October 24, 2022 – Second Reading Podcast

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to the second reading podcast from the University of Texas at Austin. The republicans were in the democratic Party because there was only one party. So I tell people on a regular basis, there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called Texas. The problem is these departures from the Constitution, they have become the norm at what. 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. Uh, very happy to be joined today by Daron Shaw, Professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin.

[00:00:47] Jim Henson: Good morning. Thank you for being here, Darren and founding. He’s also founding co-director of this polling project, poll number 52 in the books brother. Oh, bad man. Yeah, and Joshua Blank, research [00:01:00] director of the Texas Politics Project. They’re for most of the 50. Yeah. Lion’s share. I don’t know. I don’t what the technical

[00:01:06] Daron Shaw: definition of what it’s taking.

[00:01:07] Daron Shaw: 52 worth of heat. I know that.

[00:01:08] Josh Blank: Yeah. Lion’s share I think is be two thirds plus one.

[00:01:10] Daron Shaw: Anyway. I’ll

[00:01:11] Jim Henson: bet that’s pretty close . So, uh, uh, Darren’s back, not just because we like him, but because, uh, we want to talk about the, the. The poll, the, the UT Texas Politics Project poll that we released early Friday morning to the usual Hassans, um,

[00:01:27] Jim Henson: The poll included, uh, uh, our regular move to a likely voter screen, which we talked about a lot last time. Darren was here actually. And yeah, we found Governor Abbott leading by double digits. 54, 43 double digit leads down ballot in in the statewide races. We polled. We’ll talk about this. You know, it drew attention Friday and over the weekend because it’s a bigger.

[00:01:49] Jim Henson: Then as of Friday, we’d seen, you know, as most of the polling in Texas has switched to using likely voter screens. Um, and again, we talked about the reasoning and the procedure for [00:02:00] filtering, uh, our overall sampling to get a likely voter pool right after our last poll in the context of explaining why we hadn’t done it last time.

[00:02:10] Jim Henson: So we don’t necessarily need to revisit all that. And, and Josh, you did a great piece on the blog a few weeks. Uh, that I’ll refer our listeners to Unlikely Voters. You can find it on the blog site, at the blog section of the site at Texas politics dot u texas.edu. So let’s, let’s jump into it. Josh, why, why don’t you start us up by just running down quickly, The likely voter screen we used and then.

[00:02:33] Jim Henson: The margins that we found, uh, uh, among those likely voters in the statewide

[00:02:37] Josh Blank: races. Sure. So, you know, the likely voter screen that we settled on this time, which is based on the likely voter screens that we’ve used in the past, mostly, uh, you know, relied on equal balance of, uh, what voters tell us that they’ve done in the past and what they intend to do in this coming election.

[00:02:52] Josh Blank: So essentially, a likely voter in this poll was among our 1200 self-declared registered voters, Uh, those respondents who said that they [00:03:00] either. Vote in every election looking back over the last few years. So they’re consistent voters. They see themselves that way or looking ahead to this upcoming election on a scale of zero to 10 sort of rating their, their likelihood to vote with 10 being absolutely certain and zero being, you know, never.

[00:03:14] Josh Blank: Right. And we basically said if you were a nine or a 10, we included you in likely voter sample that resulted at 883 likely voters, which produces a margin of error for the full sample of likely voters of plus or minus 3.3%.

[00:03:27] Jim Henson: Okay. So, and, and just to, you know, I mean, a quick point about that, I mean, and.

[00:03:32] Jim Henson: This is like where Darren makes fun of me for one, cuz I used to use the comments on the blogs, , for those of you on Twitter that didn’t read the methodological section because you were seeing red too much. Mm-hmm. , you’ll notice that that’s both has a retrospective component in terms of what P people report having done in the past.

[00:03:49] Jim Henson: And a prospective component that is their, their thoughts about what they’re going to do. So this was not based simply on what people have done in the past. Right.

[00:03:58] Josh Blank: Thank you. Okay, [00:04:00] so what, what do we find? What do we find overall? So just running through the top, you know, top braces we measured here, as you already said, Jim, we found Greg Abbott leading better O’Rourke, 54, 43, so an 11 point, uh, margin.

[00:04:11] Josh Blank: Overall, it’s a little bit farther than he is, been in, in kind of most statewide polling, where it’s been around, you know, seven. Points and that kind of range. And in fact, this is real quick. We talked to this last week. If you just look at the result among just registered voters, the gap’s about seven points.

[00:04:25] Josh Blank: So as we go and we tighten that screen and we look at a little bit, uh, you know, again, I think an older, more consistent electorate. As usual, it tends to accrue to a Republican advantage. We can talk a little bit more about that. Looking at the Lieutenant Governor’s race, we see Dan Patrick up 51 36 over Mike Collier, so that’d be a 15 point lead for Attorney General.

[00:04:44] Josh Blank: Ken Paxton’s, lead, Rochelle Garza, 51 37, so 14 point lead, pretty much the same. And the Comptroller’s race, Glen Hager is up 47, 35 on uh, Ding. Duing. Duing. Duing. Sorry, sorry, Janet. I think, uh, so that’s, you know, plus [00:05:00] 12. Now here we would say, just, we’ll come back to this, but the fact that, you know, uh, the comptroller’s under 50% is also largely a reflection of name recognition, uh, that he has is a little bit lower for him than it is for some of these other candidates.

[00:05:10] Josh Blank: For example, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller is up 51 39. Again, Sid Miller is pretty, you know, he’s got the hat. He’s got the hat. Yeah. Among other things, in the Land Commissioner race, we saw Don Buckingham up. 47, 36 over Jake Kleberg. So plus 11, and again, Don Buckingham, same thing. State senator.

[00:05:31] Josh Blank: She’s not gonna have the same sort of statewide profile. Yeah. One

[00:05:34] Jim Henson: thing we should notice about that is that she’s the one person in that, on the, on the demo on the Republican side, who is not an incumbent because George, Right. P Bush resigned that seat, or it didn’t run for reelection for that seat. So he could run unsuccessfully for the, for the AG nomination.

[00:05:50] Jim Henson: I mean, Resigned to run unsuccessfully.

[00:05:53] Daron Shaw: It just sort of happened. Yeah.

[00:05:55] Jim Henson: Well, he resigned to run comma, unsuccessfully as it turned out. Comma, comma, that’s

[00:05:59] Josh Blank: one of the, [00:06:00] that’s one of those, you know, the placement of the comma matters kind of things. Okay. Uh, just real quick, just to round it out, you know, the congressional trial ballot among likely voters, we saw, you know, Republicans with a plus nine Advantage 53 44 for the legislature, about a plus 11 53 42.

[00:06:14] Josh Blank: So for the most part, on the statewide races, are actually outperforming the trial ballot a little bit at this. So that’s, that’s the rundown on the top races.

[00:06:23] Jim Henson: Okay. So what do you make of this, Darren? We were talking about this going in and, and I wish you could all see the little shrug Darren just gave us.

[00:06:31] Jim Henson: Um, that was the turn. Sometimes it would be better to do this on video, but um, generally

[00:06:37] Daron Shaw: not. Turn on the tick the

[00:06:40] Josh Blank: talker. Josh. Thanks. Yeah, cuz here I

[00:06:42] Jim Henson: am. .

[00:06:43] Daron Shaw: Yeah, I mean, Well, let’s speak to a couple of issues. Skeptics. Not that anybody listening to the podcast would be skeptical, but, um, we like skeptics. We

[00:06:53] Josh Blank: don’t like cynic.

[00:06:53] Josh Blank: Yeah, that’s

[00:06:54] Daron Shaw: right. That’s, that’s exactly right. Um, with respect to the likely voter screen, um, one of the things that, uh, [00:07:00] that Josh pointed out in passing in saying that, where are we, like 8, 8 80 or something like that, and 83. Yeah. 8 83 or likely voters out of 1200 registered voters. Those proportions are about right.

[00:07:11] Daron Shaw: Um, you know, you end up getting, yeah, between 65 and 75% are registered voters vote in a midterm election. So the proportion of our sample, our RV sample that gets through the likely voter screen is, is a plausible sample. And it’s a function of people who have voted in the past. And as Jim mentioned or fired up about voting this time, it, it might be surprising to those who assume.

[00:07:35] Daron Shaw: Or have read or consumed information that you see in the national context about how the Democrats are as fired up as the Republicans about voting nationally. And I’ve seen enough of that data to think that’s probably right. Um, but in Texas it’s just not quite as evident. There still is a, an enthusiasm and engagement edge on the part of the Republicans.

[00:07:54] Daron Shaw: So, um, to the extent that attitudes change and are subject. Context and [00:08:00] mobilization if you’re, you know, if you’re Democratic out there and you’re not happy with this. Well, I mean, it’s always possible that, uh, you know, you’ve got a late arriving crowd. As we say, I mean, um, you know, so that’s, you know, and again, that gets you from, you know, the plus 11 in the Abbott O’Rourke race down to the plus seven.

[00:08:19] Daron Shaw: If Democrats simply kind of, you know, realize they’re, you know, this is an important race and show up. Right. Um, but a couple numbers in here that are interesting. I think so, you know, if. against, they’re saying, Well, you guys have my favorite line. Oh, you have too many Republicans in the sample. Well, um, that’s, that’s actually not really the problem here, uh, for, for the Democrats.

[00:08:40] Daron Shaw: Um, you know, take a look at some of these other numbers. Now. Now, Josh, I, I, did I read the, the US house wrong? I, I thought that was 47 Republican. That, that’s, that’s rv, sorry. Okay. RV even. The house race amongst all registered voters is 47% Republican, 45% Democrat, right? So you look at that numbers and [00:09:00] the sample therefore looks, you know, from our point of view, from sort of a professional pollster point of view, you’re like, well, you know, plus two in the registered voter sample for the US.

[00:09:09] Daron Shaw: Race, US congressional race is a pretty plausible number. In fact, it’s, you know, about what we’ve seen. It’s actually maybe even a little more

Democrat.

[00:09:17] Jim Henson: I’m sorry. You might even, Yeah. One might say that’s a little democratic, right?

[00:09:20] Daron Shaw: So because that’s in the sample, you know, if, if that number had, but Democrat, Right, Right.

[00:09:25] Daron Shaw: If that number had come back plus 15 Republican we’d, you know, we’d take a look at the sound little boy. Um, but the fact is, you know, so there is a baseline measure there suggesting that what’s happening is it’s. The likely voter screen plus the specific races you’re talking about that seem to be favoring the Republicans right now towards that end?

[00:09:44] Daron Shaw: Um, you know, if you look at some of the sub numbers here right now, uh, I mentioned that it’s not just the composition of the sample that’s hurting the Democrats right now. Abbott is winning amongst independent voters by a 60 to 20. Clip. Mm-hmm. , Um, he’s winning Republicans [00:10:00] 95 to three. Um, it’s not possible at this point in time for Democrat to win a statewide election when they’re picking up no Republicans and getting absolutely whacked amongst independents.

[00:10:12] Daron Shaw: And I

[00:10:12] Josh Blank: think, and I was gonna say, I think that’s also hurting them, you know, down sample with some of these other groups. So the fact is that Split with independence is. What you see is, I mean, this is sort of the interest. I mean, there’s been a bunch of polls released in the last few days and there’s gonna be more kind of going along.

[00:10:24] Josh Blank: And what I’ve noticed so far in kind of comparing the internals, all these polls, is that what you tend to see is, you know, whether you’re picking up the negativity among independents or not in a lot of cases. Right.

[00:10:32] Jim Henson: Well, and I think the negativity among independents is diluted by the people that just do a, a.

[00:10:37] Jim Henson: You know, three point party id,

[00:10:39] Josh Blank: three point party ivd and an RV sample.

[00:10:41] Jim Henson: Right. Right. And so, you know, we’re talking about, and you know, in our, in our sample, we’re talking about 8% of true independents who will. Right. And these are true independents who will not Yeah. Budge even when we nudge ’em a little bit

[00:10:52] Daron Shaw: in the full we’ve made, Yeah.

[00:10:54] Daron Shaw: We’ve made this point before. But just to, so the audience is kind of with us on this. We ask an initial party ID question and [00:11:00] quite a few people, 30 to 40%, sometimes upwards of 40% say I’m independent, I. Think of myself as a Republican, nor do I think of myself as a Democrat to those individuals. We ask, a second question is, Well, do you lean one way or the other?

[00:11:14] Daron Shaw: And when you do that, the 30 to 40% comes down to 10 to 15% because most people, most independents do lean closer to one part or the other. Now, You might reasonably say, Well, why don’t you take them at their word and just treat them as independence? Because the leaners vote, and this is true in this sample, we looked at the internal, the leaners vote, 85 to 90% for the party to which they lean.

[00:11:38] Daron Shaw: They’re not really independent.

[00:11:40] Jim Henson: They’re

[00:11:40] Daron Shaw: issued position.

[00:11:41] Jim Henson: This, you know, this, this is a they, you know, they’re pretty clearly. Somewhere between the strong partisans and the somewhat

[00:11:48] Josh Blank: partisans. No, See, I, that’s the thing. I mean, I, This is, and on the

[00:11:50] Jim Henson: Republican side, they’re even closer to the strong. Well,

[00:11:52] Josh Blank: that’s the exact thing.

[00:11:53] Josh Blank: I mean even, and this is just to belabor this point. If you take the people that we, who originally said, No, I’m a Republican, or No, I’m a Democrat, and then we said, Well, are you like a real [00:12:00] strong Republican or you know, not so strong Republican or Democrat, and which you, and you look at the attitude space across, you know, these three groups, strong Republicans or Democrats, you know, sort of leaning Republicans or Democrats and these people who are originally independents and.

[00:12:12] Josh Blank: Pulled them over and made them a partisan, if you want to think that way. They look like the strong partisans. They don’t look like the weak partisan. So if anything, again, if there’s any sort of skepticism, cynicism, reticence about it, their issue positions line up again, more towards. You know, the strong identifiers and the weak identifiers in most cases.

[00:12:30] Daron Shaw: Right. So this is, I mean, it’s an, I was gonna say an overly technical point. It’s not an overly technical point. It’s important point. So when you, when y’all look at our poll, you’ll see, boy, I mean this, this poll has 35% independence and our poll has 10. That that’s the reason. So, Kind of relatedly, when we say Abbott’s up 60 to 29 or 60 to 30 amongst independents we’re talking about is Jim Mason.

[00:12:51] Daron Shaw: That’s eight to 10% sliver of the electorate. And once you, once

you,

[00:12:54] Jim Henson: yeah, once you, once you do, once you run the likely voter screen, I think we

[00:12:57] Daron Shaw: are down to eight. But if you, if, if that [00:13:00] 8% in a state like Texas where Republicans have kind of a built in party advantage of, you know, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 points at this point.

[00:13:07] Daron Shaw: You can’t win those independence as a Democrat, you can’t close that gap. You can’t get to anywhere close to where you need to go. And our poll indicates right now, and again, independence move a lot. That’s something to really bear in mind here. You know, we’ve got three weeks for more before, three weeks before the election, right?

[00:13:25] Daron Shaw: Um, they can move, but right now the Democrats are just not competitive enough amongst independents to do well. Um,

[00:13:32] Jim Henson: and I think that’s where the, you know, The favorability ratings that we did for all the can. Illuminates some of that. Certainly illuminates that with O’Rourke and, And Abbot. That’s right.

[00:13:41] Jim Henson: That’s right. Or neither O’Rourke nor Abbott is really, I mean, independence, by their nature, they don’t have these partisan moorings. They don’t pay that much attention. They hear the loudest noise. They hear the loudest noise. That’s great. They’re, you know, I was gonna say, they’re. Yeah, they soak in a very negative environment that we’re in.

[00:13:56] Jim Henson: So nobody’s doing that. Great. But O’Rourke is, O’Rourke’s numbers are very negative [00:14:00] among the

[00:14:00] Daron Shaw: streets. That’s right. And just a couple things and then we can move to kinda that political context or, you know, but, but I just jotted these down. You know, there is a gender gap, obviously this is again, the gov race, but it persists down ballot.

[00:14:11] Daron Shaw: Uh, Abbott currently is carrying men by 21 points, but he is about break even with. Um, so yeah, there’s a gender gap, but you know, it doesn’t take an algebra wiz to figure out if you’re up 20 with half the population and you’re even with the other, you’re probably in pretty good shape, um, amongst now O’Rourke.

[00:14:28] Daron Shaw: Best groups you might imagine, as it was in 2018 against Cruz is younger voters right now with under 30. He’s, he’s, uh, up eight points. However, and this is something we’ve seen nationally, um, the Republicans are really doing well with seniors and right now Abbott’s up 22 points with seniors. If, if y’all are looking at the national polls, that’s something that, that I think is really gotta be concerning to the Democrats.

[00:14:49] Daron Shaw: The, you know, Biden actually carried seniors in in 2020, but right. The Democrats are hemorrhaging votes with older voters.

[00:14:57] Josh Blank: One of the thing is, and you can’t, you can’t do that in a midterm [00:15:00] election, right? Yeah. Cause when you’re thinking about the seniors, where you’re talking, as you’re talking about reliable voters, and, and what I was about to say is, I mean, the thing about the problem with independence is, you know, it manifests in a couple points here and there, but it’s also manifesting everywhere else.

[00:15:10] Josh Blank: To the extent we’ve been talking about key groups in the electorate, and we’ve been sort of dividing them between something. We’re talking about independence, we’re talking about Hispanics, we’re talking about people in the suburbs. But the thing is, is that of course you can have Hispanics in the suburbs, you can have independent Hispanics and all these things.

[00:15:21] Josh Blank: And when you look across the. You know, these problems for Iraq multiply within each group,

[00:15:26] Daron Shaw: right? Right. Yep. Yeah, so this, the finals we’re talking about through the key groups. I’ve pulled suburban voters and Abbott’s got an 11 point lead with suburban voters, and that’s a, a lesser trend nationally.

[00:15:38] Daron Shaw: Lesser in the sense of Republicans are carrying suburban voters by three to five points in most of the national polls I’ve seen. But here, and it’s not just Texas, you know, these are people in these suburbs who have drawn a lot of attention lately in Houston and Dallas, and even in Austin. These places are really going purple.

[00:15:52] Daron Shaw: But right now, Abbott’s been able to maintain that edge. Mm-hmm. . Right. And it’s,

you

[00:15:56] Jim Henson: know, it’s purple compared to 20 years ago. Right, Right. I mean, [00:16:00] Right, right. But it’s not that, But that change is not complete and it’s still, it still moves. Right, Right. And we’re talking about a lot of voters. Well, as in,

[00:16:07] Josh Blank: Well, and also the other thing too is, I mean, just aside, Texas remains, you know, the place that has the fastest growing suburbs in the country.

[00:16:14] Josh Blank: So when, so it’s very, you know, usually we say, Well, population change is slow, and all this kinda stuff. Except for the fact when we’re talking about these counties that are adding 50,000 people every, you know, couple years over and over again, it’s like, it’s still sort of, is is very up in the air going forward.

[00:16:28] Josh Blank: Although not this time. .

[00:16:30] Jim Henson: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, that, you know, I, Well, I got a stray thought on that. Yeah, that makes me, I mean, I mean, very speculatively. I, it does make me wonder a little bit. Some of the patterns we saw people moving more to the outer, outer suburbs and excerpts in response to the pandemic and the working at home thing.

[00:16:49] Jim Henson: Mm-hmm. , it does make me wonder for, that’s maybe been a short term fluctuation that

[00:16:53] Daron Shaw: added to this. It’s, it’s a fascinating sub top, but you’re right. We could do a whole podcast on that. But, you know, the, the Williamson Counties, the, [00:17:00] you know, the Kyle Butta suburbs around Austin, but then you go to Fort Bend in these places and it’s, you know, The way the Yeah, exactly.

[00:17:09] Daron Shaw: The, the way the media tends to write about this is that these voters are moving back and forth. There’s a little bit of that, but it’s mostly compositional change. Yeah. Right. There’s just tons of people from the urban area moving into these places and they bring their political sensibilities with them.

[00:17:22] Daron Shaw: Mm-hmm. .

[00:17:23] Jim Henson: Yeah, I think that’s right. And so one other, the thing I wanted to add to this is also, I mean a little, I talk to one of our frequent. frequent readers, probably not a listener earlier this morning, was talking about those gaps down ballot too. And you know, one thing that is interesting is that if you, and that’s, this is why I raised the, the favorability ratings also a minute ago, is that, you know, these, the Democratic down, you know, ticket, uh, candidates below O’Rourke are really unknown to most voters.

[00:17:54] Jim Henson: And I think that, you know, all along we’ve. Assuming that we’re picking up [00:18:00] partisan ballot and trial ballots like this, to the extent that we’ve run ’em, certainly with the. The pat, the Patrick Race, the Patrick Collier race, and the Paxton Garza race. But you know, in the Paxton Garza race, 11% of Democrats still are saying are not committing to a candidate.

[00:18:17] Jim Henson: Now that either means maybe they’ll drop out or maybe they’ll eventually come home and, and the gaps in those races will tighten. But I mean, for those that expect those races to look more competitive and to be more competitive, when you look at the fave un fave, Half or more. And I think virtually all of those races below the gubernatorial reg, uh, below the gubernatorial reg have no, like, people don’t have attitudes about the democratic candidates.

[00:18:42] Jim Henson: Yeah. And this is the, and, and the name recognition even of the incumbents is not that high for

[00:18:46] Josh Blank: that one. Well, this is sort of, you know, as we get to the sort of like, I mean, we’re kind of getting, we’re getting into a where, so how and why, Right? You know, all this, and this is always sort of a perpetual story in Texas, right?

[00:18:55] Josh Blank: Is that, you know, it’s a big state, it’s an expensive state to campaign in. [00:19:00] And, you know, setting aside, I think the overall kind of national issue environment, local issue environment, uh, sort of fight for attention and how that’s played out. The other side of this is that, you know, if you’re a Rochelle Garza, ultimately, you know more than half the electorate doesn’t know you according to this.

[00:19:17] Josh Blank: Well, 42% of Democrats don’t have an opinion. So when you say like 11% are kind of like, Well, I don’t really know yet. It’s like, cuz they literally may not have any idea who these people

[00:19:25] Jim Henson: are. And I don’t know, you know, if you guys. You know, you guys are healthier than I am. You probably didn’t watch a lot of TV over the weekend, but I mean, you know, the, the, uh, Pax, the Paxton campaign is running an attack out on Garza That is, you know, All about immigration and border security.

[00:19:41] Jim Henson: Very negative. So for a lot of these people, that’s gonna be the first thing they see, I think in a lot of, in a lot of settings. So we, I think

[00:19:48] Daron Shaw: we talked about, touched on this before, but it’s an interesting strategic question about should any of these republicans, even, even obliquely talking about their opponents, right?

[00:19:57] Daron Shaw: I mean,

[00:19:57] Josh Blank: I was thinking about this with respect to. [00:20:00] The Patrick Collier race in particular, you know, I mean the, the, the coverage of his campaign, Patrick’s that is of the last few weeks, or talking about this sort of, quixotic might not be the word, but this bus tour in rural Texas where, you know, there’s no schedule, no one knows where he is gonna be.

[00:20:12] Josh Blank: They’re not telling the press about it. And I mean, at some point, You know, and so I, the first questions I was getting is like, well, you know, is he worried about the world vote? And I said, No. I think if he was worried about the vote, he might go somewhere where there are mo more voters. . Yeah. Yeah. You know, he might actually, I mean this is not, this is not a knock, this is just a political, you know, sort of calculus.

[00:20:29] Josh Blank: Like maybe he would want to extend himself into some places where he’d be competing for votes if he really thought in the last couple weeks of the campaign. That’s what he needed to do. Yeah. But I think. Kind of cruising as an incumbent. And I mean, one thing I’ve pointed out on this podcast before, and I’ll point out again about both of these races in comparison, then people keep saying like, Well, you know, but, But paxton’s under indictment, I mean, surely these legal problems I say, He was under indictment four years ago, , and a lot of people voted for him.

[00:20:53] Josh Blank: And he has a very strong brand, especially with Republicans. And every time we sort of measure job approval, uh, [00:21:00] favorability ratings, if you look at Dan Patrick who has no legal problems, and you look at Ken Paxson and his legal problems, attitudes towards both of them among Republicans are basically

[00:21:08] Daron Shaw: identical.

[00:21:09] Daron Shaw: Yeah, I mean this is, this is the point. This is a party, the survey suggest. Party line vote in Texas is about, you know, 47 to 30, 36 right now. Something like that. Right. Um, you know, if they don’t really know who the Republicans are and they don’t know who the Democrat is, so, you know, that’s not a indictment.

[00:21:28] Daron Shaw: I mean, I, I, I think it’s

[00:21:29] Josh Blank: a little bit of an indictment because it’s a reflection of the fact that, that, that nobody’s really happy

[00:21:33] Daron Shaw: with anybody. Or maybe indictments. Oh, that’s an indictment, sir. Yeah. , I mean, I mean,

[00:21:36] Josh Blank: well, I’m just in the sense that like, you know, part of this, if, if you looked underneath the, the hood and you said like, well, but like clearly there’s a big gap in, I look different people have positive views about O’Rourke obviously than have positive views about Abbott and vice versa.

[00:21:48] Josh Blank: Right. But when you look under the hood at a lot of this stuff, if, if the dominant storyline, like say for the Democrats is people don’t know who they are, you know, the do story at the top of the ticket amongst the candidates who people actually know is kind of ambivalence. [00:22:00] and in a case of ambivalence and a bad national environment for Democrats in a state that trends Republican by at least a couple points, if not more, we are seeing what, listen, we talked about this last week or two weeks ago, kind of a

[00:22:10] Daron Shaw: normal election here.

[00:22:11] Daron Shaw: It’s, it’s the partisan w you know. Yeah. Um, just a, a couple points, Jim sort of hinted at this, um, you know, in the. In the gov race, abbots at 47% approval, 44% disapprove. So he is, you know, plus three, which is for a guy who’s been around as long as he has. In times where voters are unhappy with the state of the world,

[00:22:31] Jim Henson: he’ll take net positive, even if

[00:22:32] Daron Shaw: it’s only three and he’s 46% favorable.

[00:22:35] Daron Shaw: 44% unfavorable. So we have a job rating and then we have a sort of more personal rating. O’Rourke’s at 44% favorable, 47% unfavorable. So alone amongst Democrats, O’Rourke does not have a recognition problem. Um, his problem is the baggage that he’s accrued from the. Past campaigns and the Abbott campaign has been very, I think consistent and relentless might be the word smart, about making this elect, you [00:23:00] know, bringing O’Rourke into this cuz people know who O’Rourke in these other races.

[00:23:03] Daron Shaw: There’s a question of whether Republicans ought even be talking about Yeah, yeah. Their opponents.

[00:23:06] Jim Henson: But in the governments, you know, you mentioned that twice there. And let me, I want to ask you that. Cause when you, you know, you said you raised the issue of whether, you know, . If you’re enjoying an advantage and you’re, say, Patrick, or, or, or Paxton, let alone anybody further down, why would you even run an ad?

[00:23:25] Jim Henson: You know, a lot of people are, are going to interpret the fact that they are running those ads as a sign that they are. Worried. Worried. What do

[00:23:34] Daron Shaw: you think? Oh, that’s a good question. I, I think it’s, you know, we have a theory in political science called Minimax regret. Yeah. John Josh’s

[00:23:44] Josh Blank: minimax regret is great for parenting also.

[00:23:46] Josh Blank: Yes. Continue. Yeah.

[00:23:47] Daron Shaw: So, so it’s a, it’s a, it’s a theory about, uh, strategic behavior. Political context. We, we love it in voting because the idea is that, uh, what you’re trying to do is to minimize the [00:24:00] men, uh, here, um, the possibility of your maximum regret, right? So, uh, and it by, it’s a, for those of you who are nerds like us, it’s in contrast to, you know, ideas that people are strategically.

[00:24:12] Daron Shaw: Strategic optimizers, right? They’re trying to maximize their benefit. This one says, Nah, they’re just trying to minimize the possibilities of the worst case scenario. There’s a campaign

[00:24:20] Josh Blank: expenditure that you can maximize on the curve and that’ll be the right amount, but that’s not what we’re talking about.

[00:24:24] Josh Blank: Right?

[00:24:24] Daron Shaw: And I, I think, I think what you probably have, Jim, is a case of of mini max reasoning, which is like, okay, what’s our worst regret? Well, that we underachieve. Underachieving. Worst case be you lose, but even, even that, you underperform the other Republicans on the ballot by three or four or five points.

[00:24:40] Daron Shaw: Right. Which makes you look terrible and Right. Among your friends. Right, Exactly. So, or fundraise or people who have aspirations for higher office. Right. Um, so you spend the money. and you, you know the, Yeah. The other possibility is that you actually have some sort of internal polling that shows you’ve got weaknesses, and here’s the key hand.

[00:24:58] Daron Shaw: You assume the other [00:25:00] side is going to be able to take those concerns to the public. That last part of it is the one that I don’t really understand. I just don’t think, you know, unless somebody’s saving a lot of money. For a, uh, you know, a spot during a Cowboys game in a week and a half after

[00:25:14] Josh Blank: voting’s already been going on for a week.

[00:25:15] Josh Blank: Right.

[00:25:15] Daron Shaw: I, I’m just not seeing it from the Democrats. And I, I think to Josh’s point about whether this is an indictment or not, I, where democratic money is where democratic communication is, I’m, I’m at a loss to explain the silence from the left. Yeah. You

[00:25:32] Jim Henson: know, I think on that, I mean, I. My hypothesis has been pretty much that they, I think that they adopted a minimax regret position after 2018.

[00:25:44] Jim Henson: Hmm. That basically after 2018 when the Republican, you know, some of these, many of these, some same Republicans had, what was for them a dear, a near death experience. Right. That, that has influenced, there’s like a, I think there’s a, a trope in among Republicans in [00:26:00] Texas that we’re fine, but we can’t be too complacent.

[00:26:03] Jim Henson: Right. And that, and it’s based on that kind of logic, I think. All right, So like a little bit of time we have left, let’s talk about the issue environment a little bit. It seems to me overall that what we saw when we asked voters what issues were most important to their vote, um, and in conjunction with our usual IP aum, uh, item, you know, this is continuing to move in ways that were consistent with what we saw among the larger I RV pool in August.

[00:26:30] Josh Blank: Yeah, More or less. Yeah, I mean I think that’s right. I mean, what, what you’re seeing here is, you know, in addition to sort of, I mean, you know, when you look at the, the gap overall, which is sort of the touching off point here, you know, across all the races, you know what, what you see, what I think we’re seeing here in a lot of ways is sort of the accrual of, or the accrual of Republican advantages sort of across the board.

[00:26:47] Josh Blank: We’re talked about a number of the statewide advantages now, but ultimately I think the thing you know that for that is really kind. You know, better or words broken Republicans way in the last few months of this campaign is that the [00:27:00] economy’s become front and center again. People are, you know, when we look in the poll at economic evaluations, they ticked slightly more positively or slightly less negatively, depending on how you wanna look at it.

[00:27:09] Josh Blank: In August, from June, uh, and then as we move ahead here at October, they’ve ticked back up in that negative direction again. And the salience of the issues of the economy and the border in particular have just continued to sort of stay front and center for. Too many voters in a lot of ways when you have a Democrat in the White House and Democrats in control of Congress.

[00:27:27] Josh Blank: And when you look at our evaluations of Biden among registered voters, among likely voters, especially on these two key issues, the environment, uh, I mean not the, the the economic environment. So, you know, the economy and inflation and then the, and then the border. They’re in the tank. I mean, they’re just, they’re terrible.

[00:27:42] Josh Blank: They’re terrible among independents. Okay. At best among Democrats. And so, you know, for O’Rourke and, and company, the goal was to say, No, no, no. Let’s talk about, let’s talk about the grid, let’s talk about Aldi, let’s talk about abortion. Let’s talk about the local policy, you know, the, the state [00:28:00] policy environment, and make this right.

[00:28:01] Josh Blank: The stewardship critique. The stewardship critique. You know, the summer gave a little bit of a reprieve because you couldn’t not look at those things. I mean, I don’t think anybody had a choice whether that was what you were interested or not. But as we’ve come out of that, into the, into the fall, And these other two issues of taking over.

[00:28:15] Josh Blank: I think, I think you see this in Abbot’s messaging. They’ve sort of flipped to more focusing back on, you know, let’s, let’s make sure we’re doing keeping Texas better than the United States. Let’s make sure we’re, you know, sending a message to Joe Biden. You know, let’s make sure about the border, about the border, about the economy.

[00:28:29] Josh Blank: And so you know that that message seems to be winning out, which is, you know, not surprising and in like a, an increasingly nationalized environment. Right? Yeah. Josh,

[00:28:37] Daron Shaw: what was Biden’s approval number was 38, 30 9%. Oh, I have to go back and, Yeah. Yeah. Let’s say it’s 38%, which I think is pretty much where it is.

[00:28:45] Daron Shaw: There’s some interesting analyses lately that. That talk about the de democratic candidates statewide races, so Senate elections and gubernatorial elections, ability to outpace the president’s. Mm-hmm. approval rating. And essentially the idea is that there’s an upper, an upper boundary of [00:29:00] about five or 6% that if you’re running five or 6% above what the president’s getting and approval, you’re, that’s about as, as good as you can do.

[00:29:07] Daron Shaw: And so O’Rourke’s, you know, clocking in at, you know, 43%, he’s, he’s running, if, if those numbers are right, 39 was a total point. 39. So he is at four. So he is four points. Better than, than Biden. So he is at the upper end of what you could expect a Democrat to do in this particular environment. And I, I, I take those analyses seriously.

[00:29:26] Daron Shaw: I think they’re pretty instructive and I think they’re, they’re probably not great news for, for Warnock in Georgia and, and Federman and Pennsylvania and some other places. But, um, just to reiterate what Josh is saying, I mean, the statewide issue. 33% said border or immigration, border security, immigration’s their top issue.

[00:29:42] Daron Shaw: 16% said inflation or the economy. Right? So, you know, combine those, that’s basically 50%. Yeah. On the other hand, abortion 6%. Um, and even there, you know, if you look at the candidate ratings, so you know, people think you know who’s better to handle the economy [00:30:00] inflation, Abbott or O’Rourke, Abbots plus 11 on border security, Abbots plus 12 on abortion.

[00:30:06] Daron Shaw: O’Rourke is up for and on guns for gun violence. They’re even, so, and this is something I think we talked about earlier, which is the best, the Democrat, and I think this is true nationally, the best the Democrats have been able to do is change the, the channel. But there’s an old guy metaphor. Very good.

[00:30:24] Daron Shaw: Change the channel for at least a few minutes. Minutes, Yeah. , Yeah. With the remote thingy, um, to issues where they’re not dominating, they’re just sort of slight, you know, they’re, they’re sort of competitive. Maybe even have a very slight advantage, which is a heck of a lot better than running on issues where you’re just getting decimated and, and right now the economy and immigration.

[00:30:46] Daron Shaw: The Democrats just aren’t competitive. Well,

[00:30:48] Josh Blank: I, I mean, the thing is, here in Texas in particular, I mean, they don’t have a message. I mean, I would just, you know, now we’re getting to the critical phase of the podcast. I mean, first, you know, if you look at the data just real quick before we do that, you know, we look at the RV pool in August [00:31:00] on the issues and who they trust more.

[00:31:01] Josh Blank: And then we look broadly kind of across the board at the, at the LV pool in, in October on the issues. When we go into this, we’d say a slightly more engaged group of people. So I think the, the don’t knows drop off or either O’Rourke about cross all issues, gains about a point, maybe two points. And ABA gains about five.

[00:31:19] Josh Blank: Yeah. Yeah. Five or six. And so, and then to draw this out over, that’s just, you know, I think part of this is to say if your biggest concern is the economy or the border, and I think as I’m sitting here thinking about this, and I had a conversation with a Democratic friend over the weekend about this a little bit, you know, what’s that?

[00:31:32] Josh Blank: What’s, uh, what’s, what’s the O’Rourke plan? Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you know, and again, I think if those are the most important issues, it’s kind of hard to change the subject to something completely different, which I think they’re finding. And so, you know, why wouldn’t you maintain the status quo at this point?

[00:31:47] Josh Blank: Cause at least you know with that. But, you know, property taxes are, they’re gonna try to cut property taxes. . Right. And we’re gonna see a, you know, a muscular Texas approach to the border. Yeah. That’s an answer. Even if you don’t agree with it, you know what it is. Right. The

[00:31:59] Daron Shaw: one, [00:32:00] one interesting thing, let’s throw, you know, a little bit of shade at the Republicans for once in this, you know, kind, kind of tough, I’m sure for Democratic listeners, but I can do it

[00:32:08] Josh Blank: at the end.

[00:32:09] Josh Blank: Yeah, well,

[00:32:09] Daron Shaw: I can do it at the end. Abbott. Abbott and O’Rourke. Basically even on property taxes. Yeah. As a, as a issue handling thing. Yeah. Which, which surprised me a little bit, but then again, not so much. Um, Well,

[00:32:21] Jim Henson: it’s funny, I mean, I gave a, I was on a panel for, at, you know, the Texas Taxpayers Association, which has been one of the people that are very focused on this.

[00:32:30] Jim Henson: And, you know, I mentioned, you know, there was a discussion on the panel and in the room about, you know, the agenda next time and what property taxes would look. You know, and I did say Paul Betten court was in the building, but not in the room at the time. That, um, you know, as much as Republicans have talked and tried to do things about property taxes, you know, the delivery has been, Not very well received, put it this way.

[00:32:59] Jim Henson: [00:33:00] Very skeptically received among voters per our polling. And that expectations are not high, that they’re gonna do much. Yeah. You know, and you know, I, So yeah, I mean the property tax thing is a really interesting example. I think that, you know, to the point of how familiar this looks and the kind of, And last week when we were talking about this, Josh, I think we were talking about the last poll, and it’s even more so this poll that.

[00:33:24] Jim Henson: You know, for all the things that have happened, for all the changes we’ve seen in politics in the last few years, as unstable as it, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You look at these, these, you know, issue, you know the issue salience in your vote. And it’s a very familiar story. You’ve got 60% of Republicans saying immigration and border security.

[00:33:44] Jim Henson: Another 18 saying, The economy, just take that immigration and border security number at 60%. The Democrats top three choices, abortion, gun violence, environment, uh, climate. Don’t add up to [00:34:00] 60%, right? Classic democratic problem in terms of, you know, how you craft your message, what the argument’s gonna be, how you’re gonna motivate voters if you’re thinking about it.

[00:34:11] Jim Henson: Not just in terms of partisanship, but through the, through the template of issues there. There was

[00:34:15] Daron Shaw: an interesting, uh, article last week by, uh, three or four Democratic pollsters, Selinda Lake, Stan Greenberg, I think a couple others were authors of this. And it was, it was sort of interesting spin at the top end, which is like, we are well positioned to achieve a historic victory, which I thought was okay.

[00:34:31] Daron Shaw: I need to move to paragraph two at this point, but paragraph two was, well, maybe paragraph four. Yeah. Um, was an effort to. Identify and articulate a democratic economic message. And it was essentially, um, look at all these fat cat corporations and businesses that have made money out the pandemic and, and supply chain issues and stuff like that, which I think is probably the best you can do under these circum and, and certainly these sort of populous messages do well.[00:35:00]

[00:35:00] Daron Shaw: But that’s been. Utterly absent from kind of democratic rhetoric. Yeah. In Texas, and I don’t, I don’t even know how well it would play this time around in Texas. I’m a little skeptical it would do as well as it does nationally, but to Josh’s point, at least it’s a message. Yeah, and

[00:35:14] Josh Blank: I mean, I think this just, you know, this speaks to the, the, the political.

[00:35:17] Josh Blank: Just, you know, dumpster fire that inflation is, right? Yeah. Cause I mean, the parties aren’t practice. I mean, especially if you’re the party in power, what are you gonna say? Cause it’s not that people don’t have jobs, right? That’s not the issue at this point. The issue is that, is that every time they go and spend their money, they’re mad.

[00:35:31] Josh Blank: Yeah. And that’s something you can fix overnight. That’s not something that infrastructure’s gonna fix. That’s not something that you can just kind of in turns

[00:35:38] Daron Shaw: it on. I think this is a really good point, which is neither party and the Democrat, it’s just more acute problem for the Democrats because they.

[00:35:44] Daron Shaw: The party in power. Right. But typically when Democrats get into power, they pass a lot of programs that spend money. And when people say like, Well, the economy’s the real issue, they can point to those things and say, Well see, we spent money and that generates jobs and see, so we are doing something to address those economic [00:36:00] concerns you have?

[00:36:00] Daron Shaw: Yeah. And Republicans cut taxes and do the same thing. Well, inflation’s a different animal and it’s tough to say. Yeah. Well, what’s your economic plan? Well, we spend a lot of. Yeah. And people go, Well wait a sec, . Well, you know, I was, and then, you know, very smart economists tell us how stupid we are for not seeing that.

[00:36:15] Daron Shaw: These are totally unrelated, which I, I’m still sort of mystified about. But, uh, yeah.

[00:36:19] Jim Henson: Uh, Speaker Pelosi was on the morning shows trying to manage that. Critique and a, and at least an appearance that I saw over the weekend. And they’re not managing the, And I look, it’s a hard one and I was gonna say it is, it

[00:36:30] Daron Shaw: is for, from both sides.

[00:36:31] Daron Shaw: I just think it’s, it’s inherently, Democrats own the keys to the car right now. And so the logical problem is theirs, rather than Republicans explaining how tax cuts are gonna help

[00:36:40] Jim Henson: inflation. And I think, you know, and it’s interesting to see where that national environment is meeting the kind of organic state environment that we’ve talked, that we’ve been talking about.

[00:36:48] Jim Henson: And there was, you know, maybe a brief period in the late spring and. where it looked like that might not meet in the right way for Republicans here. Right. And I think we [00:37:00] we’re, this poll illustrates how much we’re past that. So last five minutes, Darren’s gotta go. He’s got a, he’s got an important appointment.

[00:37:06] Jim Henson: I don’t know what it is, but I

[00:37:07] Daron Shaw: assume, I just assume it’s, it’s another poll. Everything, everything Darren does is important. Yeah. It’s another polling appointment. Well, yeah.

[00:37:12] Jim Henson: Yes. Um, so let’s, let’s do a quick round about what really interested you in the poll, Darren. Uh, I’ll

[00:37:18] Daron Shaw: start with a number. So we haven’t gone at Yeah, yeah.

[00:37:20] Daron Shaw: We’ve, uh, we asked a series of questions about, uh, concerns about the actual, uh, functioning of the election, uh, you know, apropo after 2020 and, um, you know, The problems we had with that election. We ask, uh, people about, uh, you know, a series of election concerns, including, uh, people who are not eligible, voting, people who are eligible not being allowed to vote.

[00:37:40] Daron Shaw: So voter fraud, voter suppression, all these things. And the item that far and away scored the highest and highest here, meaning the people expressed the most concern, identified it as, as potentially the most serious problem was the spread of misinformation on social. Um, we had 51% who said it was a, an extremely serious [00:38:00] problem, I think Extremely or very serious problem.

[00:38:02] Daron Shaw: Extremely. Yeah. Right. Um, and it blows everything else away. The, the next highest scores for extremely serious are in the, the mid to high thirties. Right. Um, I found that really fascinating with all the talk, you know, Republicans focusing on voter fraud, Democrats focusing on voter suppression, that if you ask people, now, of course there’s a partisan divide, which is Democrats think Republicans are falling for this misinformation.

[00:38:22] Daron Shaw: Republicans think Democrats are. But I still think the point is why not by partisan shot? Exactly. That’s what it looks like now, guys. Yeah. But, but there seems to be common ground in today’s polarized America that social media is a real problem or information through social media. So that, that caught my eye.

[00:38:38] Daron Shaw: I about you, Josh.

[00:38:40] Josh Blank: You know, we did a little bit of, uh, of issue stuff. Uh, You know, in addition to sort of figuring out, you know, the candidate kind of issue ownership stuff that we talked about here and just at the end, just so we could have a little sense of direction on some of this stuff. And it’s hard for me, you know, not to think about what the interpretation of this election is gonna be.

[00:38:56] Josh Blank: You know, in the sense that if we, let’s just say, you know, we’re talking about now is, you know, Republicans are probably [00:39:00] gonna win at the top of the ticket, probably gonna, you know, almost. I’ll say, I’ll say this right now, a hundred percent sure they’re gonna have a majority in the Texas legislature and the House and the Senate.

[00:39:08] Josh Blank: And so then, you know, it’s hard, like a lot of people not, you know, at least in the people who listen to this, not to already be looking ahead to the 2023 session. And I think it’s gonna be interesting, you know, how is this election interpreted? I mean, Jim brought up. You know how the 2018 election was interpreted as sort of a, as a very close shave, and then the next session was very much, let’s focus on some of the bread and butter issues.

[00:39:27] Josh Blank: Let’s focus on public ed, finance and property taxes. And then, you know, going to, obviously lessons was very conservative. And what I’m wondering is, is you know, what the next session is gonna look like in light of what we see in some of these policy numbers. So for example, you know, on gun control laws, 55% of Texas registered voters said that they wanted to see gun control laws.

[00:39:46] Josh Blank: More strict than they are now. This is, uh, the highest share that I’ve ever said this, uh, in the poll, going back to 2015 on abortion, 50% of voters say they’d like to see the abortion laws in Texas made less strict. This is, again, [00:40:00] by far the highest, going back to 2013 when we started asking this question.

[00:40:04] Josh Blank: So again, obviously, you know, and this is in to where we started in some ways, you know, to those who would say like, well, you’re not capturing, you know, people who are, you know, chinned up about abortion or you’re not. Yeah, but you look at these numbers and, and it’s in there, this policy, the policy response is in there.

[00:40:18] Josh Blank: It’s not ma making it through to the electorate. It’s not making it through in the sense of, in any way. That’s not reinforcing, I think the views that people already have. But going to the next step, I’m curious to see what, what, what are people saying about what happens after the election and what that means for the session and policy in the state.

[00:40:34] Josh Blank: I’m already over the election basically. . Yeah, .

[00:40:38] Jim Henson: Um, Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot to be kind of, I mean, that, how that goes is an interesting question. Um, you know, I mean, I, I think from my thing, I, you know, a, I was sort of noticing that El I wanted to flag the election battery that, that Darren flagged simply cuz we’re starting early voting today.

[00:40:54] Jim Henson: And if you take the extremely serious and the somewhat serious [00:41:00] responses in the, in, in all of that problem, more than half are, you know, expecting problems across the. , Right? So as early voting starts, we are going to see attention paid to things happening in the election that are either, which there are problems or not.

[00:41:16] Jim Henson: Remains to be seen. But I think it’s fair to, to, to expect there to be some problems in some places, as we see first time implementation of the, the, the voting, the new voting laws that were passed in 2021. You know, and I think what this tells me is that there are a lot of voters that are ready for this.

[00:41:34] Jim Henson: I mean, people are primed. And I think that’s gonna be really interesting. I, you know, since Darren, since Darren sort of hit on my thing. I’m gonna add one more thing before we get out, and that’s just a circle back to something we talked about earlier in terms of what is, you know, what, what is on the electorate’s mind.

[00:41:50] Jim Henson: We talked about. You know, the, the legal problems of Attorney General Paxton, we talked about the prevalence of, of immigration and the psyche of a lot of voters. [00:42:00] You know, we have this battery that sometimes we use and sometimes we don’t. It’s kind of like a heat check where we ask people, How much have you heard about these things that have.

[00:42:07] Jim Henson: Been in the news to some degree, the share of people that said that they had heard a lot about the legal problems of Attorney General Paxson was 20% the share. That said they had heard a lot about the number of migrants attempting to cross the US Mexico border was 50 something more than 50%. . Mm-hmm. . So, you know, the environment that’s out there, um, is really helping to reinforce these things.

[00:42:31] Jim Henson: So with Darren about to go. I want to thank Darren for taking the time to be here, Josh, for all the work you did on the poll Of course. And for being here today. To our excellent production team in the dev studio in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin. And to our listeners, thank you for listening.

[00:42:46] Jim Henson: Remember, you can find all the data that we referenced today, much, much more, including our pole tracker of other poles, the two or three poles released than the last 24 hours, I think. Um, and much more at the Texas [00:43:00] Politics Project website. That’s Texas politics dot u texas.edu. So thanks again for listening.

[00:43:06] Jim Henson: We’ll be back soon with another second reading podcast.

[00:43:11] Outro: The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.