’ll do a podcast on independence. That’d be fun cause we need to write about it anyway. So I think that’s a good idea. So some of you, you spoke to this, so.

What’s good. What’s bad here then. Right. I mean, you know, I mean, I think on the list overall and for whom or for whom? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, you know, taking it at first cut and we’ve talked about this, a lot of people listen to the, the Tribune podcast. We went through this at some point, um, you know, in terms of what’s good in terms of what had the highest level of public approval.

The highest approval ratings in this grid, uh, public in not in order public safety election and voting laws. Second amendment rights. I think that’s actually in reverse order, probably so most popular. Second amendment rights followed by, uh, public safety. And then, although. And then election and voting.

And then we have with an asterisk, we have to put immigration and border security, net negative, negative, but because Republicans are so, were so impressed, they were impressed. They were very impressed. Um, that, that, that has to be like right there, kind of on the bubble, even though strictly, you know, strictly speaking only three were net positive that the re I imagine that’s important.

Right. And even though, even those three second amend was 46 approved 30 to disapprove, public safety, 42 30 election voting 43 38, again, immigration, border security, big for Republicans, but 41 44 overall. So, you know, mixed bag there. Right. And so, you know, What the content of those policies were, you know, we were talking about public safety early and we don’t need to rehash what was done with election and voting laws.

Um, and then second amendment rights almost speaks for itself with, uh, with open carry or with a, uh, permit, less can license carry. Right. That’s pretty good if you’re a Republican and those and those majorities were fueled by big Republican, super majorities among, you know, within those groups. Right.

That’s right. So 73% of Republicans approved on immigration border security, 74% of Democrats disapproved. But I mean, this could be so, you know, to the insatiability of this, you know, this issue, I mean, it’s funny, we asked him this in the survey, whether, you know, the space is too much too little or the right amount of border security, 57% of Republicans in October of this year.

Too little. And this is again, after we’ve gone over the billion dollar threshold, almost a $2 billion. Oh, now it’s almost three, right? If you put everything together, those late, you know, that late supplement that God added towards the end of, I think the third session we’re close to three now. So 57% say too little that’s down from 61% in August, but they said this year in February of this year, also 61% said too little in February of 20, 19 60 1% said too little.

So ultimately it’s not clear. Like, we’ll see. I mean, this is again, one of those lag questions, right. But whether, you know, Republican attitudes, at least maybe after the campaign season, you know, ended up getting, you know, let’s say maybe they’ll say, well, we spend about the right amount. Maybe after we have a whole campaign season of Republicans campaigning on how much money were spent on border security.

But at least in the immediate sense, the demand is still there. Yeah. And I think there’s an interesting piece of the context here before we go to the bottom three, but you know, your kids, can’t not talk about immigration. It’s impossible. Uh, you know, th there’s a, there’s an interesting piece of the, of the context here though, is that because of all of the federal money, I mean, there’s not been a with.

Have any sense of fiscal limitations or problems? Well, why would there be exactly so, you know what I mean? There’s just, I mean, you know, there were holding some of that federal money over for later on, you know, the $4 billion is still it’s something like that. And they were saying today, you know, they’re closing down like applications to the rent relief program and there’s still a bunch of money in there.

I mean, it’s sort of, you know, what, what me worry well, How many re you know, what is the translation of a, how many months of rent by how many feet of fence I was going to say, let’s say, you know, you know, who’s not getting a tax kick back renters, and that’s right. Brings us to the bottom. Right? So then the bottom three on this list were property taxes.

Uh, K through 12 education and then dead last. And obviously my hobby horse right now, the reliability of the electric grid, right. And the electric good numbers we’ll start with that are just, you know, amazing. I mean, eight only 18% or only 18% approve and 6% approved, strongly, uh, 60% disapproved, 42% strongly.

And that’s up from 52%. In June. So, you know, the, the window in between in which, you know, there was this whole kind of brief discussion about how, you know, the legislators were bringing, you know, the regulators to task for, you know, the bills that they passed, not looking good. Yeah. And, and, but, you know, I mean, the politics of that obviously have been very interesting in terms of where the Republican leadership is.

And, you know, this was an area where. There was a lot of daylight, natural daylight, not electrically electrically lit daylight between the Lieutenant governor and the governor on this. Well, you know, and this is something where it’s showing me, we, you know, we’re kind of implying something or not to be all academic again, but about the role of, you know, elites informing a public opinion.

Now it’s all indogenous by which I mean, they affect each other, you know, the message and communications of a leader affected by the views of their constituents and vice versa. But yeah, one of the great social science diagrams of the arrows just, just gone in circles. But the thing or illuminated the thing is here, whereas, you know, there’s almost no, uh, daylight between Republicans on, you know, it’s like immigration on, you know, I would say election and voting.

It was pretty for the most part. Once you kind of got their act together, it was certainly, you know, pretty pretty, uh, they moved a lot of agreements, you know, and I would say same thing on the second amendment, once again, the Lieutenant governor decided, so yeah, there hasn’t been as much, you know, I would say coordinated communication, especially on the electric grid.

And then what you find is, is that when you look at that number 18 approved 60 disapprove, that is not, I mean, it’s driven by Democrats, but Democrats didn’t change. When we say that the shared disapproving, we went from 52 to 60 Democrats were at 75 disapproval they’re up to 78. Independence went from 52 disapproval to 61.

And Republicans went from 34 disapproval to 45 and approval. And from 37 down to 31. So you go from net plus three among Republicans and net minus 14. So if there’s an issue that’s kind of hanging out there, just. Yeah. Speaking of keeping things to ourselves, I’ll just repeat it the empty time. This is such a big time bomb out there.

And look, it’s, uh, it’s got a long fuse that may never quite get to ignition, but if it does, I keep trying out different metaphor, the bomb, the bomb with a long fuse. I may, I may run with that a couple of times it wants a metaphor. It does, it needs one. But, you know, it, this is really out there. And I think it suggests that there’s some leverage to be had from this and some political hay to be made of it, even if there isn’t another problem.

Yeah. I mean, there’s, there’s an anxiety out there. We’ve talked about this for a while. I mean, to the extent that. I mean, Republicans have the keys to the car, you know, they’ve controlled state government for two decades. They’ve controlled. They control both chambers of the legislature. I mean, so when it comes to these sorts of things, like the basic operation of government stuff, there’s nowhere to point a finger and they tried and they’ve already fired everybody and then replaced them.

You’ve got a completely new public utility commission, you know, they’ve got new leadership. Um, yeah. You know, shrug emoji, I mean, you know, at this point, you know, you’ve got, you know, you’ve got to say, you’ve got to, you’ve got to have some vulnerability to the new appointees and to the policy framework, which you said you were going to do something about.

Yeah. Maybe so maybe not right. Voluntary weatherization. Yeah. Doug Lou. And if you’re out there, we’ll, you know, maybe we’ll have you on, um, we should talk about property taxes we should, before we get out. So then property taxes and, and that’s another interesting thing in which what just, you know, w what can we assume about public opinion and, or, uh, what can we assume and what can we.

Surmise based on evidence, based on what we’ve seen. And I think, you know, it’s hard not to look at these numbers in the context of the numbers that we’ve collected on in the past on property taxes. And we have a good long time series on this because, you know, we have been doing this longer than anyone else and more frequently.

And it’s not a pretty picture, but it’s a very interesting one, I think in terms of public opinion and response. Yeah. It’s one of those things where, you know, I’ve got two data points. You can’t draw a trend, but you kind of, you want to, I want to, I want to guess I want to think about it. So it’s a real quick, so overall 20% approve of how the legislature handled property taxes, 46% disapproved.

So minus 26 net, the only thing. Yeah, that makes that look acceptable as the fact of the electric grid being on this battery. But the interesting thing here again is, you know, this goes back to this pattern, you know, democratic disapproval went from 45 to 48% unchanged, independent disapproval 42 to 43 unchanged minus 31 net for both of them Republican disapproval.

33 to 43, went up 10 points. So on those other issues where, you know, approval went up 10 here, disapproval went up 10, it went from net negative five to net negative 14, it’s only 29% of Republicans approve of how the legislature handle property taxes. 43% is approved. This is maybe the most interesting result in the whole thing is your, you know, we went to the field after they finished the session, pass the property tax.

Uh, yeah. Bill or whatever last minute eruption of property tax action. And here’s so here’s, so here’s the question, right? So we noted that the, in June, the property taxes were sitting here at the bottom of the list. When we asked that I think it was the worst rated of anything in the legislature, uh, when we measured this in June and was like, oh, this is kind of sitting here.

And then there was some talk about it kind of made sense that it would come up again. And then to the extent that. Pass this bill. So, you know, you’re already kind of alluded to our previous research on this. You know, the legislature passed, you know, a small property tax decrease while back. And why, why am I say small?

I’m not even, I’m not even criticizing it. It’s a big state, even a small property tax, you know, a rebate of some sort or an increase in, in the homestead exemption is exceedingly expensive. And that’s the thing that we tend to find, which is, you know, we ask people, well, would the average amount make you know of the rebate maker or, you know, the D decrease in your property taxes make a difference?

Most families overwhelmingly. No, because it’s like, it ends up being like, especially now in this current version, like 12 to $17 a month, which is not gonna make a big difference, most people. So one of the things that I think this result sort of raises is, you know, is this number. Better than it would have been if they had done, if they hadn’t done this or is it worse because they did.

Yeah. And that’s the thing, I don’t know. I mean, to some degree, I’m not sure that they didn’t actually just, you know, take this issue that was already kind of sitting out there and as a source by providers and actually kind of raise the fact that, well, we can’t really do anything meaningful about it. But here you go.

Yeah. It’s like, there’s this wound out there. And instead of treating it, you just kind of scratched at it. I mean, it’s kind of the feeling you get, you know, and I think at the macro level, there’s another, you know, as we think about going into an election season and we think about, you know, how we come to terms with the 87th legislature and what they did, the things at the bottom of that list.

Are both, you know, to be fair, really difficult. Yeah. Right. I mean, look, they, they were going to have a lot of, they weren’t going to just restructure the electric market. They weren’t just, you know, w there were a lot of policy issues despite, you know, a certain populous discourse around it with just giving consumers a bunch of money back.

Yeah. Right. I mean, that sounds great. Yeah, the inherent complication of the system is a problem. Right. But you know, how much money could you have spent that you’re, you know, of that if you would take and say the extra 2 billion, we added to border security, and this is I’m going to an admittedly simplistic and stupid way of thinking about it, but I’m going to say it anyway.

But if you took that $2 billion and moved it, that pile of money over to doing something that might have at least. Reduce the degree to which the companies are going to now charge consumers over a long period of time. Might that have been a fairly popular move and might the billion, billion and a half on border security maybe have been enough until, you know, you just raised the bar.

I don’t know. And you know, that’s like a fantasy football league or something, right. Or, you know, Marvel versus DC lane, buddy. Right. But it’s an interesting question. When you look at, at, you know, how tough it is to handle these really hard issues. I mean, you talked about, you know, if you’re, if you’re the Republican party or now you own the policy environment and one possible implication of just kind of the narrative that you were spinning out a minute ago is that, you know, they’re pretty good at what seems like the quote unquote easy stuff.

Yeah. Right, but they’re, but they’re not as good when it comes to, you know, the really hard stuff, you know, and, and, you know, in a podcast you did with, you know, one of our colleagues and I, I w you know, Darren Shaw kinda mentioned in the trip cast something about, you know, the weakness of the citizen led legislature.

And I didn’t want to jump in there, but since he’s not here, I’ll do it now. But there is a sense in which, you know, there’s a, I think, a more persuasive contending explanation there, which is. You know, the stakeholder and interest group universe is much harder to handle on issues like energy and property taxes than appealing to very powerful one, you know, kind of lopsided Republican constituencies on.

Guns and other kinds of issues that we’ve seen the legislature acting well, you know, another issue at the bottom, that’s very simple was K through 12 public education. As an example, we haven’t touched on, but what’s interesting is this is the one that actually breaks the pattern, right? So overall 26% approved how they did this 42% disapproved of their handing of K through two.

That’s up from 30% disapproval in June. Now this is driven by Democrats, right? So, whereas Republicans, you know, there’s a slight increase in disapproval actually over the period, but, but pretty slight among Democrats the year disapprove and how the legislature handled this, uh, you know, K through 12 public ed went from 46% to 63%.

So pretty big jump share of independence, went from 31 to 46, another big jumping again, net negative for all those groups, uh, at, among Republicans, you know, just to round it out when. 42 16, uh, approved disapproved in June to 42, 23 in October, which I think reflects the fact that all the sort of consternation around critical race theory and transgender students, which was again, you know, which was present in every single special session.

And then sort of this turn now to the books. Yeah. It’s a complicated space. Well, with the overlay of, you know, the things that we talked about that were so front and center in our August, Texas politics project poll, which was just the incredible amount of churn and conflict that accompanied back to school in the final phases of the Delta variant surge.

Yeah. As we were saying last time, you know, we were talking about it last time and we kind of ended up in talking about public education and the kind of ideological space and you know, the struggle of the books. So we recorded that before. The Virginia results know whatever, but you know, if you look at it, sideways it at about a 45 degree angle, we were ahead of the game by that squint one eye.

But you know, we, one could say we were in front of that. But I think, you know, separating all that out. I mean, public education is just become such a Royal space, no matter where you look. I mean, some of these longstanding issues of curriculum and, and again, what I think of is, you know, control over socialization or influence over socialization, but with the overload.

All this churning, you know, I mean, I think to me, when I look at it, and this is kind of a transition maybe to, to what this says for the state of, you know, we can do a quick kind of where we are going into the elections now with all of those. But I mean, to me, I look at the, sort of the K through 12 public education space, and there’s sort of that kind of two broad observations I’d make, right.

Uh, one is, it’s just remarkable. I think, you know, the shift in attitudes towards. You know, teachers and schools and, and just, you know, the sense of these are generally considered pillars of communities and, you know, just like your Congress person, everybody hates Congress, but they love their congressmen and same thing in Poland.

You know, you can say what you want about the public education system. People have all kinds of problems with it. Do you like the school your kid goes to? Oh yeah. Do you like the schools in your neighborhood? Absolutely. Do you want to pay teachers more? Oh yeah. A hundred percent. Of course everybody loves teachers.

Right. Although. We’re kind of, you know, we’re in the space right now where the, you know, sort of the antipathy towards the edge, you know, the public education system, you know, on the right around some of these issues is really, it’s going to be interesting. But the other thing I would say, the other kind of observation and this relates to the election season is I think, you know, K through 12 public education space, I think in the 2022 cycles, kind of like what defunding the police was in 2020.

I think it’s an issue that. Uh, you know, Republican voters are nearly unanimous on it, specifically targets a lot of suburban voters where the political competition is, and Democrats have two problems. One, they may agree on what the problems are. They don’t have a solution or how they want to deploy that solution in public schools in a way that, you know, clearly there’s clearly, there’s no solution that everyone’s going to agree with.

That’s the first thing, right? Um, but also you’ve got an, you know, an interesting split here on some of these issues, not necessarily the racial stuff, but with, you know, let’s say the more social stuff around gender identity and things like that, where you have, you know, a very progressive white electorate, that’s kind of, you know, I think most active in the fundraising space and in the primaries.

And then you’ve got a majority non-white electorate that holds less progressive views on a lot of these issues at the moment. This is going to change is going to move. But, I mean, I don’t think we’re going to stop hearing about this issue. No, I mean, I can’t remember. It was either Axios or political playbook this morning was I think it was probably actually talking about the way that education has emerged in a surprising way as a Republican issue.

As potentially a Republican issue in the, in the cycle and along the lines you’re saying, and that it’s, and that it’s, you know, one more problem for Democrats because that’s something that traditionally they’ve, that’s a great, that’s such a great issue on her. So the, you know, the industry ownership ideas that, you know, you know, there are certain, you know, the election is about certain issues.

It’s gonna advantage one part of the other. You know, historically you’d say, well, like policing and crime, like that’s a Republican issue because you know, no Democrats are going to want to spend as much on policing and that kind of thing, or be as punitive as Republicans. Well, except for bill Clinton, who said, well, let’s just put all the cops on the street that works, but this is the same thing with education, right?

We’re an education normally democratic issue because ultimately, no Republicans are, want to spend more on education than Democrats will. Democrats can always spend more on education, but what if it’s not about spending. You know, discussions around sensitive social issues and people’s kids. When I would flag, you know, one of the things that’s going to be interesting to watch yet again, is New York city with a former police officer democratic African-American mayor who is trying to carve out a.

You know, to use your example. I mean, it’s a little, you know, I mean, I wouldn’t say this necessarily, other than he just referenced, you know, a kind of a bill Clinton desk space on policing in New York city. And you know, that is a very low. Issue in New York, but the Democrats have often dealt with in this more, you know, quote unquote centrist way, you know, even at the height of, of discussions of over-policing and it’s so, and it’s so subject to the con you know, the cyclical context of crime.

Yeah. Which party do you think increased all those pensions, right. Exactly. So that’s all very interesting and I, and I think it is going to be interesting to watch that. And again, I, and I think we’ll put a pin in this for next time, but. You know that there’s a discussion that we still need to have. I think about the nationalization of politics, how that’s manifest in Texas.

It’s another one of those kinds of, you know, oh sir, you know, certain areas, you know, uh, circle with arrows. Right, right. But it’s playing out in very interesting ways here and it’s gonna, it’s gonna play out elsewhere in the cycle and yeah, it’s pretty unpredictable, I think. And I mean, it’s brought outlines or.

Crushingly predictable. The specifics are not, I mean, it’s that, that I think if you were, if we were in any others, if, you know, setting aside how active the legislature was, this past session, how active the governor has been an out-front, uh, and how incredibly negatively democratic opinion has turned against all Republicans in the state.

You know, if it weren’t for that, I would say, well, this is. Clear. I mean, I’d say this is going to be a good, uh, an overwhelmingly good year for Republicans probably. And say, because of what’s going on in national environment, I still think it’s going to be a good year for Republicans in here, just because of, you know, a lot of reasons we can talk about a different podcast.

Uh, but I think, you know, you look at these, these attitudes sets and there’s no limit to the number of issues that democratic candidates can use to mobilize voters here in Texas. Right. If there was a democratic candidate at the top of the ticket, that’d be great. Well, that would do that would do something.

I heard that, um, Beto O’Rourke. He’s kind of announced Monday. Oh yeah. Oh, wait that last Monday. Oh no, wait. I think it was the Monday before last. I think it was, oh wait, maybe it’s not, I don’t know, but I it’s. It’s common. I hear, oh, well I’ll send out an email. I’m waiting. Yeah, I get those. There’s a lot of them.

Okay. We’ll end on snark. Thanks Josh for being here. Thanks to, uh, our crew here in the excellent audio studio in the liberal arts development studio at the university of Texas at Austin. Uh, thanks to you for listening and we’ll be back with.

The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin.