October 19th, 2023 – The Kaleidoscope of Republican Politics

[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.

[00:00:24] Intro: 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: 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 by Josh Blank, Research Director of the Texas Politics Project. Happy Thursday, Josh. Oh, thank you. Thursday’s

[00:00:50] Josh: a great day. It is.

[00:00:51] Jim: I,

[00:00:52] Josh: yes, the promise of the weekend is coming, right?

[00:00:54] Josh: It’s, you know,

[00:00:55] Jim: it’s basically the weekend. It’s the new Friday. Yeah. Um, that said on that, having, having, you know, entered, started on a jovial note, it has been a grinding week or two in politics in the state, in the nation there, and certainly internationally from. The war in Israel and it’s increasingly strong reverberations in domestic politics in the U.

[00:01:19] Jim: S. to the ongoing cluster, you know, what in the U. S. House, where as we record this, we still do not have a speaker elected and now looks like the prospects for electing a Permanent, at least permanent as they get. Speaker, uh, are, are pretty dim. More on that in a sec. To new developments in the factional conflict ongoing in the Republican coalition in Texas.

[00:01:48] Jim: Politics are chaotic at this moment. A little bit. And they’ve been, you know, you know, the baseline of chaos has been higher for quite some time now. Fair to say. Yeah. Um, but it’s, you know, it’s, it seems like, well, the baseline, quite a moment was,

[00:02:05] Josh: I mean, you know, to your point, I think he’s word reverberations and it’s like the baseline chaos was still there, but, you know, to the extent that again, the things we’re going to be talking about are intersecting with each other.

[00:02:13] Josh: It’s sort of, it is creating a bit of a, you know, sort of a reverberation more broadly. You know, it’s going up on the Richter scale, right? Yeah. I mean, I,

[00:02:21] Jim: I think we’ll, we’re, you know, we’re going to try to find some, some common, some common resonance in all these tremors. There we go. Um, Yeah. Yeah. You know, and we’ll try to do that without imposing too much of a frame on it, and we’ll see how that works out.

[00:02:33] Jim: But, so let’s just start with a major domestic news story in the country, just briefly, you know, the struggle, and that’s the, the struggle of the house, but, you know, really the house. The House Republican Caucus in the Congress to select a new speaker. And as we record this on Thursday morning, as I said, U.

[00:02:55] Jim: S. House still without a permanent speaker after Kevin McCarthy was ousted two weeks ago, um, Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan lost two votes in about the last 36 hours, I guess, uh, maybe 48 hours, uh, in his Um, you know, how do I want to characterize this in the longer term, somewhat surprising, or maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by it, but, and it’s maybe the theme here, but, but he’s lost, you know, Jim Jordan was, was, you know, I think if you had gone back even a year and said, you know, you know, he’s going to be a leading candidate for the speaker of the house in a year.

[00:03:33] Jim: Jim Jordan. Yeah, there’s a what? Like, yeah, you know, I, I don’t think a lot of people would have called that other than maybe Jim Jordan. Um, but

[00:03:42] Josh: I don’t,

[00:03:42] Jim: I don’t even know if Jim Jordan would have said that, you know, he’s now lost, you know, two votes. He lost his first vote by 20 votes. Uh, Uh, was 22 shorts in a second try yesterday Wednesday.

[00:03:55] Jim: So he was losing support as it went on and, and news right before we came on to record the podcast is that he will not pursue another vote and that, you know, he will sort of join what has been the kind of fallback solution that has got been discussed increasingly in the last few days. And that would be to, for the house to pass some kind of resolution that would lead.

[00:04:18] Jim: The current, temporary, very limited person occupying the chair is presiding officer Patrick McHenry, who was a McCarthy ally, um, in the, you know, it would leave McCarthy in the chair as, as a speaker pro tem. McHenry. Yeah, McHenry. Yeah, with, you know, some allowance for, you know, limited powers for a finite amount of time.

[00:04:42] Jim: At least that was the deal that was being discussed. You know, as of, you know, the very early morning newsletters. Um, all of this obviously very much to be determined. And, you know, this has been such a fluid situation. I mean, I think I had two different newsletters this morning. Where one of the subject lines was momentum builds for McHenry interim speakership.

[00:05:09] Jim: And another subject line was, you know, why the bottom may be falling out of the McHenry speaking ship. So, you know,

[00:05:17] Josh: we’ll see. I mean, momentum is really being used very loosely there.

[00:05:19] Jim: Very loosely, you know. Yes. So, well, not surprisingly, given the size of the delegation to, you know, Texas has been playing a role in all this, um, some Texas conservatives have been very vocal backers of Jordan and had been involved in, in displacing, uh, Speaker McCarthy.

[00:05:46] Jim: You know, uh, probably more significantly in this moment, three members of the appropriation committee from Texas, um, had bordered on, it seems to me, being sort of never Jordan votes, if you will, Jake Elsey, Tony Gonzalez, and most significantly Kay Granger. And, and Kay Granger, um, You know, chairs, the appropriations committee known for the focus on foreign policy and national defense.

[00:06:12] Jim: And I think it’s, it’s worth noting her history of being engaged in foreign policy and national defense issues, because one of the big bargaining points within the caucuses, this division over aid to Ukraine, um, and now aid to Israel and an effort. put together some kind of an omnibus bill, and this is being promoted by the White House, which both adds to its momentum and causes, you know, problems, in which you would have some kind of a combination bill that would include aid to Israel, aid to Ukraine, um, some funding, uh, for Taiwan and funding for the border.

[00:06:52] Jim: Yeah. And, you know, asterisk on the border, because we’re going to come back to that very, very soon, if not momentarily. You know, stepping back and looking at the issues in the GOP caucus in the U. S. House, it really raises a lot of similar issues to the kinds of things that we’ve been parsing in Texas for, you know, months, if not years, but certainly, certainly in during the last session and, you know, when things seem to have come to a head and, and during the Paxton trial, et

[00:07:25] Josh: cetera.

[00:07:26] Josh: Well, really, I mean, it really points out, I mean, the thing that sort of strikes me first and foremost, is it really. Sort of belies any sort of argument that people make about simple factional conflicts, you know, this idea that, you know, within the Republican coalition, you’ve got, you know, these guys over here, I’m pointing to my far right, you know, and you’ve got these guys over here, I’m pointing a little bit to my left of where I was just pointing and, and they have this clear division across issues and they’re fighting for Power or policy or whatever, but the thing about this fight that’s just been so interesting is ongoing fight in some ways is that it’s so It’s so hard to pin down Sort of the various kind of factional and coalitional elements in any moment in time It kind of keeps moving to panel like what are we talking about?

[00:08:04] Josh: ongoing spending bills. Are we talking about, uh, you know, again, some of this foreign aid discussion around these sort of conflicts to even, you know, just how the house is organized and what, you know, sort of who has power, where, I mean, to your point about, I mean, talking about Jim Jordan, it’s sort of, you know, like a year ago, would we have thought Jim Jordan would be speaking, you know, over a year ago, we didn’t think he would be a chair either of a committee, but that kind of was an extraction.

[00:08:25] Josh: And I think that’s something that people are, I don’t know if they’re forgetting or just sort of not kind of acknowledging is the fact that it wasn’t as though, you know, the Republican caucus in the house, Rit large was said, this is a guy who we want to put in a leadership position. And this was a concession.

[00:08:39] Jim: Yes. I mean, McCarthy’s ascension to the speakership, not easy. Right.

[00:08:43] Josh: And so the fact is, is that, you know, I mean, to the extent that, you know, Jim Jordan sort of emerged as someone that the people that the Republicans at the very least, again, just to go back against what I was just saying on the far right, to simplify support the idea that, you know, he in and of himself was going to be able to generate, you know, much momentum with everybody else seemed like it was already going to be a huge.

[00:09:03] Josh: Huge lift and then, you know, even going ahead, you know, into the current space, you know, the idea that McHenry again, McCarthy ally was hand chosen by McCarthy would essentially be handed the roles and responsibilities of the speaker, even in a limited sense, basically because everybody throws up their hands.

[00:09:22] Josh: I think that’s a possible outcome, but I don’t think it’s obvious that that’s where we’re going at this point. It’s just seems to me we’re in another situation where, you know, I think a lot of again. Yeah. Yeah. It’s not even that enough of the caucus is going to need to decide that not having a speaker is, is worse, right?

[00:09:39] Josh: Than having a speaker they don’t like. It’s that they need to get.

[00:09:46] Jim: Um, I and I think what’s going on in this thing, you know, this goes to another thing that we’ve talked about that I think we’ll touch on here, you know, eventually, but, you know, we can sort of introduce it here is that

[00:09:57] Jim: Democrats are likely to play a big role in this either positively or negatively. Yeah. This solution, I think, has at least some support in the Democratic caucus right now. Probably not universal support. Right. It’s unclear where Minority Leader Jeffries is, uh, uh, Jeffries is on this. Um, but there’s been a lot of reporting that, you know, the The kind of, you know, right end, if you will, of the Democratic Party that this kind of, you know, people like the people that are in the Problem Solvers Caucus, the Blue Dogs, uh, are relatively amenable to this solution.

[00:10:44] Jim: And, you know, that of course plays, you know, is that good or bad, you know, I mean, yeah, we just don’t know, right? And it just depends on how, you know, how this is, we don’t know how that’s going to shake out. So all of that is kind of in play. And I think that. You know, one of the things that, you know, you know, was I’ve been, you know, giving talks and talking to reporters, etc.

[00:11:09] Jim: I mean, I, you know, and I, it’s not, it’s not the greatest figure of speech. I think I even may even use it last week on here, you know, and that is this notion that the cleavages are kind of kaleidoscopic in the Republican Party that, you know. For those of you that, you know, remember kaleidoscopes, um, you know, you turn the can and it looks one way and okay, that’s where all the lines are and that’s what the geometry looks like.

[00:11:31] Jim: Then you turn it again and the lines and the colors and, you know, everything kind of changes a little bit. And I think the, you know, the effort to understand the Republican Party right now, let alone to actually be a member in a caucus member, whether it’s in the U. S. House or, or the Texas house and kind of.

[00:11:54] Jim: navigate all that, you know, you make a deal on something and then you turn the can and all of a sudden the lines are different. That’s great.

[00:12:01] Josh: So if you’re listening to this and you don’t know what a kaleidoscope is, you should look that up on Wikipedia. Also, what I was thinking about being all social science y, and I think I said this before, another thing to look up on Wikipedia, arrows and possibility theorem, because there’s a simpler thing here about the idea of trying to find a majority preference when there are multiple choices and the difficulty of doing that.

[00:12:19] Josh: And exactly. I mean, basically, depending on what cleavage issue priority gets highlighted in a given moment, it shuffles up the coalitions in ways that just are making this kind of, you know, the impossible thing that we’re watching,

[00:12:31] Jim: right? And so I think, you know, and, and I think one of the directions we want to go with this is also to say, you know, you know, the possibilities are not unlimited.

[00:12:42] Jim: There are still parameters here, if you will. And, and, you know, things like agenda management, as you say, you know, with a sort of arrow, you know, thinking about arrow. It shifts, you know, it shifts according to, you know, what the three or four items are on the agenda and what the object of the politics are, if you will.

[00:12:59] Josh: I mean, you know, you have to, I mean, we’re going to get to this, but I mean, you do, you kind of thinking of people say, well, you know, but how much has changed? Like, you know, the, the conflict in Israel probably shakes this up a bit in a, in a material way, at least in the moment. Right. It puts more pressure.

[00:13:12] Josh: on the Republican caucus to come to some kind of solution. I mean, the idea of giving McHenry sort of ongoing temporary powers, which sounded, you know, like a non starter at the, at the outset of all this, when it wasn’t clear there was going to be something. Now it’s something more palatable. And part of that is probably not just not being able to select someone, but also the fact that, you know, the House is looking, you know, not looking, is ineffective.

[00:13:33] Josh: In a moment of sort of, you know, well, they’re immobilized right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Completely unable to be effective is what I mean by that, you know, in a, in a moment of sort of, you know, notable international conflict with a major U S ally.

[00:13:44] Jim: And, you know, in the, in the way of politics and, you know, context, you know, all of a sudden, I mean, I think you would have to conclude, I think, as I, as I think about it in real time, that the situation in Israel.

[00:14:03] Jim: Also, probably has created more space to overcome the impasse on Ukraine. Right. So, so let’s, you know, let’s, let’s, let’s zero in on this a little bit more. So let’s come back closer to home and go to Texas and even though, as we said, um, um, this also speaks to what is going on nationally, but closer to home, you know, we talked last week about the prominence of immigration and border security measures in Governor Abbott’s special session call.

[00:14:33] Jim: And, you know, that is playing out, uh, legislation, bills have already been passed in the Senate. Uh, in the House, there’s a hearing in state affairs, probably starting as we’re recording this, I think, on a border security bill, um, and this is HB 4, which has, you know, prohibitions on illegal entry into the country and, and, you know, empowering state officials to enforce and, uh, you know, to arrest and enforce.

[00:15:01] Jim: You know, immigration laws that will be passed apparently at the state level. Right, state immigration laws. And we won’t, we’re not going to, yeah, we’re not going to dig into that too deeply right now. And then on Monday, the point being that is in play, it was in the call, that’s HB4. And then on Monday, there’ll be hearings in the Appropriations Committee on, uh, a significant appropriation for, you know, what the, what the bill calls, border barrier infrastructure, but I think we’re talking, you know, obviously more walls and buoys here and, and fences, walls, buoys.

[00:15:34] Jim: And, um, you know, I, I, the number I’ve seen bandied around here is more than a billion dollars. Yeah. Well, it’s a big, border. So. You know, this speaks to something that we’ve said, you know, a zillion times in here about, you know, the really remarkable willingness part of policymakers and appropriators and the tolerance, if not demand for this among Republican voters for really significant increases in border security spending.

[00:16:08] Jim: Yeah. And, you know, we’re going to have a little bit more on that later. So, you know, as we talk about, you know, where the agreements are, where the cleavages are, underlines yet again, as we said last week, the degree to which border security and immigration are the great unifiers among Republicans. And it, and, and there’s just a, just a huge amount of unseemingly unstoppable momentum for this.

[00:16:36] Jim: You know, you

[00:16:36] Josh: shared, you shared an interesting national poll with me earlier this week from, I don’t remember what the group was, was. Which group it was, and I apologize about that, but it was interesting in that it was testing a lot of, sort of, different messages around, sort of, democratic norms, and what I thought

[00:16:49] Jim: was interesting…

[00:16:49] Jim: It was hot, just to give credit where credit was, hotline UVA.

[00:16:53] Josh: Yeah, and again, you know, I’m not endorsing that everything in this was great, or whatever. It was an interesting poll. It was an interesting poll, though, and one of the things that was interesting about it was, you know, it tested a lot of, sort of, suppositions about democratic norms, and sort of, views about the use of violence, and other kinds of things, and sort of, means justifying ends, and…

[00:17:09] Josh: And as someone who looks at a lot of polling data, you know, I was sort of struck by, if anything, the, how small the partisan differences were. I’m not saying there weren’t partisan differences on the issue, and they went in both directions. It kind of depended on the question and how it was set up, but it didn’t strike me that, you know, either one party or the other was necessarily overwhelmingly anti democratic, you know, in terms of the views they were expressing support for.

[00:17:30] Josh: And again, it’s a little bit tricky here, and I’m just going to set that aside. Yeah, but where you did see a huge amount of different again, and again, so. We talk about this right now. We’re in this moment where there’s this whole, you know, discussion about, you know, who’s committed to democracy and the importance of commitment to the democracy, and it’s especially coming from, from a lot of people on the left saying that the right’s not committed to democracy, but within the electorate, it was actually relatively similar where there was a big difference that was the border.

[00:17:52] Josh: And immigration. And there you saw, again, these sorts of patterns emerging again. And it is, again, it’s interesting that, you know, as you say, you know, immigration on the border, you know, really unifies Republicans. But it also is one of the things that really sets Republicans off from Democrats. I mean, it makes them, there’s not a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of attitudes, whether we’re talking about importance, whether we’re talking about policy preferences.

[00:18:13] Josh: And so it is just this, this thing that’s floating out there that, you know, I think on the one hand, people, you know, you can say, Why are we so focused on this? Or why should Texas be so focused on this? But you can’t say they shouldn’t be focused on it because their voters aren’t focused on it because they are.

[00:18:27] Josh: Laser focused on

[00:18:28] Jim: this. Right. And and that’s Crystal Ball U V A Center for Politics. Yeah. Um, so yes. Um, and, and that’s obviously just making manifest in Texas like, like crazy right now.

[00:18:42] Josh: But it, and it’s also, and just to take it, tie it back to the previous discussion, it’s also one of the other kaleidoscopic cleavages.

[00:18:48] Josh: that is, you know, giving Republicans a certain amount of difficulty at the federal level, which is kind of crazy in some sense, because we’re saying It does unify the voters, but, but part of the issue here has been in some, to some extent, disagreement among Republicans in the Congress, even about how to, how to best manifest policy related to the border.

[00:19:07] Josh: And there’s been a lot of fights, you know, Representative Chip Roy has been at odds with even a lot of members within his caucus about how best to sort of deal with the border at at the federal level. Yeah. So, I mean, this is just, this is a ongoing through line and

[00:19:21] Jim: everything. Yeah. And, and, you know, it’s fair to also say that, you know, it’s, it’s been, you know, actually even a bigger divisive problem for, for Democrats.

[00:19:29] Jim: Yeah. For sure. Especially at the national level, but even in the state. Yeah. We talked about that a little

[00:19:33] Josh: bit last, I think we talked about that last week with Biden. Yeah.

[00:19:36] Jim: Yeah. So, um. So, while that, you know, so we are seeing a degree of convergence and consensus in Texas on the border, there have been other things going on that have been not, not so productive of kumbaya moments, shall we say.

[00:19:54] Jim: So, and I think this had just broken last week, maybe when we recorded, but You know, I mean, we talked about it, we talked about it a little bit, but we, yeah. Uh, yeah, I think it had just kind of happened, right? Yeah. Or the story had just broken. A major sideshow, uh, has developed over the past week, couple of weeks now, I guess, uh, the defend, liberty, uh, the Defend Texas Liberty Pac has been in the news since the Texas Tribune reported that.

[00:20:21] Jim: Uh, noted white supremacist and anti semi Nick Fuentes, uh, was seen having a long meeting at the offices of the consulting firm Pale Horse Strategies, owned by former host, uh, House member Jonathan Stickland, who was, you know, at the meeting, presumably, uh, I think it’s been confirmed, who is also the president of the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, funded by, you know, West Texas Large Donors, the Wilkes And, and Tim Dunn.

[00:20:54] Jim: Um. Now, on Tuesday of this week, after several days of criticism of the meeting, back and forth between certainly, you know, especially Speaker Phelan and, and Lieutenant Governor Patrick, but also, you know, uh, you know, a lot of social media conflict and statements and et cetera, um, and that back and forth included a call by Speaker Dade Phelan almost immediately for anyone who got money from the PAC to donate it to charity.

[00:21:24] Jim: Now, what I, one of the things that was a little. Yeah. Touch on there. It’s like, don’t give them back the money. No. We don’t want them to have the money to spend still. Give it to charity. Right. You know, a nice, a nice move, I thought, uh, tactically speaking. So we had that going on one side, on the other side, you know, uh, a certain amount of damage control by the Lieutenant Governor and by, by allies of, of the Defend Liberty PAC.

[00:21:48] Jim: You know, a lot of, you know, a literal, you know, one statement in particular, and I think we need to talk about this in here, you know, the. The mistakes were made, quote unquote, statements that actually Lieutenant Governor Patrick delivered on behalf of, I believe, Tim Dunn. Yeah,

[00:22:03] Josh: Tim Dunn, he spoke to us.

[00:22:06] Jim: So in the wake of all this, earlier this week, um, Jonathan Stickland’s name disappeared from the website without explanation, at least thus far that I’ve seen, uh, that has been based on the reporting.

[00:22:20] Jim: And he was replaced, uh, as the head of the, of the, of the PAC. By consultant, uh, Luke Macias, well known and as another, you know, somebody who is very active in those same circles and, and Macias had already been employed by the, by the Defend Liberty PAC. Macias is known for

[00:22:38] Josh: working with far right candidates.

[00:22:42] Josh: That’s his brand in the space, you know, so it’s not… Right.

[00:22:45] Jim: Exactly. Not a change of direction. Maybe some of you listen, well anyway, yes. Um, you know, so it’s also notable that in, you know, the immediate aftermath of the story coming out, the, you know, the photo of Fuentes walking into the, Walking in and out of, I think, the, the, the Stickland’s group’s headquarters.

[00:23:09] Jim: And Ophelian’s criticism of Patrick taking three million dollars from the group, notably, almost, you know, right before the beginning of the Paxton trial. Um, Paxton’s response was to say that Phelan was politicizing the Israel situation.

[00:23:25] Josh: Yeah, which is really, I mean, one, you know, again, we’re sort of working our way in here, but really pretty notable.

[00:23:31] Josh: I mean, on the one hand, Oh, we did foreshadow this. Yeah, we did foreshadow this. So, you know, on the first, you know, on the first, you sort of hear that and you think to yourself, okay, you know, that’s, That’s a pretty political response, you know, I mean, it’s sort of interesting and it’s sort of a, it’s a way to kind of, I think on a, on first blush, you’d say that’s a, that’s a good way to take the current moment and sort of tar feeling for being insensitive in some kind of way or, or, you know, making, making, you know, again, making a political benefit to himself out of, again, expedient, expedient, if you will, but it’s also interesting because if you think about it, you know, that that statement to say, well, you know, he’s only doing this because of the Israel situation, it’s sort of automatically raises this counterfactual, which is, you know, without the Israel Hamas situation, without what happened there, then does that mean the contributions from the Pact to Patrick and others wouldn’t have been an issue at all?

[00:24:20] Josh: And it’s like, well, I don’t know. I mean, that sort of, sort of raises that the idea is like, we’re not, we’re only talking about this because of the situation in Israel. And it’s like, so you’re saying we wouldn’t have been talking about, again, a very, very prominent white supremacist.

[00:24:34] Jim: Well, because it kind of seems to me that where that naturally leads, and we’ve talked about this and others have too, but do you really want to follow that kind of defense in that counterfactual to its logical conclusion, which is kind of like, look, Nick Fuentes had dinner with Donald Trump and

[00:24:52] Josh: yeah, no, well,

[00:24:53] Jim: well, this is,

[00:24:53] Josh: you know, what’s the big deal?

[00:24:55] Josh: Well, and that’s the interesting, I mean, I think that’s the other interesting piece of this, which is that, you know, you have. I mean, I’m not saying, you know, I mean, I could say this, I mean, I’m saying who’s right or wrong here, but, you know, you can have Dade Phelan come out and say, you know, point out the problems of this meeting, you can have Patrick say, well, this is just political, and if you were to say who’s right or who’s wrong, and I’m not saying any sort of moral sense, I’m just saying in a political sense, I think, you know, it’s kind of, you Easy to forget that Nick Fuentes had dinner in broad daylight with Donald Trump at his club with another noted anti Semite, Kanye West.

[00:25:26] Josh: Like, I mean, you know, this was, this was out there, so it’s not as though, you know, as it happened with no impact on Trump besides maybe a negative news cycle about it. Right. But to the extent that, you know, if you’re sitting there as a Republican elected official looking around saying, boy, you know, is, is meeting with, with Nick, Nick Fuentes, is that, is that going to kill your political career?

[00:25:46] Josh: You know, I, it doesn’t seem like it, you know, at least, you know, at least within the, within the confines of Republican party

[00:25:55] Jim: politics. Right. And, and, and, you know, I, as you know, if you drill down deeper, you know, into the nitty gritty of, you know, what happens now, I mean, remember there is this, you know, The consulting groups kind of meet in the pack.

[00:26:13] Jim: Right. If you will. As we mentioned, you know, Stickland has his own consulting firm. Mm-hmm. , he served as both the owner, president of that firm and the head of the Of, of the pack. Yeah. You know, and, and people are on that. I mean, there have been follow up statements, including one, I believe by the speaker that, you know, as you know, to read some of that partially in response to this, the speaker’s press person said, you know, removing Jonathan Stickland as president of defend Texas liberty is frankly a hollow gesture as long as pale horse strategies that Stickland’s firm is getting paid handsomely to oversee every shadow organization, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:26:55] Jim: Um, You know, and then there is a, you know, a pretty, uh, and this is just to give a, a flavor of how, you know, this is not, we’re not talking about the unity of border security here, you know, speaking of the group, they should wholly terminate Stickland’s employment and completely clean house. Or risk solidifying their legacies as the billionaires who bankrolled a sexual predator.

[00:27:19] Jim: Mm hmm. Identify that in a minute. Yep. And invited Hitler followers into the party with full pockets and open arms. Now, aside from the artful language and… Yeah. The enjoyment, whoever wrote that, you know… Clearly got. Clearly got out of writing it. You know, it does raise this issue that we’ve been talking about a lot, which is, you know, the relationship between…

[00:27:44] Jim: What is clearly being portrayed here is a fringe element that should not be welcome in the Republican Party and the obvious presence of these groups in the longer term for the last few years in the party and in the politics of the party. Now, one might say, you know, they’re an outside influence or they’re, you know, and to some degree, look, some of these guys, they are outs.

[00:28:08] Jim: Yeah. If we think about, you know, if we, if we turn the can on the kaleidoscope to ins versus outs. A lot of these people, you know, they are out. I mean, Jonathan Stickland is a former member, you know, um, for example. But, you know, these groups have been players inside the party. And, you know, one of the things that the Texas Tribune and others did almost immediately was to go look at the list of candidates that have been supported by the Defend Liberty PAC and, and.

[00:28:38] Jim: You know, if you look at the list, you know, I, the list was three, you know, there were three screens long in the Tribune article, we don’t want to go through all of it, but if you look at the, you know, the prominent recipients, you know, the three candidates that have gotten money, uh, you know, that have gotten funds of a million dollars or more to use that convenient cutoff would be from the most at about 3.

[00:29:01] Jim: 6 million Don Huffines, right? who challenged, uh, uh, Governor Abbott in the last gubernatorial primary, but is also a former state senator. Dan Patrick, 3. 1 million, 3 million, 3 million of that famously coming right before the Paxton trial. And if we want to be technical, which I’m sure the Lieutenant Governor would appreciate, $1 million of that was a contribution, and 2 million of that was a loan.

[00:29:28] Jim: Just a loan. Uh, and then Ken Paxton, incumbent attorney General, $1.25 million. And then you go down, you know, in the, in the six figure range, and you see Shelly Luther.

[00:29:44] Jim: Um, you know, twice an unsuccessful candidate who made her name during the COVID lockdowns. Brian Slayton, who I believe we can safely say is the sexual predator referred to in the, in the speaker’s statement. I believe so. Former, I think it’s plausible. Former member. Um. You know, skip down a couple of slots, Tony Tinderholt, who is challenging the speaker.

[00:30:10] Jim: And then, you know, lower the 50, 000 range, Ag Commissioner Sid Miller and Texas State Senator Bob Hall. Now, one might fairly argue that these are, but I think not, fairly, but not persuasively, let me put it that way. But, you know, these are not all, you know, these are, these are candidates that are on the very conservative end of the Republican, of the, of the Republican Party of Texas.

[00:30:40] Jim: Yeah, I think that’s fair. On the other hand, it includes three of the elected statewide officials.

[00:30:49] Josh: Yeah, I mean, you know, in rea Well, you know, it’s interesting. I mean, you know, you reading the, the, the statement from, from Phelan, you know, it’s interesting, you know, or Phelan’s, I’m sorry, Director of Communications, sorry, uh, you know, it is interesting because, I mean, one of the things I hadn’t really thought about in all this and looking at that statement, this idea that, you know, I mean, this, this specific language, you know, uh, so long as pale horse strategy is paid handsomely to oversee every shadow organization and those shadow organ, what he’s talking about there is shadow organizations that have supported Challengers from the far right to Republican incumbents in the Texas House pretty much repeatedly for the last decade plus.

[00:31:24] Josh: It wasn’t always Defend Texas Liberty PAC, it’s been Empower Texans, there’s been other groups that have been funded by the same backers. By any other name. By any other name, and the goal has been essentially to knock out. You know, Republican elected officials from the Texas House. And so, I mean, again, on the one hand, again, this is why things are not always one thing or the other thing.

[00:31:41] Josh: They can be multiple things at once, right? And so just as much as Phelan is, you know, I think justifiably saying, hey, look, we shouldn’t, you know, we shouldn’t be meeting with white supremacist anti Semites and inviting them with open arms. He’s also doing something else here, which is saying. You know, this group should really basically be eviscerated, you know, wiped from the earth because they’re so bad.

[00:31:59] Josh: But also that would make my life a lot easier. Yes,

[00:32:02] Jim: you know, in the world of, you know, intro party politics in the world of intro party politics. And, you know, I think. You know, I, I think this is a good moment to step back and think about the, the longer trajectory again of the development and, and the increased, I wanted, I was going to say rootedness, but then I, I want to say two things, I want to say both a subterranean kind of rootedness, but also a much more public role of what we would have thought of 15, 20 years ago as legitimate, you know, accurately as fringe elements.

[00:32:42] Jim: Right. Okay. But one of the things we said about the tea party over time going back, you know, which is where, you know, Jonathan Sticklin came from and, you know, others, um, in running in these circles. is that, you know, we had always found to, you know, I, I think, you know, as we wrote about the Tea Party and some of the, you know, when we collected data on all that back in that period, you know, a couple of things came out of that, right?

[00:33:12] Jim: One is that in terms of coalitional politics, you know, what the Tea Party achieved was ultimately a seat at the table and a voice in the party. And This is in part the fallout of that to my mind. Yeah. And

[00:33:27] Josh: I mean just, and we’re not, well, I’ll say Jim Jordan too, anyway, just right. But yeah, and

[00:33:31] Jim: then the other thing we concluded about that was that while, you know, and we had some, you know, imperfect measures of this, I think, but still approximately good measures.

[00:33:41] Jim: Yeah. The other thing we found was that while there were a lot of Republicans that didn’t really think of themselves as. Tea

[00:33:56] Jim: partiers per se. there was also a lot of passive acceptance and support of the role That of the tea parties sort of force and influence on the party. That’s right You know We got a lot of people saying either when we asked do you think the tea party is too much too much? About the right amount, you know I, I think there was about plurality responses would say, and we’d have to go back and look at this data, which is now pretty old, but as I recall, there were a lot of plurality response saying about the right.

[00:34:27] Jim: Yeah, I think the

[00:34:27] Josh: plurality, right? And if you add right, plus not enough, you got to a majority. I mean, it was a minority. I mean, the more that’s important for this. It’s really a minority of Republicans, even though most of them did not identify with the Tea Party. But among those Republicans who didn’t identify with the Tea Party, if you asked, if you just looked at their responses to that question, most would say about the right amount and very few would

[00:34:45] Jim: say too little.

[00:34:46] Jim: Right. And all of that is to your point of saying that, you know, when You know, the opponents within the party of these kind of elements, these coal, these, you know, these, you know, let’s put it this way. These disliked coalition partners is what I’m going to call them. Maybe intensely disliked. Um, you know, when you see them saying, well, you know, we’re just, you know, I’m shocked.

[00:35:11] Jim: Yeah. Let’s just use that old saw. I’m shocked. Shocked. to see these kinds of politics going on, I think we have to take that with a grain of salt. And, and, you know, to that point, you know, the context matters. Let’s tie some of these things together. I mean, you know, I mean, you raised Jim Jordan again, and that’s a perfect transition here.

[00:35:31] Jim: I mean, you know, one of the things we have to look at is, you know, The incentives to tolerate, embrace, or reject these, you know, elements that, you know, then get, you know, get classified depending on the context as either coalition partners or fringe elements, you know, has a lot to do with the context.

[00:35:54] Jim: Right. Sometimes it’s the context of the issues, but something that we’ve been thinking about a lot is it’s, you know, it’s about, it’s about the degree, you know, one factor here that to flag is that it’s the degree of competitiveness in the political

[00:36:05] Josh: system. Yeah, that’s right. I mean, if you think about it, we’ve had, you know, really close elections at the national level, you know, cycle after cycle, which has led to really tightly divided Congresses, which is sort of, you know, creating the problems we’re seeing right now and frequent majority flipping.

[00:36:18] Josh: Right. We’re also seeing, you know, the same. Trends in Texas, we’re seeing, you know, gradual but clearly increasingly competitive as Texas elections. And as we’ve talked about repeatedly, you know, the fact that partisan primaries, mostly on the right, as the focus of much or most of the competition, where really, you know, large funded groups can really, you know, prop a candidate up.

[00:36:35] Josh: Doesn’t mean they’re going to win, and that’s a different step question, but can certainly create problems for incumbents. And the point is, is when you say take a step back and look at all that competitiveness, the issue here is that neither party can really disavow much of anybody.

[00:36:48] Jim: Right. Especially, you know, when it, yeah, at the national level, when it’s that competitive.

[00:36:51] Jim: At the

[00:36:51] Josh: national level, especially.

[00:36:53] Jim: And so, you know, I mean, I, and so I think, you know, and so at the state level, to follow that logic, I mean, I think on one hand we are seeing, you know, and I don’t want to oversimplify this, but you know, one could argue that one of the things that we’re seeing here is that as the state becomes more competitive amidst more nationalized politics, I’m kind of making this up on the fly a little bit.

[00:37:16] Jim: Good. Um,

[00:37:20] Jim: you know, all things being equal. What you see is that the fringes become more empowered because they become more important to maintaining the majority coalition. Yeah,

[00:37:31] Josh: you know, let me, so what we think, we talk about, and this is great, I love this, I love that you said that. Because, you know, we talk about a lot in, you know, in political science, whatever, when you think about, Legislative bodies can be the Congress can be Texas.

[00:37:42] Josh: Talk a lot about the pivot. You talk about, you know, essentially, who are who are the voters at the edge of the coalition that you need to bring along in order to get to a majority of votes? Now, that can be more or less consequential. If you’ve got a 30 vote majority, it doesn’t really matter. You’ve got a lot of people you can get that that last vote from.

[00:37:57] Josh: We think that the last one gets you over the majority support. If you have two votes or four. Well, you know, traditionally what you think of, if you, if you imagine the parties being aligned along a left, right axis, the thought was, is that the pivot comes somewhere from the middle, right? But now two things that one, the pivot can come from anywhere, right?

[00:38:15] Josh: Because that last vote could be anybody. It could be, they could be the left most member of the Republican coalition. It could be the right most member. It could be someone from the middle unclear. And it depends on what issue you’re talking about, but also what you’re seeing more increasingly is, is especially members on the right.

[00:38:28] Josh: I mean, you know, and this is true in Texas, true nationally again. Originally elected during a tea party wave that was self-described as being insurgent. Right, right. And, and willing to, you know, challenge institutional norms to get to their ends. And so now what you’re seeing is the pivot sort of all the way on the right.

[00:38:43] Josh: What’s interesting is, again, I think it makes interpretation difficult because someone like, you know, Jim Jordan is a great example, who came in as an insurgent. As a firebrand as, and it sort of slowly kind of, you know, cl I don’t became an important committee Chairman cleaned up his image, you know, he said, not because everyone thought this guy is a leader, but because that was the.

[00:39:00] Josh: What was extracted in order to get their support, but ultimately, you know, what we’re kind of finding is some of the limits of this notion of like how, you know, again, to where and how I don’t want to oversimplify this either, because it depends on what you’re talking about, where and how the rest of the party would say right amount of power.

[00:39:17] Josh: Yeah. Too much power. Because I think right now, if you were to ask, especially members in the process, does this group have too much, too little, or the right amount of power, they’d say, probably too much. Yeah. The

[00:39:24] Jim: threshold for wielding veto power over decision making and leadership choices gets lower.

[00:39:31] Jim: Right. Right. And so, you know, I mean, if you oversimplify it in that way, you know, in the way that we’re talking about, you know, the increased friction and the increased empowerment of the, you know, this right word, you know, the right word end of the coalition in Texas. Becomes a little more understandable right now, you know, as does the ability to invite them in and give them a seat at the table, but, you know, more or less keep them in check.

[00:40:01] Jim: Well, and it’s

[00:40:01] Josh: important here again, because, because it’s so competitive, this is where these things come together because it’s so competitive. Again, you can’t, you know, you, you know, you know, this date feeling can say, Hey, you know, we shouldn’t associate with these people. We shouldn’t, you know, have anything to do with them.

[00:40:15] Josh: But when they’re required to be, you know, to create a majority coalition, whether in the voting electorate or actually in the legislature, you can’t really do that.

[00:40:25] Jim: Yeah. You have to find ways to counterbalance that. Well,

[00:40:27] Josh: right. Well, and that, and that raises this question of what does it even mean to be on the fringe?

[00:40:32] Josh: Right because I think that’s right because because this is this whole thing where you can say like well These are fringe elements, you know They’re not really part of the party like we can set it like we can easily set aside Donald Trump meeting with the same person We can easily set aside, you know, the Charlottesville.

[00:40:45] Josh: They’re good, you know good people on both sides Which is where Nick Fuentes came from and gained prominence, you know, you can even set aside You know sort of this idea of you know It’s or Trump during the last election cycle speaking to white supremacist groups and telling them to you know, stand down but stay ready Yeah.

[00:41:00] Josh: And that kind of thing. And you do have to start asking yourself, is this… Is this the fringe element of the party? I mean, is that, is that

[00:41:06] Jim: right? Yeah. And look, you know, I mean, I, I think we’re, you know, we’ve talked about the data that we have in here. I mean, you know, having presented a simplified version of this, when you start looking at what the, the attitudinal undercurrents of the voting base and the ideological undercurrents that, or the ideological elements, if you want to call it, and the rhetoric that leaders use to appeal to their base.

[00:41:35] Jim: Invasions and such. Right. I mean, you know, our data, you know, where we ask people, you know, who do you think is the most discriminated group, you know, in the U. S.? What, what groups do you think experience the most discrimination right now? And half of Republicans say either whites or Christians. Right. And the shares of, of respondents…

[00:41:56] Jim: that say that, that, that say that those groups receive them are, are experienced the most discrimination increases when you look at essentially Republican primary voters, the most intense Republicans, the most extreme conservatives, you know, this, you know, this idea that there is a mainstream. And then there’s this fringe that’s kind of distasteful and outside of the Republican mainstream.

[00:42:21] Jim: Right. Is a little harder to sustain.

[00:42:24] Josh: Yeah. I mean, there’s, you know, I mean, the, the, the data that you’re, you’re citing is, it’s not even that old. I mean, the most, yeah, we have. No, it’s not old at all. It’s from August. I forgot we did this recently. Yeah. Cause it was also, I forgot we did it so recently. Well, it was, I mean, because it’s actually a pretty consistent finding, actually.

[00:42:36] Josh: Well, we’ve

[00:42:36] Jim: replicated, this is about the fourth time we’ve replicated this, I believe. This is,

[00:42:39] Josh: this is a consistent set of attitudes. And what was also found in that poll was when, you know, you asked questions about whether newcomers in rich Texas, you know, you had. I think, you know, north of 60 percent of Republicans saying, no, they don’t.

[00:42:49] Josh: You also had a majority of Republican voters. And again, it’ll get even larger when you start to look at, we think of as Republican primary voters saying that Texas increasing racial and ethnic diversity is a cause for concern. And you put all these things together and you have to ask yourself, what is the fringe?

[00:43:03] Josh: And I’m not, and I like, I’m really, really, really against. Sort of speech on either side of the of the ideological divide that basically paints, you know Essentially all democrats as fascists or all republicans as racists or something like that’s that’s crazy But I think it is useful to look at these attitudinal undercurrents and say to yourself, you know, okay fine but if you think about the ends of Someone not like nick fuentes because his he’s pretty pretty extreme.

[00:43:28] Josh: But if you think about you know, the overarching, you know, let’s say message here when, you know, it’s a very active group in Republican politics and the state’s leadership meet in a very active funder meets with a very, very virulent anti Semite white supremacist. And the question becomes, well, are people going to, you know, again, not people are, you know, not all people, but are Republican voters going to react really negatively to this?

[00:43:51] Josh: And when you look at this data, the answer is like, I don’t know. Right.

[00:43:55] Jim: I mean, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know. And it returns, it returns us to the counterfactual of, you know, you know, were we not seeing, had we not seen the Hamas attack on Israel? Right. And… The rally, the general rallying to Israel in the

[00:44:12] Josh: United States.

[00:44:12] Josh: And I say, you know, in our data, when we asked, last asked about countries, uh, you know, Israel was, was relatively positively, you know, positioned relative to the, you know, the countries we asked about. But if you look at the partisan dynamic there, Republican attitudes towards Israel are significantly more positive than Democratic attitudes.

[00:44:27] Josh: The attitudes of extreme conservatives towards Israel is even more positive and most positive is among basically the most religious people in Texas. And that’s a whole other discussion for another day. Right.

[00:44:39] Jim: But it also, you know, but it does, it underlines though that, you know, where the rallying points are.

[00:44:45] Jim: Right. If you will. And, you know, that. And, and it brings us back yet again, you know, to cite a New York Times headline from just a few hours prior to us recording this, for Republicans, all roads lead to the U. S. Mexico border. You know, so when it comes to seeking to unite Republican office holders, you know, And again, you have to be careful here.

[00:45:08] Jim: The border is clearly, as we’ve said in here a dozen times, if we’ve said it once, is clearly a difficult policy problem and is definitely, definitely a policy issue for residents in the border areas. And we see that Democrat, Republican, the solution, you know, the kind of discussion of solutions varies.

[00:45:27] Jim: But I think at the state level, you have, you can’t, You have to look at all that stuff is all of these elements, these attitudes about cultural identity, attitudes about the border, the management of coalitional politics. And connect all that, because it’s, you know, I think it’s part of the political play across the board.

[00:45:52] Jim: This includes Democrats and Republican factions, is to try to divorce these discussions from the broader context, and particularly these broader underlying, you have to say it, these broader underlying attitudes about cultural identity and this kind of sense of, you know, the preeminence. or the, the, the prominence, the con, the, the commonality, shall we say, of, you know, what can be called a kind of white grievance.

[00:46:22] Jim: Christian grievance.

[00:46:23] Josh: Yeah. I say white grievance in Christian

[00:46:25] Jim: nationalism. Right. Some kind, or, you know. Yeah. The sense of, you know, kind of. you know, persecution. I mean, that’s what the discriminated, discrimination data shows us. And, and, you know, I mean, I think you have to really try really hard to say, no, border security, the reason it really rings people’s bells is simply because it’s a policy problem, because that’s generally not true of.

[00:46:49] Jim: And I don’t know why it would only be true of border security and immigration, that it would somehow be divorced from these other adjacent underlying attitudes. And, you know, to underline, and as we come to a close, how, you know, one must… you know, be a little careful about looking at one fight and drawing a line, but you know, a hard line between these factions, quote unquote, in the coalition and the broader, you know, underlying politics here. So we have a clip from a Facebook ad that Speaker Phelan, I believe rolled out, his team rolled out yesterday. So if we could play that.

[00:47:18] CLIP: Texas used to spend little on border security, but when Dade Phelan became Speaker, he increased border funding by 630%. Dade’s finishing the wall, empowered Border Patrol to arrest lawbreakers, and designated Mexican cartels as terrorists.

[00:47:43] CLIP: Dade’s invested nearly 10 billion and won’t stop. And Dade’s next plan ensures border criminals are arrested and removed, or given up to 20 years in prison. Southeast Texas own Dade Phelan fights to secure our border.

[00:47:59] Josh: Not California Dade

[00:48:00] Jim: So there you go. That does not sound like California Dade to me. So, you know, look, I mean, I think, you know, this underlines, you know, several of the things we’ve been talking about.

[00:48:11] Jim: You know, it, at the most obvious level, underlines the extent to which border security is the go to binding agent if you are a Republican candidate. But as I said before we went into the clip, you can’t get too reliant on a construct that this fight is all about the moderate versus the fringe in some kind of universal, hardwired

[00:48:31] Josh: way.

[00:48:32] Josh: You know, I gotta say, having had this discussion, thinking about this more and getting to the end point, you know, I think that is really like one of the main takeaways here. I mean, I think the last number of years in Texas politics, you know, this has always been, we talk about the dissident right, and you know, and this sort of desire for agenda control.

[00:48:47] Josh: And this sort of notion of, you know, whether you call it the moderate versus the fringe or you call it, you know, the, uh, the, the, you know, the establishment versus, you know, whatever, the dissidents or the, or the insurrectionists or whatever, you know, whatever you want to call it, you know, what you can see here is that all, you know, we’re in a moment right now where I, to your, you know, I can just use your thing.

[00:49:06] Josh: I mean, the kaleidoscopic nature of it is, is getting. Really interesting, both at the national level and the Texas level, right? Because you turn it one way and everybody’s happy to spend billions of dollars on border security. You know, you turn it another way and, you know, the house may adjourn and just walk away, right?

[00:49:21] Josh: And to say that this is can be described as just simply a factional conflict. It’s just. It’s not an accurate reflection of what is going on right now, especially as the quote unquote fringe elements are being invited further and further into the mainstream of the party. And I’ve been talking about the Nick Fuentes type, but I’m talking about like even someone like Jim Jordan.

[00:49:43] Josh: Right. As an example. Right.

[00:49:44] Jim: Look, Jim Jordan just came within, you know, well, 20 votes of being third in line to the presidency. Jim

[00:49:51] Josh: Jordan. Go back and

[00:49:54] Jim: look up Jim Jordan. I’m not picking on Jim Jordan per se, but I mean, if you locate Jim Jordan on the political spectrum and locate him on both the ideological political spectrum and, you know, the, you know, as an example of what is successful in congressional politics.

[00:50:17] Jim: Um, it’s pretty striking. I mean, now, you know, again, old timer would say, hey, remember Newt Gingrich? Yeah, I remember Newt Gingrich. Yeah. But, you know, that was also a while ago, and Newt Gingrich for a while was a little bit of an object lesson of what happens if you, you know, get out of, get, if you, you know, get off the road a little too far.

[00:50:37] Jim: Right. Right. So. You know, so I think, uh, you know, I, I, I enjoy, this has been a good discussion in terms of the, how we conceptualize these things. I think in the next couple of weeks we’ll be seeing, you know, a bit more of how this plays out. Yeah. Because clearly, you know, I, I think as expected and probably, you know, I, you know, I can’t speak to who’s been talking about things with whom, but I mean, I think, you know, the governor set.

[00:51:11] Jim: The House up to take this, the kind of path that Phelan has taken and, and open the door for Speaker Phelan to take this kind of approach and for the legislature to lean hard on these border security and immigration measures. We still not getting signs of any clear resolution. We’d almost went through an entire podcast without mentioning vouchers.

[00:51:33] Jim: Oh, but we’re not seeing any clear resolution to the voucher. You know, I’m hearing conflicting reports of what those negotiations are looking like. But certainly, you know, it’s not inconceivable to see this first special session end with a lot of border security, uh, legislation passed by both houses and getting to the governor’s desk.

[00:51:54] Jim: Not much else. And, you know, the voucher fight continuing to be deferred and still being negotiated as we go into a, to a second, to a subsequent session. And again, as we said at the beginning, you know, a, a couple of sessions ago when we talked about. How the governor has set this up, you know, this is, this is not a particularly surprising outcome.

[00:52:19] Jim: I don’t think in terms of where we are, but I think it does invite attention to a lot of the issues that we’ve talked about today. So with that, thank you for being here, Josh. That was a fun, stimulating discussion, at least for us. We’ll see what people think. Um, thanks again to our excellent production team in the dev studio in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin.

[00:52:40] Jim: Uh, if you’re listening to this on a podcast platform, we will post, uh, this podcast probably with definitely with some supplemental polling and some of the things some of the data we’ve talked about so we can show you the receipts at texaspolitics. utexas. edu Just navigate through the polling link To the blog section and above all, of course, thank you for listening.

[00:53:04] Jim: And we’ll be back soon with another second reading podcast. And if you’ve made it this far, some fresh data,

[00:53:18] Outro: the second reading podcast is a production of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin.