October 10th, 2023 – Texas public opinion and Gov. Abbott’s special session agenda

[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. Sir, 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? At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room?

[00:00:33] 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. Happy to be joined today by Josh Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project.

Good late morning, early afternoon. Yes, good afternoon. Good, we’ll just call it afternoon. Um, to being perspective, being literal and precise, which is, you know, what we’re all about in our estimates. Um, yeah, yeah. Good after a good morning was an estimate.

[00:01:05] Josh Blank: Um, it was within the

[00:01:06] Jim Henson: margins. Yeah, sure. You know, plus or minus 20 minutes.

Um, so here we are, we spent a lot of time last week setting up the politics of the third special session of the 88th legislature, uh, which at the time we met last week, we had just gotten the date of the kickoff, had a couple of the topics still did not have the actual proclamation. Well, as it turned out, we wrapped the podcast, walked upstairs and.

Governor Abbott had issued the proclamation or did shortly thereafter. So, you know, we’ve laid a lot of groundwork, which is good. The basis of the discussion last time held. Yeah. You know, as expected, the call was topped by the governor’s call for, quote, legislation providing educational savings accounts for all Texas school children, unquote.

Also as expected, a set of items related to border immigration and border security. I think there’s four of those. I’m not going to read those through. We’ll circle around to those in a minute. But, you know, a bit of a surprise, you know, the, the, the governor, you know, popped something in there, popped a little treat in there, if you will.

[00:02:11] Josh Blank: 2021 calls and they want their shoes

[00:02:13] Jim Henson: back. I used that line with somebody. Uh, so the, and the bit of the surprise was, again, quoting directly from the call legislation prohibiting COVID 19. Uh, Vaccine mandates by private employers. Now, this has been an issue that’s been bubbling in the legislature since, you know, last session over the last two sessions.

And, and, you know, rhetoric on government and COVID policies, vaccine requirements of any kind by anybody. You know, tap into areas of broad Republican consensus. Um, you know, long after the COVID, the COVID vaccine was judged safe and effective by the preponderance of medical experts, real, real medical experts, and, and by practice, uh, amidst an avalanche of available data.

You know, requiring vaccines has remained a theme, or vaccine freedom, I think, or health freedom, I think, are some of the terms of our Vaccine choice. Yeah, you know, requiring vaccines, you know, in schools and certainly in workplaces by, you know, any government involvement has really remained anathema to a large share of Republicans.

If you go back and, you know, I would remind people before I go for this one data point. As you go back and you think about these COVID policies and we’re going to hear about them at least to some degree in the next couple of months, we did what I think is certainly in the state, an unmatched volume of polling on COVID in that, you know, we started polling in April of 19 on COVID for the first time in April of 2020 in the very early stages of the pandemic and polled very consistently.

Some trend questions, but certainly, you know, trying to catch COVID attitudes and some of the issues of the moment as well as some of the trend through December of 2022, at least. And I think we even had an occasional question, certainly about maybe vaccines. I

[00:04:07] Josh Blank: mean, the bulk of that, you know, that, that effort, the trends, trying to catch the sort of the policy currents as they were ebbing in and out.

Definitely like that was, that

[00:04:14] Jim Henson: was really right. And so during the two peak years of the pandemic, we did six polls a year. And there were a lot of COVID questions. So there’s a post on the Texas politics project website at texaspolitics. utexas. edu. Um, if you, if you search or go to the blog site, we have all this trend data in one place.

You can also use our search tool. I think the keyword that, you know, we’re pretty consistent in our keywords. Look for coronavirus. I think I was there the other day. If you do coronavirus, if you check coronavirus, COVID 19 and vaccines, you get hundreds of results. Public

[00:04:53] Josh Blank: health might help if you want. So,

[00:04:54] Jim Henson: you know, there’s a lot there, but you know, to the, to the immediate and narrow point.

In February of 2022 polling to the point of, you know, the politics of this, 70 percent of Republicans opposed to allowing businesses to require employees to provide proof of vaccination or to submit to frequent COVID testing. Now again, February, 2022. You know, already with the back to work, the open up movement, you know, beginning to really, you know, really have the upper hand, certainly in the state and, you know, really even in the country at this point.

But, you know, it’s a very good issue for, for Governor

[00:05:31] Josh Blank: Abbott. Yeah, it’s great. I mean, look, at this point, I mean, I think the point you’re making is clear is it, I mean, we talk about this all the time on any policy issue where you can say, well, 70 plus percent of my voters agree with this stance. It’s, it’s a win in a state like this, not to mention the fact that as with other sort of items on the call, you know, the attitudes that are likely correlated with attention to these vaccine mandates and this issue in particular, and this idea of sort of employer mandates, you know, it’s conservatism and it’s really, you know, extreme conservatism.

What we find here is that, you know, the, the resistance to these sorts of vandals manage or even higher amongst the people who identify in the, in the electorate is extremely conservative and these are, you know, in a lot of ways, the target. You know, the target audience for these kinds of policy is looking ahead to the next election cycle.

[00:06:15] Jim Henson: And, you know, and so, you know, speaking of, you know, and look, there’s a lot of context here and I think, you know, we want to, we’re on a little bit of a time, we’re on a clock here in a couple of different ways, but, you know, I think you made a really good point in terms of the timing of this, that is. You know, this taps into these COVID attitudes, but if you’re thinking about this in a policy, from a policy perspective, it is coming as there’s been both in the, in the tail of two things or three things, really one, a slight, not run for that or, you know, run back to your homes and hunker down, but a slight uptick in COVID cases.

I can attest to personally a couple of weeks ago, the availability and promotion of, in the context of that uptick, a new booster and, and to the point you were making then. We’re heading into flu season, right? This is vaccine, or we’re trying to get people to go get vaccinated.

[00:07:05] Josh Blank: So I mean, what that tells you, what that should tell you is, I mean, I think some people are gonna see that say so wait a minute, what?

And it’s like, the main point we’re making here is that it’s becoming more salient. People are talking about it, people are talking about covid, people are talking about the Covid booster. Again, flu vaccines are out there. So this is on people’s mind. But the other piece of this, the politics of this is if you really think about it, you know one of, you know, one of Abbott’s biggest.

You know, I’ll say failures, if you will, from a political standpoint, you know, potentially seems to have been his early embrace of some kind of protocols to mitigate the virus early in the pandemic. And he’s really been pushing since that point to make clear that, you know, he was not taking the pandemic too seriously.

He was not supporting shutdowns. You know, he is not that guy, but. You know, in doing so, you know, again, during the, the, the original uprising in the pandemic, like that really fomented a lot of, you know, his primary challenge that he saw, you know, in the last election cycle. It’s also one of the few policy areas that really creates a certain amount of negative distance for the governor here in Texas with really the other most prominent Republican governor in the country, uh, Rhonda Santus, who really has, you know, went out of his way through.

throughout to basically make Florida the most open state, you know, the least restrictive state, however you want to look at it. And so this is really almost like some, some, some dust, some cleanup work on the backside of

[00:08:20] Jim Henson: all this. Yeah. I mean, it’s a, the politics of this, as you say, are, are pretty good. And you know, you mentioned, uh.

You know, by way of transition, you know, you, you mentioned the support for this policy, you know, being particularly strong and not only particularly broadly distributed and particularly intense among the most conservative Texans is, you know, we were putting together a post that, you know, went up over the weekend that was basically a survey of attitudes related to The, the, the emergency or the, the, the special session items and the particular wording of the items that we, that we finally got, that was a theme of all of these items and it plays in, you know, it plays in different ways, in different contexts, but if there’s one thing that all three of these items have in common, it is not to be too reductive, that they are really appealing to the most conservative among the Republicans and, you know, most conservative voters in the state and therefore, by extension, um, To Republican primary voters.

So, you know, and that very much applies

[00:09:25] Josh Blank: to vouchers. Yeah. And I mean, I think, and I think it’s really easy for someone who follows us closely to say, well, yeah, I, duh, duh, I

[00:09:32] Jim Henson: was gonna say duh, i duh. Wish we’d just done duh at the same time. But, but I wish we harmonized. I wish I

[00:09:36] Josh Blank: harmonized. Duh. I wish we had too

But, um, actually don’t believe that. What was I going to say there? I’ve lost. Now you’ve totally. No, no, no, no. I know. I know. I know what I was going to say. I was going to say was, but the point here is, I think, you know, last week we were talking about this and I mean, look, there’s a lot of conversation going on knowing that vouchers was going to be on the bill, which I think we’re going to turn to next was going to be on the call.

You know, a lot of the discussion on both sides is, well, what else is going to be on the call to, to make vouchers easier? I mean, it was, that was really the idea. It wasn’t just what’s going to be on the call, but really the question may be, or is there going to be something on the call that’s going to be a trade ship either with Republicans or with Democrats even to push vouchers across the finish line?

And you come and again, by that afternoon, the answer was no. And in fact, what the real focus here is. The Republican electorate and really the Republican primary electorate. When you look at these issues as they’ve been framed and I want to, you

[00:10:27] Jim Henson: know, and their origins to put a pin in it podcast, you know, I’m going to put a pin on that because I want to circle back to that.

Okay. Because I, but I, you know, obviously I think that’s correct. But, uh, as we look at the what’s in the, so if we look at this and we look at the politics of the voucher item, we We have done a lot on public education and in particular on vouchers in the last couple of weeks. You’ve done a, you’ve in particular have done a lot of digging into this data.

So there are, there are two posts in the blog section of the website at texaspolitics. utexas. edu to feel like I’m raising money for a campaign. Yeah. Um. If only. If only and I would urge people to go look at that. There’s a really, you know, uh, great piece that Josh worked a lot on On question wording and the impact of question wording like we talked about this a little bit last week a little bit but that is really worth looking at but And then there’s another sort of broader piece about coalition politics and the distribution of partisans on the voucher issue and how that plays out in attitudes.

And I think you can summarize that, you know, as complex as it is, once we dug into it, you know, the points that come out of that. Kind of build on each other pretty clearly in terms of setting the stage.

[00:11:39] Josh Blank: Yeah, I think that’s right. So I think, you know, generally I think we should just acknowledge at the outset that you generally find majority or at least plurality support for this broad idea of vouchers, but as, as we write, you know, in the post, it really depends on how you ask about it because it’s not something that’s salient for a lot of people, it’s also a policy that has.

A lot of moving parts, a lot of particulars. We’re not going to go into that, but you know, student population definitions, what the money can be spent on, where it can, all these things become a factor in terms of how people think about it. And the main takeaway from that post was essentially that, you know, opposition goes up dramatically once you start talking about redirecting funds from the public school system, which is, again, if you’ve been watching the early debate here, they’ve been at pains to say, this does not come out of the public education budget.

This comes from general education, you know, general revenue, which is, you know, A useful framing of it, although it obviously has a major limitation, which is once kids leave the system, how do you think the public education budget is determined by kids in the system? So there’s sort of a yes and no. But anyway, but the point is your people get a lot less supportive when they think money’s coming out of the public education system.

Obviously, attitudes towards school choice or heavily conditioned bipartisanship, um, you know, and basically both in terms of, you know, the yeah. Preferences for those policies, but also salience, you know how important those policies are. Republicans are much more supportive. It’s much more salient for them than Democrats.

However, the salience of vouchers is relatively limited, as is the salience of public education more broadly. This is true whether we’re talking about just In the whole issue landscape, you know, education vouchers versus, you know, the border versus, you know, COVID mandates versus other things. It’s pretty low down on the list.

But even within the context of public education, vouchers are not a high priority for most people. Even Republicans in our most recent polling, you know, we found that almost twice the share of Republicans said it was extremely important for the legislature to address school safety, parental rights, and curriculum as said the same about establishing a voucher program.

[00:13:25] Jim Henson: Right. And then, you know, the The prominence of school safety in that education battery, which we’ve now replicated at least a couple of times, right? We’ve seen this, you know, I mean, I, you know, I’m beginning to accept it as a relatively reliable estimate in this, the context of this issue. It’s occurring to me that the prominence of school safety within the rubric, within the ambit of public education actually is a good illustration of the limited salience without it.

In other words, school safety itself is such a powerful issue because it intersects things that are not just about public education, right? You’re right. You know,

[00:14:03] Josh Blank: you’re totally right. I think that’s a great point. I mean, I mean, and just. I’m just going to say it back to you. Probably thanks. But I mean, the main point we’ve often said is, you know, most voters don’t have a direct connection with the public education system, but I would submit that most voters probably feel a pretty strong reaction when there’s something as horrible as happening.

You’ve all day and that brings them into the public education sphere, but in an angle that’s kind of different from this

and

[00:14:25] Jim Henson: has been reinforced in

[00:14:26] Josh Blank: prior, you know, right. It gets reinforced over and over again. And it’s something that, again, you know, whether you, you know, there’s lots of disagreement about what the response should be.

To those kinds of things. There’s no disagreement about the idea that schools should be safe for kids. Right. And that extends beyond people with even a direct interest in the public schools. And that’s sort of, I think is something that just sort of sits out there above everything else.

[00:14:46] Jim Henson: Right. And we saw that, I mean, you know, the Senate is, you know, you know, the Senate got off to a roaring start and, you know, as we’re recording on Tuesday, right?

Yeah. On Monday, the big, uh, Senator Creighton’s, uh,

Non voucher education bill that is, you know, we’ll talk clearly outside the call, right? Then we’ll talk about in a moment. I mean, that’s the pin to come back to the bargaining point, but a good deal of the discussion yesterday was about supplemental money for school safety and, and paying for some of the mandates that are in the, that are, that are in the pipeline right now based on what was done

[00:15:21] Josh Blank: in the last session.

I mean, I don’t want to, but I mean, there’s definitely another piece to be ran at this point that looks at SB1 and SB2 in the context of the priorities that, you know, Voters have said they care about and I think you’ve seen SB2 a lot more of the priorities mentioned by voters and that’s sort of the bargaining chip.

So just real quick to sort of wrap up, you know, the opinion piece on this, you know, the further the broader context here is not so much that, you know, Republican voters writ large or are clamoring for vouchers, but the broader context here is just negative attitudes towards the public school system among Republicans, right?

Democrats still hold, you know, broadly favorable views of public ad. But, you know, to the extent that public ed has been under assault because of, you know, whether it was COVID policies, whether it’s perceptions of the way that they’re teaching about race, the way that they’re teaching about gender. So, you know, social, emotional learning, all these kinds of things that are sort of, you know, being roiled

[00:16:10] Jim Henson: up and to be fair, you know, discussions of learning lost, you

[00:16:14] Josh Blank: know, yeah, that’s all kind of false for me and the pandemic sort of stuff, but yeah, learning loss during the pandemic, et cetera.

You know, Republicans hold much more negative views of the public education system. And I think that’s sort of, I mean, the broader context that we think we need to understand sort of efforts that would say, you know, divert some of these funds towards alternatives, right?

[00:16:31] Jim Henson: And again, you know, the data in these posts, I think it’s, it’s probably.

Most explicit in the most recent one, but you know, when you say that, you know, I mean when I went back and looked at that as I was, you know, working on that post over the weekend, it is striking. We’ve got three polls in the past 14 months that found, you know, the public education system in net negative favorability territory.

You know, in other words, more people just, you know, having unfavorable views than favorable views among Republicans. And, you know, that’s, that’s. a pretty striking result And if you go back you’ll find a similar result, you know several years ago when we first asked this question Prior to all of the pandemic upheaval and I want

[00:17:13] Josh Blank: to make sure people don’t I want to do two things I want to both make sure people don’t over interpret that result but also take it Take it seriously.

Yeah. And so I think the, the reason I want to say that is, you know, we ask about the, you know, basically public school system in general. So K through 12 public education. Now we, sometimes what we do is we ask people, we ask parents about like their own children’s public schools, right? So, or we’ll ask people, you know, again, about public schools in their communities.

And whenever you ask things more locally, people have more favorable views, right? Because again, even locally, you might say, Oh yeah, you know, the place where they do all the events, right? And if you send your kids there, you like the, usually like the teachers, usually you’re, you know, most people have positive associations.

So just, that’s just to say, just because we’re saying, you know, there’s these broad negative Republican attitudes towards the public schools, it doesn’t mean that Republicans with their kids in public schools in Texas don’t like those schools. In fact, they probably do, but that doesn’t mean that again, this goes back to the salience issue by our estimates, maybe 20 percent of the registered voters have kids in the public schools, which means that.

80 percent of voters don’t and they don’t have any sort of direct connection to have these positive views. So these negative views still matter, just not among people who are actually interacting with the

[00:18:15] Jim Henson: system. Yeah. I mean, this is like, you know, I’ll just, I’m just grossly oversimplifying here, but I mean, all things being equal, if you don’t have, if you’re not a direct stakeholder, you don’t have direct exposure, then Ideology and you know, you, you know, you’re then in a position where ideology and politics fill in the attitudinal space that doesn’t this left from that direct experience.

And I think

[00:18:39] Josh Blank: that sort of, you know, just environment is what’s driving a lot of these, you know, kind of rural school districts and their associations. Crazy and you see them. They’re like, Hey, look, come out to my school district. Tell me that we’re indoctrinating these kids. Come out to the school district, you know, and tell and tell us that we’re not, you know, promoting, you know, West Texas values because it’s crazy to them because, you know, honestly, like What goes on in San Francisco’s public schools, which may get a lot of attention and may sort of fill in these gaps that you’re talking about in the sort of ideological landscape, or even what goes on in Austin, you know, that’s not really what’s going on out in West Texas, right?

Weatherford. And they’re

[00:19:14] Jim Henson: exactly, that’s not West Texas. I know don’t, don’t say Jernigan

[00:19:17] Josh Blank: or which is not West Texas either, but you get the idea of these very small communities. And these very small ISDs. And so, you know, again, it’s interesting as again, this sort of leads into sort of the strange bedfellows of all these, you know, these voucher debates.

[00:19:28] Jim Henson: And as another footnote to the polling, I mean, I think that’s another reason. I mean, I either the result gets ignored or we hear about it, you know, behind the scenes or in a sub Rosa kind of way. Yeah. But that’s also why public opinion is much more divided in the rural areas than, you know, people who have heard, Hey, look, all of the, you know, the rural schools and the rural members in the legislature in particular.

Are the biggest skeptics, but all of that. the demographics that you were laying out a few moments ago about, and this dynamic between, you know, the, if you will, the ambient ideological or contextual ideological landscape in rural areas and the age and ethnic breakdown in rural areas, et cetera. You know, I mean, that’s one of the challenges for these rural members.

And I think we’re seeing that unfold in real time right now. But, you know, that’s why I, you know, to my mind, I think that’s a pretty plausible hypothesis for why the rural public opinion polling doesn’t look like the rural voting in the house.

[00:20:28] Josh Blank: Right? Yeah,

[00:20:29] Jim Henson: that’s right. Now you can, one could, you know, look, I mean, it’s a fair criticism.

I think that we hear from proponents of vouchers to say that these members, in fact, are not voting their districts. Well, we’re also not saying that rural members are. Fine with vouchers and they’re being stonewalled, but in our rural results often are more divided than one might expect from the frame that people often put on it.

And I

[00:20:51] Josh Blank: think when you think about for those rural members, yes, you know, they’re concerned about a primary challenge from, you know, school choice advocates in these small districts, but you know, they’re also really scared about messing with people’s kids, right? Both of those groups can be mobilized very easily.

Right. And I think they’re making those calculations and then, you know,

[00:21:07] Jim Henson: in districts with a lot, you know, with maybe based around one. Regional, you know, comparatively urban center in a lot of smaller towns, you know, the impact of the schools in those smaller towns and the people that work for those schools, the leaders of those schools is, you know, is much more prominent.

[00:21:23] Josh Blank: You know, it’s interesting. I mean, this has something I didn’t really realize, but I was watching the, the, the layout of SB1 and, and, and Senator Springer was, was bringing up some interesting points and they were talking about, especially, you know, he’s got, you know, a gajillion. Basically school districts that he deals with.

And some of them, some of the counties are even divided with multiple school districts. And, you know, because of that, there’s just these fixed costs that they have to take care of. And one of the sort of responses to this was, well, you know, this, this didn’t hurt rural school districts in Florida to which, you know, Senator Springer basically, yeah, there’s 50 school districts in Florida.

There’s 1200 in Texas. Yeah. It’s a different thing here. Right. And so I think, you know, managing those kinds of dynamics is obviously something they haven’t figured out yet. We’re going to watch in real time and see whether whether they can. Right.

[00:22:04] Jim Henson: So. All right. So, you know, last night, Senator Creighton filed SB1, which is the voucher bill.

You know, I don’t think we need to spend a ton of time laying it all out. You can see the bill, TLO.

[00:22:14] Josh Blank: And I do, I do want to like lay out one of the public opinion pieces to sort of the way that it’s being discussed here, which is, I think, you know, so the bill is going to 500 million of from general revenue.

Fun for the next two years to pay for the program. You know, the center crane has been very explicit on the performance of in very specific. This money is not siphoning money away from public schools. It’s coming from general revenue. It’s not from the public school budget. I’m just going to put out there.

I understand why you’d say this based on the public opinion program, because we know that support’s going to drop. If you say you’re taking money out of public schools, the problem of course, is if students leave the public schools, the way that public schools get funded is through formula funding, which is based on average weighted daily attendance, basically enrollment.

Right. And so students leave the school, that is going to necessarily affect the budgets of public schools. It’s just going to be, it’s going to be kind of this bank shot around where then the state’s going to have less of a liability because there’s fewer students to pay for. So

[00:23:02] Jim Henson: anyway. So yeah, so, so, and I think, you know, and we’ve seen this before because this is not the first time we’ve seen this model of funding of this kind of proposal, you know, that, that is why the wording on that is so careful in the messaging.

[00:23:16] Josh Blank: Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, I want to say, you know, I mean, to that point too, I think, you know, it was notable and interesting, you know, governor Abbott choosing educational savings account as the vehicle of choice here. He’s not giving a lot of ambiguity. Now, look, would he accept a quote unquote voucher bill that was of, you know, a straight voucher?

Would he accept, you know, some selling broadly called? I think so. I don’t think he necessarily, you know, the specific, you know, tax designation of how the money is distributed, I think is important here, but I think it is important to sort of note that like school choice. Vouchers, educational savings account, all of these terms have been poll tested by lots of people for many, many years.

And the idea here is I think that this is probably more palatable as a, as a, as a structure to say what we’re, how we’re going to talk about this versus vouchers.

[00:24:01] Jim Henson: So, right. And so, you know, and if you look at this bill, I mean, in terms of what’s in it, It’s ambition. It’s, you know, it’s labeling the mechanisms, you know, I mean, I think it’s hard for me to imagine that this bill would not be introduced at this point without some sense that this is something that the governor will sign.

Yeah, I’m not saying this is the bill that, you know, whatever, because I don’t think I think this bill by all signals on its own is probably dead in arrival in the house. Yeah, but this does bring us back to the bargaining strategy on this bill, right? Which is, you know, and, and look, you know, I would point people to the bill and we’ll put some of this maybe in the post on the website.

The politics and the horse trading of this are evident in the allocation of. Funds, you know, funds and you know where this, you know where this, which students were at. Yeah. Which students would have priority in the, in the case of demand, exceeding supply, right. For this, et cetera. But I think for the politics of the moment, one of the interesting things here in terms of thinking about what’s gonna happen in the house is that to, you know, to draw the line or go back to what we pinned earlier.

There is another bill that I’ve referenced already, SB2, which, you know, increases the basic allotment, the basic student allotment, provides for a one time teacher bonus, has teacher incentives in it, has, you know, increased funding for school safety, you know, has a lot of the things, if you go back to that list of priorities that we were talking about earlier, that touch on that list, but the politics of this are very interesting because since this isn’t on the call, Mhm.

Arguably, it seems to me there would come a point where the governor, which is perfectly within his power, would add something to the call would, you know, issue another proclamation with more items for the legislature to consider that would be tailored to this bill. If a deal was in the making right now, that’s one scenario.

[00:25:59] Josh Blank: Yeah. And that sets aside any sort of like sequencing consideration, which is a kind of, which is not

[00:26:05] Jim Henson: trivial, not trivial at all, but also, you know, politically very interesting in that it keeps the governor directly in the conversation where the governor’s office.

[00:26:15] Josh Blank: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, I think it also, you know, one of the other things that this does is it puts more pressure on, I think it puts more pressure on everybody.

I don’t want to, I mean, I was thinking, does it put more pressure on Democrats versus Republicans? I think it puts more pressure on everybody. And part of it is, is, you know, I actually think SB2 to a large extent, you know, if you’re talking about sort of big things is a little bit weak sauce. Sorry, I’m just going to say it because I mean, when you look at it, it increases the basic allotment by 75 per student.

You know, I think about trading places. Oh, I’ll go to the movies. Okay. By myself, you know, kind of vibes, the teacher bonus is a one time teacher bonus, which again, so we’re just going to spend some money. We’re not going to increase salaries. We’re actually just going to do it. We’re going to do it in a way that we’re going to give rural,

[00:26:54] Jim Henson: you know, rural, you know, which was rejected last session, which was

[00:26:57] Josh Blank: rejected.

You know, the teacher incentive allotment is basically for incredibly high performing teachers who meet a certain criteria, which covers right now about 13, 000 teachers in Texas, which is 4, 000, or I’m sorry, 4 percent of. All teachers, so it’s sort of a smallish program and the school safety, you know, I think is actually one of the biggest pieces in here, but that’s also not surprising.

Given our polling, which is that people don’t really feel like they’ve done anything to make the school safer. So they basically double those allotments from what they agreed to in the session. Say we’re doing more. But again, my impression is, is that really, except for Uh, I mean, if you basically take this, if you take this all as a package, right, the voucher program is establishing a program that will have ongoing expenses that are unknown into the future.

Each of these, I mean, the increase in the basic allotment is pretty minimal relative to a lot of things you could look at. I mean, again, and a lot of people in putting a lot of really good data over the last week or two about looking at, you know, inflation adjusted dollars, historic expenditures, so on and so forth.

You know, it’s not a lot of money and everything else in here is a one time expense, kind of wipe your hand and walk away. And so I’m not really sure other than the messaging to say, Hey, we’re looking for teacher pay raises and they, you know, and they, whoever they are, some Republicans don’t want to do it because they just don’t want vouchers.

I mean, look at

[00:28:12] Jim Henson: one point, you know, like on one hand, one can say, look, these are all opening bargaining positions, et cetera. Sure, but it does, you know, I mean, our friend and colleague, uh, Harvey Kronberg had a piece at Quorum Report, I think last week. There was a lot in the piece, but one of, one of the sort of arguments Harvey was making was that, you know, to some extent this is, The session is all sort of display with no real chance of success.

Yeah. I mean, I think that’s not a, you know, entirely controversial position, but I mean, certainly these initial gambits and the response among Democrats, which was extremely negative, right? I mean, you know, even before SSB one came up yesterday in the Senate hearing for SB two, Senator West was very clear to say, Hey, by the way, this,

[00:28:55] Josh Blank: you know.

Yeah. And Rey no, and Trey Mar and Senator, and Representative Martinez Fisher speaking for the House caucus was, was pretty. Pretty locked. Similarly

[00:29:01] Jim Henson: definite. Yeah. Right. So we’ve talked a lot about border security. I don’t think and we’re gonna, you know, we don’t need to sort of reinvent the wheel here, but I think it is good to sort of know just where the governor went on this and just how much it does plug into things that we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast and written about a lot.

I mean, the items called for, you know, legislation to do more to reduce illegal immigration. By creating a criminal offense for illegal entry into the state from a foreign nation and authorizing all, all licensed peace officers to remove illegal immigrants in Texas now. I wonder how you do that. What does that mean?

Our recent, you know, whatever the practicality, just talking about it, we know our recent polling, you know, actually months of polling, if not years, but even, In our most recent poll in August found, you know, kind of upticks in draconian attitudes among Republicans about any illegal immigration, not to mention legal, right?

And widespread support for the deployment of a military and police focused operation from the state. Yeah. You know, in other words, Operation Lone Star seems to be have found an

[00:30:07] Josh Blank: audience. Yeah. And look, we’ve, we’ve asked about, you know, sort of local police involvement in immigration enforcement in the past, because this was a big issue back, you know, about, you know, I don’t know, eight years ago now or so with the Arizona law and Texas sort of considering something similar.

We saw pretty widespread Republican support for then if anything, the underlying attitudes that we would think, you know, are the buttress and that you’re talking about have gotten. even more supportive of something like that. I always

[00:30:31] Jim Henson: envisioned the picture that ran very prominently of Rick Perry and what kind of looking like is sort of, you know, kind of policy looking fatiguing outfit, you know, on a boat with the sun, you know, on a sunglasses on a boat patrolling.

Yeah. Border areas. The other items were just to run through them. Legislation to impede illegal entry into Texas by increasing the penalties for certain criminal conduct involving the smuggling of persons or the operation of a stash house. Legislation to impede illegal entry into Texas by providing more funding for construction, operation, and maintenance of border barrier infrastructure.

Um, and finally, uh, legislation concerning public safety, security, environmental quality, and property ownership in areas like the Colony Ridge development. In Liberty County, Texas, which is, you know, the, the, the sanctuary cities of 2023, I think,

[00:31:26] Josh Blank: well, I mean, it’s funny, actually, I mean, it’s not funny, but I mean, did I bring up, you know, sort of the, the show me your papers kind of, you know, sort of debate that we had a year ago, and it was around the same time that we’re talking about sanctuary cities, we’re kind of looking at the same.

Sort of things and we’re calling something different, you know, we’re, we’re focusing it a little bit more on this particular development, but they really are very, very similar issues to ones that, you know, we’ve been polling about and sort of talking about it for a

[00:31:49] Jim Henson: while. And, you know, on, you know, the construction operation, maintenance, you know, it’s, you know, is, uh, Asterisk or a footnote.

It is interesting to see the language of the wall. Now we’re reverting back to border barrier infrastructure, but not because the wall has become partisan or radioactive, but because, you know, the governor has innovated in what he uses his barriers since we have the buoy issue. And again, you know, these are approaches that are Wildly popular not just approved of but wildly popular among republican voters and again Among the most conservative voters who we you know expect to be You know most likely to be active in republican

[00:32:34] Josh Blank: primaries.

Yeah, two reactions I mean one not to you know, sort of from the cheap, you know criticized from the cheap seats here But I think part of it is like, you know a physical wall Super expensive. Super hard to build. I mean, that’s one thing we’ve learned over the time where there may be alternative barriers or a good idea.

The other thing about that particular piece is, I mean, given, I mean, we’ve talked about this, it’s out there, but the insane increase in the amount of money that Texas spends on, on immigration, border security session after session, including in the most recent session just concluded the fact that there’s another item on here that says more.

Can we put more money into that? It’s like, I mean, you know, in a traditionally fiscally conservative state, you’d think the legislature might say, Hey, didn’t we just do

[00:33:12] Jim Henson: that? Yeah. And there are some specific numbers that are in the most recent blog posts, but you know, the, the multiple, depending on what you use as a baseline.

But you don’t have to go back very far to just see that these are unbelievably drastic increases and still majority of Republicans still told us as recently as August after the last increase in the budget up to you know topping over five billion dollars States spending too little on border security.

So, and you know, and, and not to dwell on it too much, because I think it’s, this is still very much unfolding, but you know, the Colony Ridge issue and the whole Colony Ridge development, you know, continues to be, you know, a matter of some degree of dispute. You know, there were some bipartisan, I believe, group of legislators went down and, and AP.

P story on

[00:34:06] Josh Blank: the sheriff in that county has had is pushed back pretty, pretty directly about sort of the way that the, that the area has been described by both the press and by legislative by conservative press and by legislators who haven’t been there. And

[00:34:19] Jim Henson: you know, the, the, you know, the guy who’s the developer and owner, you know, it’s a.

family owned thing, I think, and, and is, is an interesting character who is kind of almost from central casting in discussing this. It’s almost like it’s like from a John Sayles movie or something. It’s a niche reference to some film fans, but so, you know, uh, before we go to the couple of minutes, so the politics of this and the unfolding of the, uh, on border security and immigration in particular.

The opening of this special session, this third special session, all pretty interesting, right? I mean, obviously the federal politics have gotten very interesting in the way that this is intersecting. You know, we’ve said in here a million times that. An obvious, easy unifying issue for Republicans at a time of great divisions, but also one that kind of wreaks havoc, you know, you know, causes mischief for Democrats, and that really became clear in the last week or so with with events unfolding,

[00:35:17] Josh Blank: right?

Yeah, I mean, you know, basically, there’s been a lot of attention in the last week or two to Biden administration with, you know, on the border specifically, you know, there was some Uh, continuation, I guess you might say, of the installment of more border barriers and fences and things like that, that obviously got a lot of response on the right, especially, but also on the left, also on the left, and that’s that’s sort of been the main issue here is that, you know, I think I read this.

I think something you shared with me was good, and I don’t remember which piece it was, but it’s talking about it. You know, the various different administrations and talking about how, you know, especially during the Obama years, the idea was, was to talk, you know, very sort of openly about immigration while, you know, sort of enforcing the immigration laws very strongly and you sort of pick out select groups, dreamers in the case of Obama, some Venezuelan, some other specific groups and provide protections for them while really ratcheting up.

Deportation of people who are with criminal records. It’s

[00:36:10] Jim Henson: easy to forget how big an issue that was during the Obama administration. Yeah. And I mean, that was one of

[00:36:14] Josh Blank: the, it was a problem on his left flank. It was one of those curious things where it’s like, Oh, look at all these deportations under Obama.

And he sort of either didn’t get credit for it on the right and got hit for it on the left. And the thing is, is, you know, Biden came in with that baggage and sort of distanced himself very clearly, you know, from, through the Obama era policies, while also sort of saying, you know, Hey, I was part of that administration, but not here.

Right, but then upon, you know, basically actually taking the reins of power is really sort of taking a pretty similar approach in some way. I mean, I don’t know. I think it’s a little bit too simple to say that it’s the same approach as the Obama approach just because of the legal, the legal. I mean, the legal landscape surrounding what what is and is not allowed has been changing so dramatically, both Right in sort of the tail end of the Trump policies and the fighting in the courts between that, but I think, you know, if you’re on the left and you have a very open view towards immigration and towards undocumented immigrants towards asylum seekers and so on and so forth, the Biden administration has not been necessarily your friend on this.

And yet he gets no credit for that with anybody else.

[00:37:09] Jim Henson: And, and getting less your friend, you know, I mean, in a way, I mean, look, they’re in a, it’s a pretty crappy political situation to be, you know, having campaigned, you know, in, in 2020 by saying on immigration, you know, the, you know, Trump is evil. Their approach is inhumane.

You know, they’re, you know, I think the paraphrase, there won’t be another foot of wall built if I’m elected president. And now to be saying, yeah, this is a problem. And, you know, we’re, we’re going to keep building the wall. Cause we have to, you know, we, it was appropriated already, right? We can’t, we can’t not, you know, we’re not, yeah, we don’t have the power to stop it.

And so in any way we do kind of need it, you know, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s going to sound mealy mouthed and you know, it really is. the epitome of one of the difficulties that we’ve been, you know, we’re always talking about in here about just the difficulty of this as a policy problem writ large.

It’s insolubility and that how that insolubility is actually more of a problem for Democrats than for Republicans.

[00:38:06] Josh Blank: Well, and in the angle here in Texas, more, you know, not a problem for Republicans at all. Right. And I mean, it’s already a local issue because of just the 1200 mile border, but what’s going to make it even the politics of it even more apparent, especially on the democratic side, is it, you know, Colin Allred and.

Uh, Senator Gutierrez, who, who are both, you know, not going to be, you know, are both running for the Democratic nomination for Senate in 2024, are taking pretty different tacts on, you know, sort of their orientation towards the border. And I think, you know, just as an aside, as people who watch this and everything, this is great and really interesting because I’ve, we’ve been saying for a long time, the Democrats don’t really have an, you know, a clear oppositional standpoint to the Republican party when it comes to immigration.

I think, you know, that’s just important for the health of democracy, right? You know, these things, you know, good opposition parties have policies and Democrats have Seeded this field and now you actually have, you know, two democrats were running for the nomination. We’re probably gonna Take pretty different approaches to immigrate, or I’ll say this, it’s one of the areas in which you will see differences between them on a lot of areas.

You’re not going to see them. They’re just, they’re going to be good, quote unquote, good Democrats. But here’s one area where you actually could see a pretty interesting debate play out over

[00:39:07] Jim Henson: the next, well, the situation, the situation on the ground in the campaign. I mean, you know, this is a, I think it’s a watershed because it’s early, all things being equal, but it is a moment.

Thank you. Thank you. Because I think that, you know, I interviewed Senator Gutierrez for at the Texas Tribune Festival a couple weeks ago, and while, you know, he was clearly seeking to differentiate himself from Congressman Allred and to make the case for why he’s the better candidate, you know, he was Being diplomatic, I think is diplomatic as Senator Gutierrez gets.

I mean, actually I would say extra diplomatic for Senator Gutierrez in that, you know, but I think, you know, if you look at the statements they made and the comparison here, he is, you know, they, they, that campaign has clearly seen an opportunity for differentiation here. And, you know, the, the criticism of all red was a little more hard hitting in a sustained way than we’ve seen to date.

Yeah. And you know, I think the all red campaign, if all things being equal, I can’t imagine they didn’t see this coming and they didn’t anticipate that. So a, to your point, I think this is, you know, this conversation is good for Democrats. I think it’s good for

[00:40:18] Josh Blank: Democrats, both in Texas and nationally. Right.

[00:40:20] Jim Henson: And, and, and certainly in the long run, but it is a, it’s an interesting moment in that campaign. It’s going to be interesting to see how that all plays out. You know, more broadly, I think we can’t leave without talking about the Phelan Patrick escalation and the ongoing battles between Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Speaker of the House Dade Phelan, and the way that, look, a largely unexpected and very disruptive and shattering event, you know, you can go crazy on the adjectives here, and that is, you know, the surprise attack on Israel by Hamas from the Gaza Strip, and the way that that is rippling through American politics right now.

Right down, you know, into settling into Texas

[00:41:01] Josh Blank: politics, right? And the main sort of event that’s kicked off the latest round of acrimony is Nick Fuentes, who is a white supremacist and, and, you know, on the record, anti Semite. I was thinking to myself about the Venn diagrams. We don’t need to talk about.

Yeah.

[00:41:15] Jim Henson: Right. Hold on. That’s a podcast.

[00:41:17] Josh Blank: I mean, I was just talking about the, you know, who are the Jewish white supreme anyway, but that’s okay. We’ll just, we’ll leave it alone. But anyway, you know, he visits with, uh, at the, at the consulting offices of former state representative Jonathan Stickland, who has also led the leader of Defend Texas Liberty PAC.

Defend Texas Liberty PAC was one of the big players in terms of defending Ken Paxton during the trial and also gave Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick in the lead up to the trial, a 3 million donation.

[00:41:43] Jim Henson: Well, to be, you know, just so that I don’t hear from, you know, who, okay. A million dollar, you know, donation and a 2 million loan.

Okay.

[00:41:51] Josh Blank: Sorry. No, it’s saying, no, I appreciate that. I want to be accurate here. That’s right. So as said, 1 million donation, 2 million loan in finding out that this. Nick Fuentes had, had visited with, uh, Representative Stickland at his offices. Speaker Phelan called for Dan Patrick, I’m sure somewhat gleefully, to return the 3 million that they had just donated.

[00:42:11] Jim Henson: Dan Patrick and anyone else who had gotten money from the

[00:42:13] Josh Blank: PAC. Which he, and he, and you know, I don’t know if this is true. I’d have to go look. I mean, basically, you know, Phelan has said no one, no one in the House has received money from this PAC, which I would say is hard to imagine, but at least. No, I, yeah, I don’t think that’s quite right.

But anyway, uh, so he calls for no one in the houses. He’s yeah. Well, yeah, exactly. No one anyway. So anyway, so he goes calls for him to give this money back to which Dan Patrick basically says feeling is taking advantage of what’s going on in Israel and he should resign. Right? Because

[00:42:40] Jim Henson: this is a this is a terrible thing.

And he’s playing politics.

[00:42:44] Josh Blank: Okay,

[00:42:45] Jim Henson: so You know, without commenting on it, you know, the only thing

[00:42:50] Josh Blank: I’m just going to say, I’ll be brief here is, you know, to my mind, you know, like this whole thing, I’m not going to comment on the specifics of this moment, but I’ll just say this, you know, in escalating what was already a pretty serious, you know, conflict between these two, even further, you know what I mean?

Patrick’s been sort of hinting at maybe the house should find your leadership. Now he’s saying he should step down, you know, the one thing I think that this does, it just makes the margin so much finer in terms of any sort of negotiation that’s going to go on during the special session. It just doesn’t make anything easier.

Yeah. And, and, and,

[00:43:17] Jim Henson: you know, yeah. And there is the window. And very quickly, I mean, I can’t remember, you know, honestly, I can’t remember whether it was lieutenant governor or the speaker of the house. One of them commented or told the reporters that, you know, no, this, yes, you know, this is not, this is not, this unpleasantness is happening.

But, you know, that’s not going to, it’s not going to, you know, affect our ability to, you know, to negotiate a bill. I’m glad that I can’t remember exactly who it is, but I’m just going to call bullshit on that because it’s ridiculous. Right. But what this means, you know, in conjunction with the other things to tie these things together before we get out.

And so you’ve got an agenda meant to speak, especially to. Republican primary voters. You’ve got what seems to be the opening salvos in the school voucher debate looking very familiar as the setup of past failures to reach consensus. Yeah, it’s really nothing dramatically different. And then you’ve got, you know, significant Escalation, you know, and in continuing conflict between the leadership of the two chambers that involves directly some of the, you know, the players in primary politics.

And that’s, you know, I mean, as you said, you know, that after the speaker was done being offended by Nick Fuentes, there was a no doubt a certain amount of rubbing of hands together. And, you know, there’s, you know, the footage of, of, you know, I mean, look, you know, the speaker who does not do this a lot, you know, came out and spoke to reporters, I think, in the hallway of the Capitol, I think is where that clip I saw was recorded that was, you know, covered by, you know, extensively in the media.

I saw it in Austin local

[00:44:51] Josh Blank: news. That one line was. I mean, it seemed like a throwaway, but I’m sure it wasn’t in the whole. And it basically says something to the effect of, you know, to the, basically in responding to Patrick kind of coming back and saying, well, he should resign. This is, you know, this is, you know, he’s being political.

You know, his response is, look, I didn’t take 3 million from a group associated with, you know, white supremacists and antisemites. That’s his problem. Right. And that line just sort of

[00:45:12] Jim Henson: just, yeah. Well, it’s a, it’s a very, you know, it’s a good quotable line. Exactly. They,

[00:45:15] Josh Blank: and it was quoted.

[00:45:18] Jim Henson: So, you know, which is a way of saying, you know, on, uh, day two of the special session, that’s where we stand.

Um, so, uh, again, we have, you know, if you are somebody who’s paying attention to the politics of the special session and, you know, what the public opinion landscape is for the policies on the agenda, I’d point you to a lot of recent content that we’ve put up on the blog at texaspolitics. utexas. edu. We’ll continue to, uh, look through, you know, and kind of push out the data that we have on hand that should be helpful for this.

Until then, thanks to Josh for being here and for a good chat. Thanks again to our excellent production team in the dev studio in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. Thank you for listening. Find this and other content again at texaspolitics. utexas. edu and we’ll be back again. reasonably 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.