November 30th, 2023 – Another special session in Texas ends with a whimper

[00:00:00] Intro: 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.

[00:00:34] Jim Henson: And welcome back to the Second Reading Podcast. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Glad to be joined today by Josh Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project and veteran of the UT Texas Politics Project poll, among other things.

Josh, welcome. Thanks for having me. A little extra embellishment today. Yeah, no, that was nice. I like it. A little

[00:00:55] Josh Blank: flair.

[00:00:55] Jim Henson: Holiday season, you know, a little more generous.

[00:00:58] Josh Blank: A little more flair.

[00:00:59] Jim Henson: Generosity. You know. A couple of extra ornaments, some tinsel. I need it. Trust me. Uh, I need some tinsel. I need a little tinsel.

Um, well, here we are. The clock is running out on the fourth special session, uh, as we record this on Thursday, the last day of November and for that matter on the year, and it’s been quite a legislative year, which we’ll kind of get to, you know, I don’t think we’re quite here for, this isn’t quite like the year end wrap up, but it’s.

It’s getting there. It’s getting there. You know, so it seems, yeah, I mean, it seems today what we want to do is, you know, take stock of where the legislature is as we transition into primary election season. And, and I think, you know, that transition is very literal. We were talking in the office before this and clearly primary season has started.

Right. And though, you know, despite all the signs to the contrary, the legislative session is not over. Right. Seems all but but we’ll get to that, you know, it’s been a couple weeks since we podcasted. We had one that we had a deep that we sort of lost through technical difficulties, just a gremlin in the system.

It was really good, though. It was great. It was, it was the best.

[00:02:10] Josh Blank: I mean, it would have, it would have really cleared up everything.

[00:02:13] Jim Henson: Yeah, so it would have been hailed as revelatory. Unfortunately, no one will ever know. Um, yeah. We know that, so, uh, you know, it’s good to catch up and, and we can, we’re going to pursue some of the themes in that podcast, but, you know, honestly, you know, it does underline that if you don’t do this for a couple of weeks, you know, more things happen, you know, all things being equal.

So since we were last recorded a couple of weeks ago, uh, the effort to pass vouchers, which has been, you know, one of the predominant. Themes in, in Texas politics for the fall, if not a little longer, um, it failed and it failed by an 8463 vote on basically it was a vote on an amendment to an omnibus election bill that had a lot of goodies in it that we’ve talked about.

Um, but this was an amendment that stripped the vouchers out. So 8463 vote, uh, with 21 Republicans voting for the amendment, you know, and again, that bill also included things like. Teacher pay increases and increase in the, in the per pupil allotment. Yeah, this was a

[00:03:20] Josh Blank: big, this was a, this was the big test to see whether if another, if enough other goodies were put on here in particular, as you said, you increase to the funding formulas, increase teacher pay, increase to school safety.

If you put all those things on there, it’s, you know, I would say pretty serious levels as far as what the level of discussion around those things were. Could you peel people off, you know, uh, of their voucher opposition? The answer was

[00:03:41] Jim Henson: no. Right. I mean, you know, the strategy of at least some. Some of the folks in the, in the pro ESA voucher community, broadly speaking, that I had heard from talking to some folks was that, and this was sort of out in the open, um, was, you know, this approach put together a big bill that made it hard, you know, for harder for people to vote against it, presumably.

Mm hmm. Get it to conference with this, you know, something comparable in the Senate and then, you know, negotiate it, you know, you know, essentially use the conference committee as a, you know, a final, you know, platform for negotiation. Well, that didn’t work. Right. You know, it would appear that it is not, it is not going to work.

And again, the House, the Senate was coming briefly into session today. The House has been out for most of the week are gaveling in on Friday to leave ourselves a small caveat slash trap trap door here. Something miraculous could happen, but it would be pretty close to miraculous. Now it’s the season.

[00:04:35] Josh Blank: Yeah, we’d say vouchers are all, it’s a season of resurrection. Yeah, well, no, no,

[00:04:39] Jim Henson: no, no, no, no, no, no.

[00:04:40] Josh Blank: No, I’m sorry. Birth. I’m sorry.

[00:04:42] Jim Henson: Yeah, you’re, you’re showing yourself here,

[00:04:44] Josh Blank: buddy. I’m from, I’m from, yeah, I’m sorry. I’m of a different tradition. I’m of a different tradition. It’s older. Um, no, but, but it’s all but dead.

I mean, that’s the thing. I mean, you know, to say otherwise, I mean, again, leave ourselves a trap door here, but it’s hard to imagine without, again, a miraculous. You

[00:04:59] Jim Henson: can leave that holiday commentary in case there’s a special session after the prime. Sure. But even then, I mean, it’d be about right. Um, so that happened right now.

I want to go back a little bit and this is, you know, this is maybe retreading something that we just wanted to do in the last podcast, but it, but it’s, it’s relevant. So, you know, where is the governor in all this now? The governor was pressing very hard. Um, for the house to vote on, you know, to pass, to move this bill, um, and you know, and obviously for vouchers to pass, and he’s taken a few different tactics on this and to be fair to the governor, you know, depending on the timing.

So, you know, back when he, you know, before the third special session, before he called the third special session or the fourth, um, you know, he had basically said he was going to give the legislature two sessions, you know, that was essentially going to be the October and the November sessions. Yeah. with a little bit of overlap there, or a little bit of running into the following month.

And then he’d let the vote, then, you know, he kind of declared dramatically, then we’ll let the voters sort it out. But he kind of backtracked on that. And it’s as I, you know, and the way I, I read it, and I think we read it in the, in the, the now departed podcast was that. You know, as they began to get a little bit of traction and this bill in the house, you know, that had, it was this omnibus type bill began to move out with these voucher provisions in it, he increased the pressure somewhat.

So let’s rewind to about three weeks ago. And this was, um, this was on a Friday afternoon, about three weeks ago when he, the governor was signing SB seven, which was the COVID bill from the third special. And then, and he seemed to indicate, you know, a preference for putting more pressure on them. So let’s, we’ve got some tape on this, thanks to a Twitter post from Ryan Chandler that we drew this audio from.

The audio is on the internet. So let’s, let’s play this excerpt from, from Governor Abbott’s comments at that bill signing. Pretty much every member of the House, uh, has people. It could be families, it could be kids, it could be educators, uh, who want to see this legislation passed. Because this legislation is going to benefit the voters and the residents, uh, in each of, uh, the House members districts.

But another thing I know about the House, and they know me well enough, uh, to know that, uh, if, that, if they were to do something like that, for, for one, it probably wouldn’t even meet with agreement from the Senate. It would be nothing that would ever meet my desk, but if it did, of course, I would just have to veto it.

We would start all over again. We’d be, we’d be spending, uh, December here, maybe January here, maybe February here. And I know one thing about both the House and Senate. They want to get out of here Now, you know, we should have set that up a little bit more But the the reference the governor made in there to you know, if they do something like that was actually what they did the question at this time before the vote took place was You know if they sent the bill, you know with if they sent this omnibus education bill with the increases in spending Without the voucher provision You know would that would he sign it and you’ve heard his response to that but I mean it was it was a very interesting kind of sign of You know, how the governor handles the legislature and in particular the house and that the language of that and that, you know, he’s, you know, that was, that was pushy in an almost kind of in, in, in not even an almost in a kind of personal way.

It’s like, I, I know this will make you guys miserable. You know who I am, you know, that all, you know, that I’ll push hard against you and, you know, got a lot of play at the moment, but interestingly enough, it.

[00:08:50] Josh Blank: Yeah. And I agree with everything you said. And I add to that also, there’s sort of a, you know, there’s an aspect to this, which is, you know, once he said, we’re only going to do two sessions and then we’re going to leave in some ways, he’s telling members how long they need to hold out for those who want to hold out.

Right. And so there is also a little bit of cleanup here strategically maybe in some ways to say, Well, you know, maybe I will keep calling you back. Maybe I will just make this go on and on. Because in some ways you lose, just, just from a strategic bargaining standpoint, you lose some bargaining leverage when you basically let them know that there’s an end date at which point this is done and their preferences, no vouchers in this case.

Is achieved and so I think part of this was, was strategic also, but I mean to your point, I mean, it’s hard not to listen to that clip and even look, I mean, when you watch it, it’s even better and see, I mean, I don’t know a better way to describe it than a smirk, you know, I mean, when he basically look, you know, you, you have, you know, you have

[00:09:38] Jim Henson: families, well, it was great.

There was like a smirk in an earlier point in that. And then an outright kind of grin later on. I, you know, I mean, I, He seemed to be enjoying it. I mean, yeah, I mean, the thing is, I don’t know how much comfortable making

[00:09:51] Josh Blank: these probably enjoyed it more than than he has now, because I mean, ultimately, I said, you know, either on the bank shot, it could say, well, I don’t want to say that there’s an obvious end date to this.

Maybe that wasn’t a good idea when I said it. But the other side of it is, you know, it’s kind of replaying these similar dynamics where some. Uh, elected official outside of the house, you know, to be clear starts telling the house what they should do, how they should do it, when they should do it. And just historically like this, you know, and especially even on this issue alone, we have to say historically, but on this issue alone, that has not moved the ball forward

[00:10:24] Jim Henson: much right now.

Again, I mean, to be fair, I mean, you know, there’s a little bit of a teachable moment here and. You know, whether it worked or not in this instance, I mean, the governor is, you know, has, has been doing this a while and he does know when, you know, have a sense of when his leverage is maximum, but you know, it’s this infinite, you know, just cause you have relative leverage at a moment, at a certain moment, doesn’t mean you have infinite leverage and this is again, you know, this is a constitutional system in which however much the governor, the last couple of governors, this one, the one before has extended You know, the, the power of the governor’s office, it’s still constrained.

Now we should also say that. When this session expires in a few days, uh, the governor could in fact, call them back. Now, I think given that nothing on the ground has changed since then, it would be taken as simply a punitive action and one that is less than entirely likely to provide the kind of result he wants, but he could, but for now, the bill did fail.

Right. Does seem like it’s not going anywhere. And we did see, you know, the governor, you know, sort of shifting gears now. And again, to be fair, not on this particular, not on this specific issue, but he shifted gears by doing other things, you know, and other things, you know, that I would argue and I, you know, has a lot more direct political value and a lot less downside.

So, you know, last week here, last weekend, he endorsed Donald Trump for president. In a joint appearance at the border in which you know trump and abbott seemingly doubled down on each other. Yep Um, and what people were, you know, all all the disc all the discussion of You know, the governor, to the extent that he was being discussed, particularly in the national press, which is, uh, was about, well, what does this mean for Abbott?

Does this mean he’s a vice presidential candidate? Does this mean he’s a, he’s a candidate for the cabinet, et cetera. Now, you know, I think we’re both pretty on the record as being skeptical about this, these things for a lot of different reasons. Yeah. But I would also argue that, you know, it, it hurts him not at all for the conversation for reporters to be calling sources and to be right editors to be assigning reporter stories on, you know, what is Greg Abbott’s national potential that crowd out local media and state level media outlets on, you know, the governor’s been defeated on vouchers

[00:12:56] Josh Blank: again.

Yeah. And I think, you know, this is just another, I mean, I would say even, you know, more locally, you know, again, I’m not necessarily interested in the national angle, although it’s interesting, obviously, but I mean, from the Texas angle, I mean, the way that I look at this is he just, you know, took another action that sort of shores up his flank against Patrick, who’s Donald Trump’s campaign, uh, lead in Texas for both of his elections.

And it was really, you know, I mean, I think, you know, there’s a lot of reporting about Dan Patrick’s relationship with Donald Trump. And so to the extent that Abbott kept, uh, I wouldn’t say an arms length distance for like a half an arm length distance or something. I mean,

[00:13:29] Jim Henson: I would say he’s, yeah, he’s been measured.

[00:13:30] Josh Blank: He’s been measured. Yeah. I

[00:13:32] Jim Henson: mean, I think, you know, the governor’s representatives would be saying, Hey, look, what do you want? The guy, you know, he’s traveled to DC to appear with the president, you know,

[00:13:41] Josh Blank: but yeah, I wouldn’t say this. He hasn’t, you know. I’ll put it put it this way. I think I think Abbott has been a little bit more conscious about maintaining his own brand, you know, maybe as opposed to sort of getting too much into Trump’s orbit, which can, you know, you can very easily get subsumed by Trump very quickly.

But this is to me was one of the more sort of public facing clearly meant to, like, put it out there, get the statewide coverage, you know, Here’s me and Donald Trump at the

[00:14:06] Jim Henson: border. Yeah, both of us talking about, you know, all the stuff that can be done. You know, the, you know, uh, former president Trump, I, as I recall, you know, told Governor Abbott he wouldn’t have to spend his own money anymore after this, that, you know, they’re becoming, you know, the federal government will be back to the rescue when he gets elected.

They both got to pick on Joe Biden. Right. Obviously, as we’ve said on here again and again, the border is a great issue for Republicans for a number of reasons. So, you know, so, so that happened. Right. That happened. In pretty. Close, you know, pretty short order after the vote, really within a week or so, you know, governor took a skydiving trip.

Right. Also got a lot of, a lot of press coverage. Yeah. And then more recently he endorsed the opponent of an incumbent house Republican, Hugh Shine. You know, which did answer, I think, a lingering question and I, you know, I looking back on it, you know, I may have been a little too skeptical this. I mean, I was really curious and, you know, we’ll still see this is one endorsement, you know, about just how far out on a limb the governor is going to go with these kinds of endorsements.

Um. And there, you know, but there was a question, would he really want to endorse against incumbents in the GOP primary? Now in this case, he endorsed Hillary Hicklund, uh, from Belton against Schein. Schein, you know, is a legislative veteran, did a term from 86 to 91 and then came back in 2016. Um, you know, we were talking before.

Hasn’t had a lot of trouble holding onto that seat since he’s been back. Right. Last couple of cycles. no primary challenger, easy general election wins. Now, again, Shine was, you know, not surprisingly was a vote against educational savings accounts. This is not as, you know, this is not totally unprecedented.

Right. Right. So, I mean, I think it’s fair, you know, there’s been reporting that, you know, dug up, I think, in the Tribune that, you know, This is the first time Abbott is backed a primary opponent to a house Republican since the, since May of 22 when he backand Kitman, who success, who successfully challenged Phil Stevenson.

Before that, he endorsed three primary challengers to house Republicans in 2018. He got one of, you know, to the point we were talking about earlier, he got offline. He got one of three in that, right? So he endorsed Mays Middleton against. Uh, Wayne Faircloth launched what has been a successful political career thus far for Mays Middleton.

Um, but he also endorsed a losing primary, losing primary challengers against Sarah Davis and Lyle Larson. And in terms of thinking about targets, you know, both Sarah Davis and Lyle Larson are now gone. Right. Sarah Davis lost in, in the general election, uh, that year, I guess. Um. While Lyle Larson prevailed in that election, he then hung it up after the 2021 session.

So both Lyle Larson and Sarah Davis, both of whom were, you know, pretty clearly dissidents and Lyle Larson in particular was pretty directly critical of the governor. So, you know, we can just process that. Right. In terms of, you know, who, what kinds of targets he’s chosen in the past?

[00:17:19] Josh Blank: Yeah. Well, and the other thing too is, you know, I mean, in those cases in the past, I mean, at least, I mean, thinking back on 2018, I know that he had, you know, sort of specific grievances against some of those members.

And as I recall, you know, Larson was pushing sort of, uh, some accountability measures for the executive branch that I know that the governor would clearly did not appreciate. Yes. And so those were a little bit more. You know, I mean,

[00:17:40] Jim Henson: Sarah Davis, just for those, you know, they’re relatively new to this. So anybody listening to this, you know, the only pro choice Republican in the caucus at the time, very much kind of a maverick.

[00:17:50] Josh Blank: Yeah. And obviously the fact that that district flipped to the Democrats also kind of tells you,

[00:17:54] Jim Henson: yeah, and that was, yeah, that was a competitive Tony Houston district.

[00:17:58] Josh Blank: Right. And so, I mean, in the past, it sort of seems like, you know, they’ve been a little bit more idiosyncratic and maybe even personal in nature, these sort of these, these challenges, the question is, okay, so now.

You know, he’s endorsed one, one challenger. The universe we know is bigger, right? Because the universe I think we think about here is the 21 Republicans who voted in the least, at least the 21 Republicans who voted, uh, for the amendment that stripped the voucher funding from the omnibus education bill.

You know, maybe, you know, potentially more, although I would start with that group. And so, you know, okay, we’re at one now. And so, so I mean, the question kind of becomes what’s next in a lot of ways, right? I mean. You know, I don’t do we want to go into do we want to talk about them after I’ve got a couple different thoughts here about the effects of this.

Yeah, let’s do that a little bit. Just stay in this for a second. I mean, you know, to my mind, you know, the question I’m getting a lot is, you know, does Abbott call them back for another special session? You know, the first sort of the argument against it, you know, is to my perspective is just that, you know, the more sessions he calls him back that they don’t get it done, the less effective he looks.

You know, and it doesn’t, it doesn’t sound crazy, but whoever the next, you know, uh, finds avatar is who comes along, who wants to say, I, you know, listen, he didn’t get it done. He wasn’t committed on vouchers. I am right, right. You know, to the effect, to the effect that he’s providing more evidence that he can’t alone get it done.

Look, I’m not saying that that’s a weakness of his. It’s just the, I think in a lot of ways, it’s the system working itself out. As you said, you know, he only has so much leverage here. And so I think, you know, to call them back more creates more exposure. Similarly, You know, we were talking about this a little bit earlier.

It’s like, okay, so let’s say he, you know, decides to endorse in some number of these 21 cases just as a starting point. And, you know, you say, like, maybe he does, maybe endorses in five races, 10 races, maybe in all 21, who knows. And then you sort of have to ask yourself, well, what’s, at what level of success, both, you know, winning those, those primaries and then presumably also winning the general elections.

Does that look like you’re, does that make you feel like you’re in a strong

[00:19:46] Jim Henson: position and look like we should, we should add to that, that it also, since the last time we recorded, he, and he, he endorsed every incumbent that voted for, you know, voted against the voucher amendment.

[00:19:59] Josh Blank: Exactly. And so I think essentially about four vouchers.

And so I think, you know, and then the question, so the question becomes, you know, does, if he gets. Two of ten, five of ten, eight of ten. Does he need to get ten of ten? Let’s just say he endorses ten challengers, you know, and and part of this is, you know, the public reaction to it You know, how does it get written about?

Cuz it’s gonna get written about in terms of his quote unquote success in Yeah, you know and whatever you want to say involving himself in Republican primaries, but like but from a real practical standpoint It’s I would think, and maybe I’m wrong here, you know, feel free anyone you tell me, but like this is where the rubber meets the road.

If I’m a member thinking about threats from the governor, no doubt this is going to be a pain in the butt for any incumbent that is challenged being challenged here and is where there’s an endorsement coming from the governor because the campaign is already fixed for your challenger. This person voted against the essays.

They probably voted to impeach Ken Paxton, and I’m the only candidate endorsed by the governor. I’m not saying that’s not something that could be overcome by an incumbent who has, you know, good connections in the district and has a political organization, but it’s gonna take work and money and a lot more time than maybe, you know, someone like Representative shine who faced no primary challengers in the last two cycles really is going to want to put in, but they’re going to have to, and so there is a cost here, but I think the ultimate scoreboard is going to come down to how many of these seats that flip at the same time.

There’s this broader question out here, which is like, you know, if you were perfectly, you know, bad 100 percent or 1000, right? Is he going to really like change out a quarter of the Republican caucus? I mean,

[00:21:27] Jim Henson: yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, I mean, I, you know, so that’s, you know, they’re kind of two questions munched in there.

I mean, I think, you know, what I would come out of that is saying, look, there’s a, you know, you’re balancing the external game versus the external appearance of it, you know. Internally, as we were saying before, I mean, I think to send the message to House members, You don’t have to win those challengers, those challenges, right?

All you have to do is demonstrate that there’s, you know, punishment and inconvenience. And as we’ve said in here a million times, you know, the problem with primary challengers, you know, for, from the perspective of an individual incumbent candidate. You know, I mean, part of it is your assessment of the threat, but even if the threat is low, relatively low, it’s still deeply inconvenient is something that, you know, members would much, much rather not have a primary opponent, let alone one endorsed by the government than to have done the governor.

So, you know, You know, and I, and I think, you know, you’re, if you’re the Abbott team, you’re balancing that against the kind of thing you mentioned, which is how does this play publicly? And I’m not, you know, I mean, it’ll be interesting to see how many he takes on and, and how they sort that out. My guess is, you know, probably where you started, they want to challenge in a few high probability of, you know, higher probability of success races.

And that’s probably sufficient to send the internal message and minimize. The external, you know, the, the risks associated with some negative coverage afterwards, or, you know, an illusion of failure or an impression of failure. Yeah,

[00:23:03] Josh Blank: I mean, it’ll be really interesting, you know, I mean, again, we’re going to watch this obviously talk about it more, but, you know, as it plays out, it’ll be really interesting to see going forward into, you know, future sessions, how this continues to inform kind of the relationship between the governor and the legislature, you know, because I can see a lot of these members sort of.

You know, probably feeling like here I am, you know, doing what I think is representing my district and here I have, you know, the governor who I share a party with who has basically unlimited resources, you know, essentially campaigning against me for doing that, you know, yeah.

[00:23:36] Jim Henson: And it’s that signaling that’s, you know, probably most useful to them, but they just have to be aware of what the, you know, what the outer chance, you know, what the outer liabilities are.

So, right. So let’s think a little bit about them. You know, we’ve kind of moved into the primary piece, but I want to backtrack for a second and go back to if we sort of, if we take the odds on bet right now and predict that, you know, vouchers are dead again for the fourth session and that’s probably not going to be resurrected, which I think is a, is a safe, safe ish bet at this point, not a hundred percent, but what is, what do we conclude from this kind of outcome, this outcome of the special session?

Um, I mean, the regular session, the four special sessions, and even throw in the Paxton impeachment as part of the legislative action in 2023, which was, you know, at least in terms of them being in session was pretty nonstop. How dysfunctional is this? I mean, I think it’s very much in vogue among opponents of the governor and yeah.

You know, various, you know, factions of the party, depending on what the subject is right to say, Oh, things, you know, you know, the, the legislature is underperforming, you know, and I think there’s two different ways, you know, two basic ways of framing that there’s a nonpartisan, like, what did they produce?

Right. You know, what did people want? What did they produce? What did the product look like? Right. And, or, you know, the more. limited range that is, also disputed. What did Republican voters want? What did Republican elites want? You know, how does this session look? So I think, you know, and you know, we had talked about this at one point in terms of, you know, our things working or not, like how, you know, what kind of a governance assessment can we make here?

And I think. You know, I mean, to be very myopic and in the moment, you know, on vouchers, the governor’s line. And I think the line of voucher proponents are, look, this is something Republican voters want. We’ve been talking about it for a long time and you’re, and the legislature didn’t deliver because essentially the house sucks.

Yeah. Right. In particular, the house leadership is the critique goes. That’s not me speaking. And I’m just with a

[00:25:51] Josh Blank: dash of Democrats and

[00:25:52] Jim Henson: unions, right? Right. Channeling the critique. Well, but that’s why the house leadership sucks because they got rolled by the Democrats and the unions. The argument, you know, the, the, the Twitter or the X version of that critique, right?

Now it doesn’t hold. I mean, there’s something to that, but it’s not, but look, you know, there are reasons that figures as powerful, even as the governor and the lieutenant governor can’t pass this through. And we’ve talked about this, you know, we’ve got decent amount of polling data that shows that yes, there is, you can get a narrow support, you know, narrow range of public support.

Put it this way, a narrow margin of public support, sometimes a bare clean majority, sometimes just a plurality that say they’re in favor of ESAs or vouchers. Right. We have a good piece on the website if people haven’t seen it about, you know, the degree to which that’s inflected by language. Most of a podcast on that month or so ago, I think, but the data is also demonstrated that this is not an issue that people have, that, that voters prioritize either, especially overall, but even within the range of, of public education issues or education, systemic educational issues, you know, and so if you look at, you know, so looking at them, you know, then telescoping out, telescoping out a little bit to the agendas of the special session.

Um, You know, what have they done? They’ve done a lot on border security, right? That, in fact, seems pretty responsive, even if there’s a political logic to it. That’s undeniable.

[00:27:25] Josh Blank: Yeah, you know, as you’re talking about this, I’m just gonna throw something in there thinking about, you know, sort of assessing the assessing, you know, basically how the system quote unquote is working, right?

And you’d mentioned these sort of, you know, different ways we could think about it just from a purely kind of. I don’t even know what I want to say, input output with respect to what the public wants. And so we could say, well, that’s why I threw elites in there and break it down. Yeah, no. And I agree with others for the public writ large, you know, versus the output.

And then there’s sort of, you know, Republican voters specifically in the output. But, you know, in some ways I was thinking, as you’re talking about that, about, you know, how the process is working and if you take it just sort of. Abstract just a little bit. It’s like, okay, working in, and I was thinking how, and I was saying, well, maybe working in the questions, working with respect to processing, you know, sort of the politics of the state on the one hand and the policy needs of the state on the other hand.

Right. And sometimes these things are in alignment and boom, no problem. And like on immigration, you know, border security measures, the politics are in alignment, the policy needs that would address those politics, you know, are in alignment. And so we move forward.

[00:28:26] Jim Henson: Right. I mean, you know, and I just, you know, to You know, by in alignment, you’re not saying it’s necessarily the best policy, but you know, it’s prima facie responsive.

Well, I think,

[00:28:35] Josh Blank: I mean, I may even say it’s even simpler than I would say. Are they in conflict? Yeah. And they’re not, you know, in conflict with each other. Right now, when you get to sort of the, the, the voucher piece of it, it’s like, well, the politics of this are very difficult within the list of it. And there’s policy disagreements.

So. It didn’t produce an outcome, right? And in some ways, you know, you might say to yourself, you know, I don’t, I would say the system is sort of working as designed and in some ways it’s a, I just am thinking about that. It’s not because, you know, the state government and state leadership is not able to come together and make, you know, I think for the most part, good faith efforts to try to address policy needs, especially big ones, right?

But it’s having a hard time dealing with the political conflict internally.

[00:29:16] Jim Henson: Right. And, and, you know, and I would say that was even, that’s even evident in a kind of approach that is the legislature and the governor have taken to border security. Mm hmm. For sure. You know, which is the, the biggest fights, you know, over border security.

I mean, there was really not much trouble giving the governor extra, you know, another billion and a half dollars or so. Right. Maybe 1. 2, 1. 5 for border security projects. Right. But, you know, the, the bill that. you know, wound up, you know, fundamentally challenging federal sovereignty over immigration, which is going to wind up in the courts, seems more gestural than substantive at this point.

You know, and that’s a function of everybody, you know, the, the incentive to out border security, whatever the, the baseline of border security is. It’s never enough. Right. It’s never enough. And we’ve seen that in terms of our, our data on spending. And so it’s an example of, you know, indirectly, I think, but not very indirectly of, The primacy of the Republican primary in the state and all of the things that are adjacent to that.

You know, Republican control of the, controlling control of the redistricting process, the whole host of advantages that Republicans have that, that put the focus on Republican primary voters and the, and the incentives there. Now, we’re always careful about that with border security because border security, as we’ve said again in here multiple times.

pretty good general election issue right now because of democratic and independent attitudes that are especially independents, but even among a minority, but a non trivial minority of Democrats, you know, a lot of these policies play okay.

[00:30:53] Josh Blank: And I think to, you know, to what you were saying before about, you know, we might think about how the health of the system or how, how functional the government is with respect to, you know, how it’s responding to the electorate writ large and to, you know, Republican primary voters and Republicans in particular, given the fact that, you know, control of government, but this is an issue that if you want to take a step back, I can imagine a reporter from out of state calling me and say, what, what’s up with Texas’s obsession, you know, with the border and even setting aside all those other arguments you made that I totally agree with.

And we’ve talked about a lot here. Because whenever we ask what the most important issue facing the state is, it’s at the top of the list. Right. If the legislature did not do something or try to do something or seem to do something in this direction, I mean, I think people

[00:31:31] Jim Henson: would say, I guess, I guess the, the argument I’d make here in terms of, you know, the asterisk on this being responsive is, yeah, is that, you know, There is some oversteer here.

That’s kind of the point about the, you know, yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, because you’re, you know, there’s an almost manicness to demonstrating, you know, how, how focused you are on this. And you can say, yeah, as you, you know, I mean, we’ve fed this as much as anybody in terms of being endogenous to this way, you know, the poll results, which have been strikingly consistent, but there is a kind of, um, You know, there’s a, there’s a warp in the system here, right?

[00:32:04] Josh Blank: Well, the conflict, I mean, the conflict as I was in

[00:32:06] Jim Henson: Texas is not alone in

[00:32:08] Josh Blank: this office. Well, I think here, you know, before I was thinking about the ability of the system to, to deal with both political and conflict and policy conflict here, there’s no political conflict, but there’s actually some. Policy conflict, you know, in some ways, and part of this, but, you know, most of it kind of gets papered over.

And here, there’s

[00:32:23] Jim Henson: no political conflict within the governing coalition.

[00:32:25] Josh Blank: No, there’s no political. Yeah, there’s no political conflict within the governing coalition. You know, here we saw there’s some policy, you know, I think I’ll say this. It’s possible that as time goes on, we start to see more policy conflicts around immigration, more security than we have.

This could be sort of a harbinger in the sense that we’ve seen this, I think, previously, that As the state gets so far down the line on some of these policies and have already taken multiple bites at the apple at whatever it is, it kind of leads to the situation where, as you said, you know, we see dysfunction over start scraping the guardrails.

Yeah, you’re sure. Well, and this is the point. Like, I mean, we talked to this before, but like, why would there be a conflict over a bill that’s purely going to go to the courts and be challenged over, you know, it’s constitutionality, you know, when really the only argument was like, are we fingerprinting the people we find?

Are we keeping them in county jails? Are we sending them back to the border? You’re not doing any of these things because this is going to court, right? But the point is, is that as you get so far down the line and you’re already putting billions of dollars, like this is what’s left. And this is what’s happened in a lot of sort of policy areas where again, conservative success has actually made more policy conflict.

I mean, everybody goes, yeah, we should do, we should probably do more here, but the what becomes harder.

[00:33:29] Jim Henson: Right. And, and, you know, so yeah, so what have we seen? You see, you see two dynamics. One, just spend more money, which, you know, again, our polling has shown us a high tolerance for, right. If not even. Desire demand.

Yeah, right. Um, and look for new and novel ways to call attention to your efforts, right? So especially as people get used to you spending more money You need something else more novel and I think that explains the bill you were talking about

[00:33:56] Josh Blank: And I think at the same time you got to be fair here, right?

Like I mean, you know, I think and we say this i’ve said this a couple times I’m sure it’s in this podcast But you know the number of issues that sort of become salient for the electorate is only a tiny tiny fraction Of all of the business that the legislature takes on. So when we start looking at, you know, is the legislature like, you know, somehow fatally flawed or dis is the system dysfunctional.

It’s like, and you just look at vouchers and you just look at the border kind of issue or just focus on the special sessions. You know, I mean, that’s a very, very, uh, small universe. And actually the legislature did a bunch of other

[00:34:28] Jim Henson: stuff. Right. And, and, you know, look, and I think it’s fair to argue that they did accomplish a few things that were in the realm of.

You know less sexy and less liable to generate political reward with one exception. I’ll talk about in this category And that, you know, based on our polling and, and watching the elite conversation, you know, we’re important going into the accession. I mean, you know, they accomplished infrastructure spending via some constitutional amendments, water, broadband, transportation, notably, you know, critics could fairly argue that the actions they took were either, you know, too small, which is the common critique of the water bill.

Um, yeah. from people in that policy realm, or they did the wrong thing and may not work or maybe even counterproductive and costly. And that’s, you know, the critique on the grid and energy, but that’s also why those what some also contributed to the momentum for those measures to be constitutional amendments for the public to sign off on.

Um, you know, and overall, if you look at what the At the highest priorities overall going into the legislature were, and we have a lot of different measures on this and we can pick a couple of different things to look at it looks spottier, but it also looks like in terms of this macro level question of, you know what we want from the system, right?

I think you could call it, you know, guardedly responsive, allowing for the kinds of things that we often, you know, people often say what they want, which is compromise in Yeah. And, you know, to the end of actually getting something done rather than, you know, either, you know, approaching this in a binary way, they’re saying, you know, if we don’t spend, you know, an infinite amount on water, what we really need, then we shouldn’t do it at all, which is, you know, not.

You know, very few people would say that, right? So in that sense, you know, you know, what do we see here? I mean, you know, we could start in a, in a, in a number of different ways. Look, most broadly, you know, when we ask, give people an open ended question in April, and this was early April as things were really getting finally, you know, kind of substantively getting underway in the legislature, you know, the things people, you know, were most likely to say in that open ended.

item that we asked that they wanted 22 percent in immigration and border security, 11 percent gun control, gun safety, 7 percent each on, you know, acting in the, in the general areas of education and inflation, the cost of living. And you know, so, you know, immigration and border security, no surprise, right?

Gun control and gun safety. That was mostly Democrats.

[00:37:07] Josh Blank: But again, just there’s a lot of attention to that during the legislative session. Democrats brought a lot of attention to it. Senator Gutierrez brought a lot of attention to it. I mean, and people would point out that, you know, the bill to raise the age to purchase a semi automatic firearm from 18 to 21 made it to the farthest, you know, I actually got, yeah, any restrict, any bill that would have restrict gun rights has, is,

[00:37:28] Jim Henson: yeah, it got out, yeah, it got out of committee.

So, you know, it was more abundant, but you know, there was a lot of discussion of education,

[00:37:36] Josh Blank: a lot of, I mean, huge education. I mean, again, we focus at the end on vouchers, but there’s a huge education agenda and we just say education. Remember, this is split, you know, there’s some Democrats, some Republicans, some of this stuff was definitely addressed more than others.

Uh, and so, you know, yes. Okay.

[00:37:50] Jim Henson: Now, if we get a little more detailed. In that same poll, we gave people a really long list of things that we asked them to assess the importance of, that we, you know, knew was being discussed, you know, at the time we wrote this battery, we looked at the bills that had been introduced, some of the stuff that was moving and not moving, you know, we looked at the public debate, so we put a lot of thought in this and, you know, And also what

[00:38:14] Josh Blank: voters told us in the prior polls.

And

[00:38:15] Jim Henson: yeah, what they had told us in the, in prior poll, that’s, that’s right. And so, you know, without going into like the numbers, if you look at every, you know, there were four items that were either in the high 60s or higher. Um, in terms of the share of people of Texans overall registered voters that said it was either extremely important or very important for the legislature to accomplish top top response improve the viability of the state’s energy grid, reduce property taxes, increase funding for school safety, improve the reliability of the state’s water

[00:38:52] Josh Blank: supply.

Yep. And at least 40 percent of voters for each of those that it was extremely important for the legislature

[00:38:57] Jim Henson: to do that. So, you know, I mean, I think that’s a fair. You know, look at what people thought, you know, they, they wanted done. And, and we should just say, given what we’ve already said, bubbling right below that at 37 percent extremely important.

And just 59 percent saying, uh, uh, very important was increasing funding for border security operations. So, um, and then, you know, uh, something else, right. You know, close to that at 63 increased funding for the public school system. So if you look at all of those things, you know, on improving the reliability of the grid.

They did something. They tried. And they spent a lot of time on it. Yep. It’s been fundamentally critiqued because it’s seen as focusing too much on channeling money to conventional, right, you know, carbon sources of energy. Nonetheless, they did something reduce property taxes. They acted on that. It took them, you know, it was ugly, took them a special session to do it.

Right. But they did it. Increased funding for school safety. They did. They did that. Now. They tried to do more. And, and, and it got ugly pretty quickly because as soon as, you know, no sooner had they passed it than school districts were reporting. Well, right. I mean. Having to move money around to pay for security and who is going to qualify and there are all kinds of as far as the

[00:40:19] Josh Blank: way That this question was phrased They did increase funding for school say right did they do it enough and also the other piece of this is you know Did they do it enough to pay for the armed guards at all?

The school districts were supposed to be now paying for out of their budgets That’s another question, but

[00:40:33] Jim Henson: and and then the answer that appears to be no, but right. Um, You know, and that was, you know, they were trying to address that actually in part in, in the special session, you know, after that, the fourth thing, improve, improve the reliability of the state’s water supply, made an effort there, acted on that, made an effort.

And then we said, increase funding for the public education system now on that border security first, which so border security before that, which they did spades. And then increasing, you know, and then, uh, increasing reliability of the water, of the funding for the funding for the public education system.

Right. And, you know, they didn’t do

[00:41:05] Josh Blank: that. Right. But I’ll just say right now that wasn’t a priority of Republicans. Right.

[00:41:09] Jim Henson: And they were, you know, and, and even, even given that, you know, it got in the mix. Yeah. It was, you know, again, not very much. And Rly kind of drugged and so. You know, we could go further down that list, and there’s, you know, as you get further down, you get more, you know, mixed.

Particularly as you get to priorities, as you kind of imply there, where we got, you know, in the range of, you know, more than 50 percent support. A lot of those were driven primarily by Democrats.

[00:41:37] Josh Blank: Yeah, or some Republicans. I mean,

[00:41:38] Jim Henson: I think that I think the point, you know, in a plural, you know, and maybe, you know, smaller pluralities of

[00:41:43] Josh Blank: Republicans, you know, and again, without going through every item on the list, one of the things that I think kind of separates the things that bubble to the top versus the things that had less, you know, perceived importance.

We’re in a lot of ways, you know, systemic concerns at the top, right? You know, energy, water, uh, school safety, you know, the border security, property taxes, right? I mean, these things, you know, these are, there’s things that, you know, more or less impact everybody in every community, whether directly or indirectly, as we go down the list, we’ve seen, you know, more targeted policies, either, you know, democratic priorities or, you know, policies that are important to, to Republican primary voters are very engaged actors.

And those are, those are further down the list, but I think the overall point here is, you know, in some ways, and then maybe I’m just realizing this as we talk about, you know, kind of a responsive session, you know, you know, you get, you get locked up in the, you know, if you just sort of say, well, let’s just forget about everything that happened before June, you know, you’d say, you’d say, boy, it’s been a real mess.

These guys can’t, you know, seem to agree on anything at the same time when you go back and you look at the start of session, you look at what voters were talking about. You look how, you know, how the agenda formed, what voters reactions were to the agenda and what they ultimately accomplished, you know, they’re not walking away, you know, necessarily with, with their, you know, with their heads, you know, their heads in their hands, hiding themselves from the voters and saying, we didn’t, you know, address the big needs here.

And this is really the sort of, this is the general election issues. These are the issues that they’re going to point to and say, yeah, you know, we, we made historic investments in the border. We made historic investments in the gray, in the, in the state’s infrastructure. We’re going to, you know, for water.

For transportation, for energy, for broadband, we’ve reduced your property taxes, you know, didn’t sound, didn’t sound that, that complicated. No.

[00:43:22] Jim Henson: And, and so what’s interesting I think about this to tie this together, and I think we, we were going to talk more about the primaries, but let’s do that next time.

Okay. But to set the stage for that, Yes. As a teaser. Ooh. I mean, I think this does connect to the discussion we had a few minutes ago about primary challengers and what the primary is going to look like, because if you think about all these things that we’re talking about, it’s not as if incumbents, incumbent Republicans are not going to have a lot to talk about.

Yeah, for sure. Right. And so to go back to your sort of TV ad, if the opponents are running negative ads that are saying. You know, this Republican incumbent is not a real Republican because he voted against Thatcher’s and he voted to impeach Attorney General Paxton, who’s everybody’s hero. A lot to unpack there, and I did want to talk about that this week, but we’ll hang on to that.

There’s time. On the other hand, if you’re the incumbent, this is a pretty good list of things. It is, you know, we added billions more to border security and beefed up the ability of police and Texas National Guard to shore up the failings of Socialist Joe Biden. We cut your property taxes, you know, and so on.

I mean, this is not a crappy list, even if you’re running in the primaries, you say, I mean, I think it’s, it’s a pretty good general election. List two, but even though it’s presidential election year, I mean, if you’re going to differentiate yourself from that or, you know, and that’s going to, that’ll be a calculation to be made a universe away from now in political time.

But looking at this list, I mean, I, it’s, it’s a pretty good list of things to run on if you can. Focus voters attentions on, on that. And that I think then, you know, and we’ll, we’ll re raise this when it comes time to talk about the primaries, but if you’ve got the money to promote that message in your district, and you’ve got a pretty good foundation in your district already, if you’re not in trouble going in, I think.

Your incumbent, you know, the advantage of incumbency is pretty good.

[00:45:33] Josh Blank: Yeah, I think so, too. I also think, you know, I mean, some of the people kind of keep, you know, just mentioning this. I mean, you worry about the outside. I mean, you don’t worry. I mean, you think about the outside influences in these races. If you’re an incumbent, you think about it, you worry about the outside influences.

But again, this is going to be a presidential election year. Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of races and a lot of money that needs to be spent in a lot of different places. And the idea to my mind that there’s going to be a ton of outside influence coming into these primaries beyond what we’re already talking about here.

And honestly, the regular players in it, I think that’s pretty unlikely.

[00:46:04] Jim Henson: Yeah. I mean, you know, again, we’ll talk, we’ll, we’ll move to the primary thing later, but you know, it’s going to be a broader field of competition. I mean, we had some numbers for that, you know, there are more, you know, there’s a, there’s a bit, there’s an uptick, you know, a couple of weeks still before the filing deadline in the number of, um, Primary opponents that, you know, have filed on the Republican side.

Yeah. You know, but that doesn’t guarantee victory. It just guarantees more fighting and more money flowing into

[00:46:29] Josh Blank: these races. Yeah. We’ll talk about it again. We will definitely talk about this more this next week, but I mean, you know, the thing that I’m sort of wondering about here, and this kind of, this ties us all together too, in some ways is, you know, does the increase in primary challengers reflect an increase in dissatisfaction on the ground with the output of the legislature?

Because on the one hand, as we talked about, I don’t, I don’t know that that’s necessarily Reasonable or does it reflect in a lot of ways, you know, the, not the inability, but the messiness with which the process has dealt with internal political conflict and how salient is that internal political conflict for Republican primary voters first and foremost.

And that’s sort of the question that we’re kind of kind of see uncovering an answer, at least over the next few months.

[00:47:09] Jim Henson: For now, we breathlessly await the formal end of the fourth special session. And the filing deadline and the filing deadline for the primaries, but especially right now, just seeing how that, you know, to me, seeing how this, you know, we’re looking at ending with a whimper rather than a bang is the predominant feeling, but you know, the governor will have something to say about this and, you know, we’ll see if anybody pulls a rabbit out of their hat, but until then, uh, thanks to Josh for being here.

Thank you for listening to the podcast above all. And of course, thanks again to our excellent production team in the dev studio in the college of liberal arts at UT Austin, we’ll post this podcast. If you’re listening to this on a, on a plat, on a podcasting platform, there’ll be a post of this podcast with some of the polling that we’ve talked about and links to results since we referenced some things from some polling earlier in the year.

So thanks again for listening. And we’ll be back soon with another Second Reading podcast.

The Second Reading podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.