November 17th, 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 party Toronto. So 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 the point must a female Senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room. And welcome back to the second reading podcast for the week of November 17th or thereabouts I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin.

Joined again today by Josh blank research director for the Texas politics project. And we have big political news in Texas this week. News in quotation marks sort of, although, you know, I mean, look, you have to call it news because something happened, you know, you may have there’s this guy you may have heard of him.

What. He was former Congressman who, who ran for us Senate. His name is Beto O’Rourke, he’s a cheeky nickname. And he, um, is now going to run for the democratic nomination for governor. This was the guy who we were talking about and Wayne to run for like the last, very long time.

So, you know, uh, better work, maybe as much. Anticipated announcement that he is in fact running for governor. And I mean, I think we joked, I think we joked last week, or maybe it was some other venue about, you know, Hey, have you heard Beto, you know, he’s going to announce Monday. Well, this Monday, finally, now he finally did it.

And so, you know, the political news in Texas this week has been dominated more or less by this announcement and, and political, I should say political news in Texas. And, and after weeks of other kinds of news coming. It’s Texas. This has been the big national story out of the state more or less this week.

So yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, game on, I mean, in retrospect, and you know, we’ve talked about this on, on, in this venue and others before quite a lot. So there’s no point rehashing. I mean, this is not only. Super surprising at this point, given that the Aurora campaign was sending out signals for the last couple of weeks it’s going to have, and it basically cleared the field with whatever indications he was given in the background.

Right. So right. And, and had given, you know, and was in a position where, you know, I don’t want to say he had to, but I, by waiting as long as he did in terms of clearing the field, as you say, you know, Was going to be up for an enormous amount of criticism that I think would have dented his brand pretty, pretty seriously had he said, oh, you know, I’ve just decided this isn’t for me and November.

Yeah. Nobody. I mean, nobody has to run for office. In fact, there’s probably a lot of people who shouldn’t run for office. You still do, but yeah, I mean, he would have been, he would have been heavily blamed for whatever the democratic outcome was, you know, in sort of the election postmortems down the line.

You know, had he not run. Right. So, right. So we’ve done, uh, a post on the Texas politics project website, Texas politics dot U texas.edu, go to the, all the blog link there. Um, you know, and that post rounds up a lot of polling data, the way we’ve obviously pulled quite a bit, uh, on better O’Rourke when he’s running for Senate in 2018, uh, then when he jumped in the presidential race, a matter of.

Great attention now, particularly from his opponents, uh, in 2020, and then had checked in, I think here and there, you know, um, you know, we didn’t want to put him in the race before he put himself in the race. Although in the October UT, Texas Tribune poll, we had to, I mean, really, I mean, he, by then the signals were.

Clear he was going to do it. So, so we’ve got a lot of data. So I want to be like run through just some of the highlights of that. Most of which is in the blog, but yeah, I’ll just hit it real quick. So, you know, we had a hypothetical head to head matchup between Abbott and O’Rourke again, I mean just if, if, if our orientation towards these sorts of things is, you know, Caveats.

It is super early. There’s a campaign to take place. Neither are the nominee for their party yet at this point. So this is just checking in, where are we in? Because of that, we ask it among all registered voters, because in our view, there is no such thing as a likely voter electorate at this point, anyway, in that matchup, uh, Abbott letter work 46% to 37% of at 7% said, you know, someone else.

And about 10% said they hadn’t thought about enough to have an opinion. One quick reaction to that might be, oh, the incumbent governor. 50%. And he said, yeah, but if you take out sort of the people who have no opinion on this ratio, which is kind of crazy, if you pay attention to politics and you’re going to turn out, you probably have a view of the governor.

You likely have a view of a Rourke. So if you’re someone who’s kind of outside of this, you might not be that committed to voting. If you sort of take them out and reduce the denom. You know, Abbott’s above 50% ultimately it’s, uh, you know, it’s a nine point lead. Uh, you know, you talk about that a little bit.

We’ll just run through some of these other stuff. Real quick. Abbott led among white Texans, 58% to 31% of Rourke led among, uh, African-American texts with an opinion, 54 to 13. 45 to 33 among Latinos, Adelaide, among men, which is very unsurprising and Texas given differences in party identification by gender 52 to 36, it had had a much narrower 42 to 38% leader among women, um, you know, among suburbanites and other, you know, which is going to be a big.

Part of where the conflict takes place in the election. A lot of the focus is going to be at letter work 47% to 36%. You know, this is probably the thing that sort of, I think is hanging out there. The most probably, you know, only 35% of Texas voters viewed Rourke favorably, 20% of favor, very favorably compared to 50% who viewed him unfavorably with 44% viewing him very unfavorably.

Now, obviously that’s being driven by Republicans, right? So 80% of Republicans view him, unfavorably, you know, democratic views are, you know, not surprisingly, very favorable, but less intense than Republicans using. All the time. And we see this, you know, when we look at Abbott, you know, democratic views of Abbott are extremely negative and intense.

Republican views are positive, but less intensely positive. It’s just sort of the nature of these sorts of evaluations. Um, you know, I think something we’re going to talk about a lot in Eureka. Hinted at it last week. I assume we’re gonna do this in this couple of week. Is the importance of probably independence in this race as Texas gets more competitive?

I think as both parties are turning towards really focusing on turnout of their partisans first and foremost, in these elections, you know, sort of the way independence break is going to be interesting. And it’s important because neither Abbott nor. Uh, Rourke are very well liked among independents. At this point, our work has deep deeply underwater, uh, only 22% of you and favorably 48% of whom unfavorably among Abbott.

When we ask about his job approval among independents and the same October poll, 27% approved, 57% disapproved. So net negative 30 compared to a Rourke’s net, negative 26. That’s the state of play. We find ourselves in right now going into this race. And I, you know, I think you look at those numbers. You know, I think I said something on Twitter last week about, you know, 20, 22 looking like a very long year.

Now I think this is related to something else. We’re going to talk about a little later on in, in this podcast, which is the announcement of Ryan Keon changing parties, but that it was in response to something like that. But when I look at these numbers, what I see is, you know, obviously another mobilization election for Republicans and Democrats.

You know, neither of these candidates are unknown to either their partisans or, uh, the, their opponents or the, you know, the, the members of the opposite party. There’s already a wellspring of negative impressions for, uh, each of those campaigns to reinforce which they’re already doing, which they’re already doing in order to channel negative partisanship and to help their own mobilization efforts raise money.

And then we also have. You know this, you know, then there’s a bit about independence. I think also . Pretty negative tone to the campaign throughout given that, you know, it’s likely the campaigns will be looking at the negatives among independents, where they going S they are going to see as, you know, a relatively narrow band of potentially persuadable, potential voters, you know, given independent patterns of turnout, particularly in an off year election, you know, all of this sort of ad.

To a campaign that is already pretty nasty, you know, and to be fair right now, particularly on the Republican side, I mean, you know, I mean, sure Republicans can say, well, Beto O’Rourke is not being especially nice, but you know, the, the Republic, you know, the early Republican attack ads have been pretty, I’ve been pretty tough.

And I don’t doubt that there will be, you know, and look, I guess if you’re a Republican and you read, I don’t know, I assume you read, uh, Jonathan Tyler loves interview with O’Rourke for Texas monthly. And you know, I mean, if you’re a Republican, you could say, Hey look better or work is going out and blaming Greg Abbott for the COVID deaths for the blackout deaths.

It’s a, it’s a pretty hard, those are pretty hard punches for complex social phenomenon. One might say, I think, I mean, the thing that I think is troubling. You, you started this by talking about how long a year 20, 22 is going to be, and we’re not even there yet. And that’s the thing it’s already feels long and we’ve not, we’ve not completed a calendar.

Well, and that’s the thing. I mean, you know, I’d say it’s, it’s unfortunate because it’s so clearly like it’s so clearly just systemic in the sense that. You know, before Aurora got in and regardless of whether the candidate was a Rourke or whomever, you know, it was, it was pretty obvious that that Abbott was going to paint.

You know, whoever this person is, is just, you know, basically a demo, you know, some socialists who’s going to, you know, run Texas into the ground. And some kind of in conjunction with Joe Biden in conjunction with Joe Biden, socialist, right, exactly. And Bernie Sanders and AOC and the green new deal and blah, you know, and so like, this is fine.

This is fine. I mean, again, we watch the stuff that’s, that’s, you know, to be expected. Um, you know, I mean, it was, but it was also clear also that our work was, you know, part of the whole rationale for any Democrat, really getting into a race. It’s going to be in a tough year, nationally for Democrats given Biden’s approval numbers, Democrat in the white house, all that stuff is going to be relying on exactly these issues.

Right. And we’ll get to that in a second, but you know, the, the, the, the response to the pandemic, the, you know, the failure of the grid, those kinds of things. And so the thing that I think is just seems to. You know, kinda tough about it is when they’re talking about, you know, the contrast between O’Rourke jumping in 2018 versus Cruz right down, the immediate contrast to today is that he’s going out.

And he, you know, he was before he was introducing himself, he was being, you know, I’m better, I’m outside all this. And you know, that’s part of the attraction. Right. You know, I think usually for people and you know, I’m not attacking Ted Cruz partially it, like, I don’t need to do that. Right. It was at least some of the underlying assumptions.

This time, it’s clear. That’s not the playbook. I mean, just from go. And that’s when you, when you think about how this is gonna be, it’s gonna be nasty. It’s going to be long. And, uh, you know, I mean, I guess I’m looking forward to it cause I like to watch these things, but I don’t know. Yeah. I, I, I’ve not ginned up a looking forward to it kind of attitude yet.

I guess. I guess it’ll come. I mean, You know, I mean, I think that’s right. And I think that, um, you know, I mean, there’s such an air of inevitability to all of this right now, as we’re in this transition period, and maybe that’s dampening my enthusiasm. It’s like, yes, of course, right. In the end, you know, better or workout in because who else would the Democrats have as we were saying?

I mean, I think once he got past a certain point, it was just going to be too damaging and we should mention, I mean, I, you know, I’ve been making a. Ideal about the weight, which I think is harmful. And I think that, you know, Forgoes a strategy. I think we talked about it last week or week before, that would have been helpful for Democrats overall agree, you know, in terms of, you know, Jeff Blaylock in his, uh, in his, uh, Texas election news, mailing pointed out that, you know, there’s only a couple of candidates of the last several Democrats that got in early.

In the gubernatorial race, which is on one hand, a fair point, but also might actually make the point that there might’ve been more benefit to getting in earlier, especially since I think we’ve, again, as we’ve discussed on here before the most successful top of the ticket race that the Democrats have seen was when bed or got in very early against Cruz and one could say, well, he didn’t announce until the exit day, the moment he in.

We’ll heard, you know, switched on their Instagram or whatever it was. They were using to stream as they were driving across country. Well, I think there was a move going on to the Blaylock point, which I, you know, and I agree with, I agree with the general, like sort of the missed opportunity piece of this, but I’d also say, you know, yeah, Wendy Davis didn’t formally announce her camp campaign until later in the summer, but it was clear to everybody like around town and in the space that she was running.

I mean, that was, that was, yeah. I recall that being known pretty far before the actual official announcement. Yeah. I honestly, you may be misremembering that just because she. And it just, I’ve sort of remember having direct conversations, you know, into the fall. I mean, she didn’t really, I don’t, or, or into the very late summer.

And, you know, there was, uh, there was, I would say this, there was much less of an air of inevitability about that. And, and the timing was, you know, it was earlier, I’m trying to remember, I guess it was late August when she declared maybe sometimes. Yeah. That’s what I was thinking. Yeah. And I think that it took, uh, you know, She gave it a lot of consideration.

We’ll shut you out anyway. We don’t need to read, let’s not rehash that. Right. Uh, so I mean, I guess the question then becomes, you know, in terms of, I mean, I was thinking about this other idea of, you know, are you excited about, it’s not, it’s like, you know, and part of it, I guess, is the questions that I think I’m getting a lot.

And I mean, it’s sort of the last question that every reporter asks after kind of, we run through some of the, like where’s Beto now where he standing elected that kind of piece of it, ton of stuff that we’ve gone over. Is there like, so snowball’s chance. Yeah, it’s kind of the question. I don’t know. I mean, I, I started my way of answering it.

I mean, how are you answering that? Um, probably to some degree depends on my mood, but my general approach has been, look, this is an uphill battle. He starts as an underdog. Right. You know, there’s no way around that. That’s the truth, you know? You know, I think the odds are pretty long and, and, and what I would say, you know, and this is, I’m saying, then this is sort of where I’ve arrived and kind of what I would definitely would.

I think that if the context we’re in right now holds. Cancers are pretty small. Right, right. In that conversation has to me then two routes, you know, the route that a lot of reporters seem to like is, okay, well then is he done? Or, you know, how close does he have to get for him his career to not be done?

And, yeah. We can put a pin in that hole, like the preoccupation with better O’Rourke’s political path among reporters bear enough topic. But a that’s fine. I get that too. I’ve gotten that too. So he loses again, his career’s over I’m like, and I’m kind of like, maybe I don’t think so. Yeah. And, and, but then the other is the other piece of that that I think is, you know, more important.

Is of course as you know, the sexual conditions. I mean, if, if things hold as they are now, if you know, the inflation numbers stay on the same trajectory, um, you know, if the economy continues to sort of chug along at the pace it’s at, if the political dynamic nationally stays more or less the same and crit, but most critically, if there’s no.

You know, fundamental, external shock or crisis on the ground in Texas, you know, it’s pretty hard to see Greg Abbott’s substantial advantages here, not carry the day. Right. You know? Um, and again, something we’d beat, you know, we’re beating a dead horse on this, on the podcast, but, you know, but if something goes wrong in that, you know, and I would say that something really is the power grid.

Right. Or, you know, something we should have very much internalized, you know, since the day that Donald Trump was inaugurated, you know, things can take a turn that you really don’t anticipate. Right. You know, it’s and, and a big one. Yeah. You know, there’s a lot of big structural things you’ve got there.

We’re in a very dynamic environment. And so. And so, you know, I mean, that puts, you know, if you’re a Democrat, it puts you in, you know, the kind of unfortunate position of sitting around and waiting for a disaster hap to happen, to shake up the race for you, or I suppose, you know, in the more mundane sense of things, you know, some fundamental mistake by Greg Abbott.

I can’t really even. Quite imagine what that would be now. That’s consistent with what I’m saying, but it’s, but it’s a Testament to Abbott’s advantage that. And. Both the nature of the environment right now, in which, you know, things that people often might think of as gaps that people should get, you know, a lot of grief over, you know, it’s not as if governor Abbott doesn’t say things that are kind of sometimes outside the bounds.

I mean, you know, maybe as another foreshadowing, hint, I mean, you know, he congratulated Ryan G and the other day when he became a Republican for coming out, you know, when he switched parties for coming out of the closet now, And it seems to have gotten kind of made fun of for it a little bit on Twitter or whatever, but it wasn’t, it’s very hard in the current political climate to imagine what a gap that transcends partisanship.

Yeah, exactly. And that’s, and that’s the thing, because most of the time, the thing that we think of as a GAF is going to come out in a way that, you know, in most cases like your partisan. Kind of agree with it. Just if it worst case tasks. Yeah. And, and in most cases yeah. Or, you know, give you such an enormous, you have such an enormous wellspring of the benefit of the doubt, as long as it’s not too much of a mistake, you know, that, that, that violates the activist wing or your party.

But even that is, you know, I mean, because of the balance of, of the numerical balance, we’re in a campaign environment and we look, we’re seeing the. The stray too far, but I mean, we’re seeing an example of this at the national level right now with this Congressman, uh, Paul Gosar in his video that his staff produced of them.

You know yeah. You know, murdering AOC or something. I mean, I never did see the video, but it’s now, you know, and they’re voting, you know, to, to punish him in the Congress today. And the Democrats will have the majority and they’ll impose some kind of penalty and all indications are all, but the most opposite state Republicans in Congress and like two of them, uh, will, you know, will vote against.

Right. And if anything, he’ll probably raise money off of it. Right. And so, you know, I guess that’s my snowball’s chance answer is yeah. Borderline admonish reporters to say like a year out, we shouldn’t necessarily be deciding, you know, deciding the election. There’s a lot of things that could happen, but it’s also kind of idiot, borderline idiotic to not recognize the substantial advantages that Greg habit has in this race and where the Republicans are in the state.

You know, I, I want to, you know, I wanted to move up and you know what I’m going to keep going because I pasted the wrong numbers in these notes. Anyway. So I just noticed, but I mean, I guess I wouldn’t notice that, you know, I am curious what you think about that. You kind of mentioned this obliquely a minute ago or, or without much detail a minute ago, you know, the initial positioning of O’Rourke in his first wave of interviews, I think has been interesting.

He’s been doing the things that we’re talking about saying that, you know, this can’t be, you know, and it’s, you know, for somebody we think of, you know, you mentioned earlier, or Rourke’s earlier kind of. Image is kind of unorthodox and, you know, all the, you know, all the F bombs of 2018, all that kind of stuff, and, you know, standing on tails, but the, you know, the early interviews was definitely much more, you know, uh, clear, clear messaging and clear pivots away from anticipated critical questions.

So, you know, again, our friend, you know, we’re in the tank, our friend, Jonathan Tyler asked a lot of very direct questions of him. Um, and he did a good job of being, I think, to paraphrase. One of Jonathan’s questions was something like. What’s what what’s going to, what do you expect to be viewed as more authentically Texans saying you’ll band AK 40 sevens or supporting unconcealed carry?

And I said, well, you know, that’s not, you know, look, I’m still, I’m still in favor of that. And pivoted pretty well to saying, but you know, it’s not really about that. It’s not about me or that any. Well, it’s not about my 20, 20 race. It’s about Greg Abbott and how he’s governed. And he launched into the, you know, 700 people died during the, you know, during the blackouts, you know, the COVID death counts.

So we see that and I think that’s, you know, that’s interesting. And then a day later, the thing that was Mo got the most attention, I think has gotten a little bit more attention to last 24 hours. I think either later on the first day, maybe late yesterday. I’m not sure exactly when this happened. He did, uh, an interview with a CBS affiliate, I think.

And. You know, sort of dinged Joe Biden, the Biden administration for not doing enough immigration. I mean, I think people made a little bit more. It’s not like he said, you know, I’m renouncing Joe Biden and all his evil works a little elbow, a little elbow for distance, you know, I’m dribbling, you’re kind of on my back.

Well, I think, I mean, you know what, we’ll listen to you say this. I mean, the thing that strikes me, you know, if you kind of put all that together, as you think, you know, if you’re a Rourke, I think right now you’re sitting there saying I want this to be a referendum on Abbott’s he’s been in office as it wants to paint me as this other thing.

And he’s just like, Right. You know what you know, I mean, he’s trying to say that I’m all these things and that’s fine, but you know, we can just look and say, well, how many Texans have died from COVID? You know, the fall political term here is, that’s a distraction, sir. And I’m sure Texans will not be distracted.

But I did think that, you know, the, the Biden border security thing was interesting. I mean, base our poll numbers that show that, you know, Biden’s numbers on border security, including among Democrats are. You know, bad and still sinking. Yeah. And I think that’s one of the things where our work is probably going to try to play a little bit to some of his strengths here, which is the whole, you know, the El Paso background, the whole, you know, by, you know, by national city, you know, this whole thing.

And, you know, I think the idea that he he’d probably bring his, Hey, I can authentically deal with this as a Democrat would be what I’d imagined. He would try to say, I mean, I wonder how he’d answered the question and it’s sort of see if we can’t. Maybe ask them ourselves somehow, but, um, would you spend this much money on border security?

If not, why not? And if so, how would you spend it differently than Greg Abbott? Yeah, I mean, that’s a, that’s a tough question. Yeah, that’s a challenge, you know? I mean, but I think there are, there are potentially opportunities for him there. Particularly, you know, perhaps among independence, but we’ll have to see.

So let’s switch gears for the last few minutes. So, you know, there was also big news. I mean, it’s kind of, I mean, some of this was pretty clearly counter-programming by the Republicans that, you know, as you know, Approximate to the time that, uh, that, that, that Beto O’Rourke was announcing that he was going to run for governor.

Uh, there was, uh, an event at the Capitol with the house leadership and, and governor Abbott in which a longtime member of the legislature, Ryan Guinn, uh, announced that he was switching parties. And you know, that got, you know, I, as counter-programming goes. You know, Rangin was not going to outweigh Beto Beto O’Rourke with reporters, but, you know, he did pretty well.

He did a pretty good job. He had a pretty good job, you know, they, they, they, they, they made that work and, um, right. I mean, that’s, that’s the, I mean, it was why as good. It was good programming on Republican spark is also, it’s a good program because of. You know, kinda, you can’t avoid it. If you’re any reporter who’s been covering Texas politics and you been talking about, you know, the potential inroads that Republicans have made in south Texas among Hispanics, this is just a story that, that fits in that frame.

So, well, I mean, the questions are, and maybe this is, I mean, there’s almost a quest for another podcast, the beginning of a broader question, which is, you know, sort of, how much do you buy that story? Because, I mean, I, that’s sort of, you know, where I am a little bit on it is that it’s, you know, it’s attractive because it’s sort of, you know, it’s counter attitude, you know, people don’t expect it.

And, but it also, you know, I would say, you know, not again, not to get too far down this road, but like, we’ve talked a lot about how people’s expectations about the Hispanic electorate and the realities of the Hispanic electorate are pretty different. And especially people kind of looking in from the outside.

And so, you know, the two, so that’s one contextual piece that I think we might have to save for another week. Another we’ll also point out, you know, Not a huge population center in the states. I mean, some parts of it, for sure, but not. Yeah. I mean, the, my favorite, you know, sort of reminder of that is how, you know, after the 2020 election people were just going reporters who are people, but not all people, but there was, you know, a big, you know, the example that was in all of these stories was the pot, the county.

I spot the county went Republican for the first time when we can, we went down and then we talked to people and they, you know, and you know, we’re talking about, well, less than a hundred thousand voters. Yeah. Well, well, well, well last and I don’t have the exact number in front of me, so I don’t want to put out the wrong number, but, you know, I believe it’s in the tens.

Right. And so that’s just. You know, and I think you’re right. I mean, and we’ve said this on here, there’s a, there’s a, kind of an imaginary baseline of Latino support for Republicans, which in the imagination of reporters and outside observers is much lower than it actually is in actuality. Yeah. And that’s the thing.

So you look at this and you say like, well, you know, there’s redistricting process and now representative Gannon is in a much more Republican district and he was already in a district, I think, voted for Trump beforehand. And he still won he’s in a more Republican district. Right. Uh, the district he’s in now is, is a Trump 25, the redrawn district, what would be a Trump 25 district.

Right. And so, you know, I mean, one of the things that I always wonder about this, this is sort of, this is like an existential question. Maybe we’re getting near the end here, but it’s like, you know, how often does it work to manifest? Something like this, you know what I mean? So it depends, you know, and you know, yeah.

I mean, there’s a bunch of, yeah, there’s a bunch of different things going on here, you know, it’s, you know, it’s a cycle right after redistricting, when this is most likely to happen. And you know, there’ve been rumors. This was going on, you know, in, and if you look at, you know, mark, Mark Jones, ideological rankings is the most conservative, you know, or the least liberal, sorry, mark.

The least liberal. Um, Democrat democratic house member, it’s cetera. So, you know, there’s not, you know, and, and, and in all the, you know, the talk around town about who might switch, he was the number one candidate all along. Right. Um, and you know, it will be interesting, not that, you know, we think of things wholly transactional transactionally, but it will be interesting to see what.

Gets out of this. So it would say, um, you know, the other big news, you know, in, in tech sledge and, you know, at the intersection of hashtag techs, legend, hashtag Texas 2020, which I, you know, maybe I just had, didn’t have my ear to the ground, but was something of a surprise to me. Is that house member Michelle Beckley has joined the Lieutenant, the race for the nomination to be the Democrats candidate for Lieutenant governor in 2020.

So she joins Mike Collier who’s run twice and was already, you know, had an irritant. Shall we say? Um, with the entrance of Matthew dad, political commentator and former political consultant and communications consultant. You know, I think this was greeted with some degree of surprise. Yeah, a lot of corners now, again, redistricting dynamic, she had been treated fairly roughly in every district in process and was a little bit without a home and had considered, you know, running for a congressional district in her north, Texas.

And that was a close district. She was in any way. She was already in for a fight. She was going to run for a congressional seat. That congressional seat got redrawn that left her outside of the border of the district. And so now she’s going to throw in her, throw her hat in for Lieutenant governor. And she becomes, you know, a, an interesting dynamic in that race.

If she stays in and, you know, exerts any presence in that, you know, she will be pretty substantially near, as I can tell to the left of both of the present candidates and not, uh, an older, white. And I, and not an older white guy, but I mean, it’s interesting because on the one hand, you’d say, you know, we just did this polling before she announced, you know, we asked fave on fav items on Collier and doubt, and kind of the main takeaway from that, that I think is worth knowing is just that, you know, most Democrats don’t know who these people are, right.

The name, even for Collier, who’s run twice. You know, 70% of potential democratic primary voters don’t have an opinion of them. Right. And so you have to assume that Beckley starts even further unknown than he does, but on some ways that might be her advantage. I mean, it’s in some woman, what you’re laying out here actually is the fact that, you know, a couple, you know, choice endorsements from some left-leaning groups, the fact that, you know, she’s not a white man, which, you know, in the democratic primary would probably help her out.

You know, as we talk about it, the case kind of presents itself, although it still is a little. And for anybody at anybody of a certain generation, you know, we’ll just say, you know, all of a sudden, you know, people start thinking about a sissy Fahrenthold scenario. Now I didn’t turn out well for the Democrats, but yeah.

But nonetheless, it was an interesting development and we should also note, I mean, in terms of the things that we tend to pay attention to a lot, you know, there’s been a lot, there’s going to be a lot of turnover in the house. I mean, we haven’t had any primary elections or any general election, which, you know, allows for candidates to actually lose at least in the primary.

Right. And, you know, 22 house vacancies and four Senate vacancies. Right now. It feels like a lot. It’s a lot. It feels like a lot, you know, putting in the Senate because it is. And, um, so I think this is something to really keep, keep an eye on because you know, of course the top of the ticket races, these are all, you know, they matter a lot, you know, but those 22 house seats, you know, that, you know, those 22 exits from the house also means.

22 open races. Yes. You know, both in the primary and the general election, what it portends is, you know, as we were talking about 20 to 22, 20, 22 being a very long election year, from my perspective, it means in all likelihood that election night, 2022 is going to be a late one in is going to be very exciting with a lot of turnover and a lot to track between now.

Yeah, that’s right. So with that, I’ll thank Josh for being here. Thank our excellent crew in liberal arts development studio in the college of liberal arts at the university of Texas, we’ve referenced as always a bunch of data today and a blog posts besides you’ll find all that at Texas politics dot U, Texas.

EDU we’ll be out next week for Thanksgiving, but probably back for at least a podcast or two before the year is out. So enjoy the rest of the week, have a good holiday. And we’ll be back in a couple of weeks.

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