October 31st, 2023 – Texas Public Opinion Toward Vouchers and Ken Paxton in the Latest UT/Texas Politics Project Poll

[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to the second reading podcast from the University of Texas at Austin. The Republicans were in the Democratic Party because there was only one party. Sir, I tell people on a regular basis, there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called Texas. The problem is these departures from the Constitution, they have become the norm. At what point? Must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room.

[00:00:36] Jim Henson: And welcome back to the Second Reading Podcast. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Happy to be joined by Josh Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project. How are we, Josh, as the third special session winds down?

[00:00:52] Josh Blank: Oh, I thought you were going to say on this All Hallows Eve.

[00:00:55] Jim Henson: I should say Happy Halloween, I suppose, but I, you know, I’m, I’m more spooked by the session, I guess, than I am by Halloween.

[00:01:02] Josh Blank: Is the day before Halloween All Hallows Eve Eve?

[00:01:06] Jim Henson: I don’t know. All Hallows Eve squared?

[00:01:09] Josh Blank: There we go. Math. Okay, anyway. The special session, well, I mean, the special session, yeah, sure.

[00:01:14] Josh Blank: It’s not, I mean, it’s scary to some people. It’s kind of been a little slow going as far as I’m concerned. You know,

[00:01:21] Jim Henson: well, yeah, not a lot of kids coming around this a lot of kids now. So last week when we met we focused on the election on election related results In the October UT Texas Politics Project Poll, and you know, we planned at the time, and I will follow through on returning to some of the non election, or at least not directly election related results from that poll.

[00:01:45] Jim Henson: And particularly, um… You know, in one particular policy areas and then in response, I think, to the, I think we’ll have to look at, at, at attitudes in response to the Paxton trial and impeachment. We checked back in on that. We talked about that briefly, I think, last week, but not in any depth, um, when, uh, we had Dr.

[00:02:08] Jim Henson: Shaw here. So the third special session in its final week or so, you know, I, let’s start by looking at what the poll told us about what was the initial impetus for the set for the session. And as, as we’ve said, there are three big topics on, on the session agenda, but it was all really supposed to be focused, at least the, you know, per the governor’s promises and per what was in the ether on.

[00:02:38] Jim Henson: School vouchers, savings account, you know, uh, uh, schools, uh, education, savings accounts, whatever you want to call them. So you know, just a little bit of background before we jump into the polling data. You know, as we’re recording this, and I, I don’t expect this to change, but I’ve been wrong before, the House, the Senate, the governor are in an impasse.

[00:03:00] Jim Henson: Um, the House has a bill that. At least has, you know, introduced a bill that looks a lot like one bargaining strategy that we expected, a kind of omnibus bill that creates a limited voucher program while also providing for some increased spending on public education, including raises for For some teachers,

[00:03:24] Jim Henson: yeah, and I think and I think critically, it also ties the the voucher amount to, uh, the funding amount, the average funding amount per student in public schools as opposed to sort of just creating just an out and out.

[00:03:36] Jim Henson: Basically, here’s the here’s here’s the price or here’s the voucher. You know, dollar figure,

[00:03:40] Jim Henson: which is much more what the Senate bill does, right? Right. So the state Senate approved, you know, has already moved a bill that would let parents use 8, 000 of public money for private education and other costs in particular with some limits for homeschooling, et cetera.

[00:03:57] Jim Henson: Um, and, and that bill does not have any increase in public, in funding for public schools. That bill has been passed in the Senate, sent to the house, has not been referred to committee. So, you know, as of now, it is, it is sort of nowhere’s bill and on that house bill, there have been lots of negotiations apparently between the house or at least some negotiations between the house and the governor, but the governor simply dissatisfied has said he’s dissatisfied with where the house bill is and so will not add what he needs to add to the special session call per house rules for that bill to

[00:04:34] Jim Henson: move.

[00:04:34] Jim Henson: Right. I think that’s important here. I mean, the, you know, the, The, the governor basically said, you know, basically as this was going along, you know, I will, I will consider adding basically, you know, more general funding, you know, to the call once you all pass basically the voucher bill, the house sort of up the ante and said, well, what if we just create a bill that creates a voucher program and increases funding, but then they kind of threw their hands and said, but we can’t really do anything with this until you put this on the call.

[00:05:01] Jim Henson: So what do you want to do?

[00:05:02] Jim Henson: And we should add that, you know, there is a side argument going on in, um, Among capital insiders or, you know, pran practitioners that says that, you know, this is a situation created by a ruling in the house on weather. On on on just how bound by the call the house should be that either chamber should be.

[00:05:29] Josh Blank: Yeah, I mean, that’s

[00:05:30] Jim Henson: funny. You know, well, you know, I mean, I think it’s a real thing. I mean, you know, you’re hearing it from different.

[00:05:36] Josh Blank: No, I just love the, I just, I just love the idea. This is a situation created by argument when it’s like, Oh, you mean like using the rules to your desired end points or negotiating positions?

[00:05:48] Josh Blank: I mean, it’s kind of, it’s kind of called legislating

[00:05:50] Jim Henson: also. Well, but, well, I don’t know our rules from the parliamentarian legislating.

[00:05:57] Josh Blank: Well, I mean, this gets, I mean, we’re going down, you know, the parliamentarian hired by the leadership. And I mean, yeah, so I mean,

[00:06:02] Jim Henson: it’s a little, you know, the precedent, I mean, you know, I mean, I, you know, the argument being, and again, I’m not really taking a side here, but that I’m not either.

[00:06:09] Jim Henson: I’m just, you know, that. So, you know, once you make a ruling about, once the parliamentarian hands down an interpretation of the rules that relates to what the governor can do, well, then that does give the governor some, you know, in this case, it gives the governor more leverage. And so, you know, whether that’s the case or, you know, whether You know, there’s precedent for that or not, and you’ll hear arguments on both sides of that.

[00:06:36] Jim Henson: That is kind of a side argument that’s going on here in terms of the House saying, well, we can’t do anything until the governor tells us what to do. It’s like, well, you gave the governor that specific power in this sense, so what are we to make of that? Now, how strategic that is and all of that, you know, not informed.

[00:06:57] Jim Henson: So, when we look at public opinion on where this is, you know, the big takeaway in the overall scope of the data is that really not much changed from the August poll, right? Yeah,

[00:07:09] Josh Blank: I mean, you know, I think on the one hand it’s really easy to sort of dismiss that finding In the sense that like you could say, well, of course, you know, why would it change?

[00:07:18] Josh Blank: But I think, you know, it’s an open question. I mean, one of the one of the things is like a lot of polling results. Sometimes people say, well, yeah, and I said, Yeah, but did you really know that for a fact? Right? And I think, you know, the reason we say that is because, you know, I mean, we’ve talked to here, you know, maybe ad nauseam, I don’t think ad nauseam, but maybe close to it.

[00:07:33] Josh Blank: And we certainly written about, you know, the extent to which vouchers are just not a high salience policy for a lot of people. You know, it’s a priority for the people it’s a priority for, it’s just very likely that that the share of voters is very, very small. And if you want to hear that argument or read it, we’ve, it’s all over the place.

[00:07:48] Josh Blank: We’ve made it right. Um, you know, but at the same time, that’s different saying, okay, let’s measure where vouchers are as a priority when sort of nobody’s talking about it versus when it becomes the primary, you know, one of the primary subjects, if not the primary subject of a special session, you know, the governor is still pushing this policy.

[00:08:07] Josh Blank: I think he was out, you know, in sort of, you know, more rural area or a suburban area on a. on Friday night at a private school, basically rallying for this again. Yes. And the question becomes, you know, does that message get through to voters? Do voters start to say, Oh, this, you know, because this is a priority among elites or certain elites that I follow, maybe this should be a priority for me.

[00:08:26] Josh Blank: And then, you know, you may say, well, that sounds stupid. Well, it’s not a lot of public opinion work. So just, you know, it’s not as stupid as it sounds, trust me. But you got to test that and what we found was, you know, really, there was almost no movement on this. You know, we asked about vouchers in the context of sort of, you know, just public education priorities.

[00:08:41] Josh Blank: Generally, we should say when we’re talking about priorities overall, this doesn’t even, you know, sort of register in any sort of obvious way. I mean, public education doesn’t even really register very high up on the list. And if it does, it’s mostly Democrats. So there’s that when we ask about. Public education priorities in particular, and here we asked about, you know, how important was the legislature to school safety?

[00:09:03] Josh Blank: Curriculum concerns or what students are taught teacher pay and retention parental rights public school Financing which is sort of used to be I mean one of the big kind of buckets that we would sort of think about a lot It’s the structural issue. It is the structural issue. I mean when you think about you know right now I mean, I have my early voting sticker on we raise the homestead exemption.

[00:09:20] Josh Blank: I mean that’s related to public school finance Right. Okay. Uh, you know, and, and also facility improvements, things like infrastructure for schools and then ESAs and vouchers, uh, school choice, really all, we threw all the terms in, which is actually probably the nicest way to put it in front of people. And only 25 percent of voters said that, uh, ESAs or vouchers were extremely important for the legislature to address.

[00:09:40] Josh Blank: That was below 80%. Every other issue we tested, and then we said, Well, okay, but what’s the most important we had? We did do

[00:09:46] Jim Henson: that differently in this in this poll, which we had done. We had not done in the previous poll. We asked people to talk about their do import the importance of these issues, but we didn’t put them.

[00:09:58] Josh Blank: Yeah. And so this poll, we had them evaluate each one individually and then head to head say, okay, what’s the most important, which we think is a really good way to make at least a considered choice. They’ve evaluated each one. And then they think, okay, what is the most important? Not surprisingly, school safety topped the list.

[00:10:12] Josh Blank: with 30 percent of voters saying that’s the most important. Then came teacher pay, 19%. Then curriculum, 14. Then parental rights, 12. Then financing at nine. Then finally, ESA vouchers at 7%, followed by facilities at six, which is basically statistically the same. So it’s still at the bottom of the list. Right.

[00:10:30] Jim Henson: Go ahead. No, you go ahead. Well, I was just going to say, I think there’s a good, you know, I mean, You know, a slight geek out sideline here, right, which is, well, I mean, just, you know, to call attention to how we, you know, it’s a, it’s a technique that we use a lot that we, and I think to good effect because it allows, as you say on, you know, the thing you said already, which is it allows us to sort of ask our respondents to think about it.

[00:10:57] Jim Henson: Right. You know, before we then say, okay, so, so, you know, you’re, you know, you’re putting the person in the mindset of saying, okay, let me think about these things on their own. Right. You know, in a context, but on their own, and then to make a judgment call between them. Right. And, and what it, and I think it gives us a more nuanced overall portrait.

[00:11:20] Jim Henson: Yeah. Because, you know, as you’ll notice, if, you know, the, the top ranking, the thing that got them the highest importance ranking in the individual rankings, school safety gets a ranking, you know, about 60 percent or not a ranking, but an assessment in which we find that 60 percent find it extremely important.

[00:11:38] Jim Henson: Extremely important. But, you know, there are cross currents here, so when you ask people to choose what is the most important, the highest ranked one is only

[00:11:49] Josh Blank: 30%. Right. And that’s important, and I think, you know,

[00:11:51] Jim Henson: what you could say is… And again, that’s a geek out point, but I think, I think sometimes I’ve had people ask me, like, it’s weird to me, why does it, why is it, if you look at this ranking, it’s so high, or this assessment, it’s so high, but then the other one is so low.

[00:12:04] Jim Henson: It’s just a matter of the math, but… It makes, and it makes sense, but it does show you that there are cross currents,

[00:12:11] Josh Blank: competing priorities. Well, and a flip way to look, another way to look at that is, you know, well, 25 percent of one in four voters would say it’s extremely important for the legislature to take on or establish an ESA or voucher program.

[00:12:20] Josh Blank: Only 7 percent say it’s the most important. So that cuts both ways. Right, exactly. Um. Yeah, exactly. And so I mean, you know, and again, going to the whole like, well, you know, is this really interesting? Well, you know, I mean, look, I think this is one of the things we’re talking about how it’s a low savings policy areas.

[00:12:33] Josh Blank: And you could imagine if we asked about, you know, again, let’s say we had come up with another list of seven priorities on a different policy area that people don’t think about at all. Let’s just say, you know, municipal employee, uh, pension funds, right? Yeah. You know, and we gave people seven. We said, think about this.

[00:12:49] Josh Blank: What’s the most important for the legislature to dress? If state leaders were talking about like pension reform and specific aspects of pension reform, I would say I would, I would even be willing to make a bet that what they were talking about would probably percolate to the top of the list absent, you know, sort of Other thoughts going on the difference here is that, you know, even though a lot of people aren’t affected by the public education system directly, they do have thoughts about it, right?

[00:13:12] Josh Blank: And they do have reactions to it. And there’s a reason that school safety is at the top because we have some real visceral reactions to some of the things that have been happening in schools. I think the same thing is true with curriculum, parental rights and teacher pay to some extent. Right. But this issue just sort of falls out kind of around the bottom.

[00:13:28] Josh Blank: You know, even against again, any other thing really that we could be talking about in the public education space. I mean, just to add to this, you know, a question that we put on here, we’ve asked many, many times over the years separately is about state government spending on public ed. And what we find is a plurality, you know, pretty much uniformly and You know, for many, many, many measures of this, we’ll say the state is spending too little on public education.

[00:13:52] Josh Blank: And so, you know, there’s a part of this, which there’s sort of this overarching sense that, you know, Texas isn’t really spending enough on public ed. You know, I think Republicans are more satisfied than Democrats, and you have more Republicans saying, you know, we spent about the right amount. But in general, there’s a sense of the state’s not really investing enough in the public ed system.

[00:14:06] Josh Blank: When we say, okay, well, what should they be working on? You know, this voucher is not, you know, the voucher bill is not something that really either percolates or… Or even really can be substituted for this idea of, well, it’s more spending. We’re putting more money into the system or we’re, you know, we’re, we’re improving the system in some way.

[00:14:23] Jim Henson: Well, and it is interesting that you do see a, you know, some, I mean, there’s a lot going on here as you’re kind of implying there in terms of Republican attitudes on spending, you know, it’s been a pretty frequent talking point that. You know, school districts spend their money on the wrong things, particularly among Republicans in the last.

[00:14:45] Josh Blank: There’s another really common talking point that’s used, which says, well, you know, look at the percentage of the Texas budget that goes towards public ed and there’s sort of a, there’s sort of, I love that one. I mean, Dan Patrick says that a lot and I think that’s interesting and it’s. Perfectly valid to say, look, it’s a, it’s a large percentage of the budget.

[00:14:59] Josh Blank: Now it’s also constitutionally required that we have the system. So there’s that piece of it. I mean, they can only, you know, it can only be made so small, but when you say, well, you know, we’re spending whatever filling your percentage. That sounds like a lot, 50, 60, 80 percent of our budget on, on X, you know, the relevant question is not, well, you know, is that the right amount for the need?

[00:15:20] Josh Blank: Right. And in a low taxes, low services state like Texas, you know, when you say, Oh, well, we’re spending so much of our budget on public education. You kind of say, Okay. But like, is that the right amount? And a lot of people in this debate are actually now saying, well, we’re not so sure. I mean, one of the interesting things that I think has kind of come up around this debate is like, you know, the 8, 000 that, you know, the Senate has put out, a lot of people said, you know, state money going to like, like per student spending is only around 4, 000 and the rest is made up by the federal government and other sort of sources.

[00:15:46] Josh Blank: And so you’re actually almost, I mean, talking about picking winners and losers or who you’re incentivizing to do what, you know, if you really are taking strict economic arguments, you’re actually creating an incentive for people to take that money and run somewhere else. Yeah. But the other piece of this is, and I think you see this in the coverage, you know, about this low salesman.

[00:16:02] Josh Blank: I was talking about the governor being, you know, at a private school for Friday night lights. And he was basically say, I mean, one of the quotes that kind of stuck there. And this isn’t an exact quote. I don’t have it written down. So bear with me. But the basic quote was, you know, Basically, he said something to the effect of, you know, members say, you know, they’re not hearing this from you.

[00:16:19] Josh Blank: You need to make them hear about this. But I think, you know, hidden in that is exactly what’s instead of course, they’re not hearing about this from their voters because it’s not a priority. And the other piece of it is going back to the sort of other piece that we’ve talked about a lot is, I mean, according to the T.

[00:16:33] Josh Blank: A., there’s about 250, 000 students who are currently in private schools, some of whom depend on the bill detail, some of whom are all of whom could technically apply for this 8, 000, you know, tuition subsidy basically for Kids were already in private schools and that sounds like a lot of kids and it is a lot of kids be pretty expensive, but the flip side of it is it’s kind of, you know, grains of sand in the ocean when you’re talking about.

[00:16:56] Josh Blank: You know again, they’re not going to be I mean, there’s actually two interesting things about this one It’s gonna be grains of sand in the ocean when you’re talking about the entire pool of voters But also where are these kids probably concentrated? Yeah, they’re probably concentrated in urban areas that have educational options that have private schools where honestly most of the representation is democratic and you know, they can make all the noise they want about this.

[00:17:17] Josh Blank: Those folks aren’t, those folks aren’t shifting. Or suburban

[00:17:20] Jim Henson: areas where it’s, you know, competitive. Right. Or somewhat more competitive and, you know, a much more contention, a much more contentious issue in some ways.

[00:17:30] Josh Blank: I think the polling data actually bears that out. I mean, I think we see that, you know, significantly, you know, we see significantly more, uh, divergent views when we look in the suburbs compared to in rural parts or urban parts of the state with respect to vouchers.

[00:17:42] Jim Henson: And in terms of, you know, your kind of reference to Lieutenant Governor Patrick, and probably more importantly in terms of what I have in mind, the governor, you know, Republican voters don’t look that different. Right. I mean, They’re top ranked items and the relative importance is difference, but where vouchers falls in the ranking is actually remarkably similar.

[00:18:03] Josh Blank: Yeah, only 9 percent of Republican voters said that vouchers or establishing a voucher program should be the most important public education priority for the legislature. Uh, the three issues that really led the list for Republicans were the issues that have continued to lead the list. 25 percent said school safety, 21 percent said curriculum, and 20 percent said parental rights.

[00:18:22] Josh Blank: Again, not to make the same point again, but when you think about curriculum and parental rights, what you’re talking about there is you’re talking about what’s going on inside the public schools. Not about establishing a new program to take kids out of the public schools. You

[00:18:37] Jim Henson: know, and as I think about this, I mean, we have been talking for, you know, a couple of years now, probably, um, about the long term play and.

[00:18:51] Jim Henson: Embedded in, Republican, you know, criticisms of curriculum and, and this concept of parental rights that has become front and center. I think we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, Virginia governor’s race in 21, et cetera, post COVID, all of that. And, you know, when you look at these results,

[00:19:16] Jim Henson: You know, it makes me think about how we were hypothesizing, and I shouldn’t even drag you into this. I mean, you know, I mean, I was hypothesizing a couple years ago, and I was certainly not alone in this. But there was an idea here that, you know, I mean, I think that curriculum and, you know, that the emphasis on curriculum and parental rights in the schools was likely to have some kind of relationship to the arguments for vouchers and provide a vehicle for that, a vehicle for its resurrection.

[00:19:46] Jim Henson: And it, looking at these numbers, I mean, I, I think You know, the, you know, the, the modified hypothesis now is that it probably did provide a vehicle for the resurrection of that, of the voucher issue by, you know, raising or fanning doubts about the public schools that weren’t directly related at all to my mind, to vouchers, as you said, they were about issues internal to public education and, and K through 12 education as an institution that even bled into higher ed, you know, in terms of curriculum, DI and all of this, but it, You know, it doesn’t seem to have worked.

[00:20:26] Jim Henson: Yeah. I mean, I guess, you know, at least so far now, you know, maybe, you know, Very long game. Yeah. And you know, I think voucher proponents might say, yeah, but if you look and we, I think we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, they’ll get the Rare Amendment. You know, the margin of victory of that amendment, that is the amendment that’s been the heat check in the Texas House for gauging opposition to vouchers or voucher like programs, you know, the margin of victory of that amendment has narrowed.

[00:20:57] Jim Henson: for sure, for sure. I mean, you know, it was reduced, you know, between what is it? 2019 2023.

[00:21:04] Josh Blank: Yeah. And I mean, I think, you know, during the regular session, you heard you heard Senator Creighton. I mean, I mean, he made the explicit case. He’s, you know, once they said to why, you know, again, and the bill during the regular session that included the voucher program also included basically that the parental rights and the curriculum package into this big, you know, the This big omnibus thing.

[00:21:21] Josh Blank: We talked at the time about how this probably actually made it harder to pass. But, but Senator Crane made this specific argument. He said, look, you know, I’m hearing about this as a suite of issues. Like this, this goes together. That parental rights, uh, curriculum concerns, and, and, you know, school choice all go together.

[00:21:37] Josh Blank: And I mean, the thing about that was, is, you know… Maybe he like, I don’t know what he was here. I’m necessary. But, you know, I think on its face, that’s problematic, just in the sense of, you know, you just think about, so who are these? So you’ve got these voters with kids in the public school coming in and saying, you know, I want more rights for my kids for my, I want more rights personally over my child education.

[00:21:56] Josh Blank: I want you all to put more limitations on the public school teachers. Also, I want to take my kids out next session. Yeah. Right. I mean, that’s just not, I mean, you know, if you just sort of take a step back and say, you know, I don’t,

[00:22:05] Jim Henson: I don’t think, I think, you know, I, I think, you know, it’s the kind of.

[00:22:09] Jim Henson: situation in which I can see the conceptual… Yeah, no, the conceptual logic is beautiful. But whether it was actually playing out that way, I, you know, doesn’t, you know, the public communion data does not seem to be, To bear out the idea that, you know, to be as generous as possible… whoever Senator Creighton or other advocates of this conceptual move we’re hearing from don’t seem to have been particularly representative, certainly of the overall population, but even of their constituents statewide anyway, again.

[00:22:43] Jim Henson: Yeah, I think that’s right. What Senator Creighton is hearing in his district, I’m

[00:22:47] Josh Blank: not informed. And there’s a couple questions that we’ve asked, you know, over time that I think sort of also speak to this, which is I think we asked at some point, I don’t love this question, I think we kind of killed it after we did it once, about, you know, basically, you know, parental involvement in public education, whether parents did have enough, you know, sort of rights or say or didn’t.

[00:23:02] Josh Blank: And generally we found, you know, most people thought that, as I recall, you know, basically, yeah, parents have enough say. It wasn’t like a big sort of groundswell of sort of this idea that… parents didn’t have say over their children’s education. On the flip side of that, at the end of the session, when we asked, you know, do you think the legislature has made schools safer?

[00:23:18] Josh Blank: And the answer was, you know, there was not a lot of confidence that the legislature had made schools safer. And so that’s the thing that’s kind of, to my mind, is sort of floating around there. Now I’m not saying they

[00:23:26] Jim Henson: can’t And that was after they Pass a

[00:23:28] Josh Blank: pretty big bill that was after they passed a pretty big bill.

[00:23:30] Josh Blank: And that’s also why I think, you know, one of the things in the other, the other Senate bill, Senate bill two, that would actually, you know, that would presumably add some limited funds to public education is basically taking all the school safety dollars and just doubling them. Just, I mean, that’s basically the shorthand of what that is saying.

[00:23:44] Josh Blank: Instead of 15, 000, we said 30, 000, right? Or, you know, it’s basically the bill. And I’m not saying you can’t do both. I’m not saying you can’t make schools safer and establish a program to have kids go into, into private schools. But I think, you know, when you’re, when you’re looking at sort of where the public’s orientation towards public education is, given that most of this public does not have kids.

[00:24:04] Josh Blank: in the schools, you know, they’re much more concerned about another school shooting, probably than they are about, you know, whether they can get kids into alternative educational

[00:24:12] Jim Henson: programs. Yeah. And I, and so I think, you know, the, the takeaway here to some degree is, you know, I think it’s easy and in some cases appropriate to look at this impasse and the, and the, you know, the recurring, you know, wrangling within the legislature and among the big three over public education.

[00:24:39] Jim Henson: As very, you know, very much an internal fight that, as we’ve seen, the public is not following the blow by blow in the way

[00:24:46] Josh Blank: we are. Yeah, you know, there’s a…

[00:24:49] Jim Henson: But they’re not going to be saved by a groundswell of, you know, pitchforks and torches marching on the legislature asking for, you know, if you don’t give us this voucher, you’re all out of there.

[00:25:03] Jim Henson: And, you know, that’s why… The governor is going to have is having to go around and kind of beat the bushes

[00:25:09] Josh Blank: Yeah, you know, it made me think about a campaign polling and here what i’m talking about It’s not necessarily like what we do with her running trial ballots I’m talking about the sort of people who do polling specifically for campaigns and what those those polls look like and one of the sort of Set pieces a lot of those surveys is to either talk about you know You know, whoever, you know, whoever they’re working for, whoever that candidate is, or the opponent and say, you know, well, if you knew that this person did this, would it make you more likely to vote for them?

[00:25:33] Josh Blank: Less likely to vote for them or would have no impact on your vote, right? And the idea is you kind of go through either some list of, you know, messages or tests or policies or votes, whatever it might be. And what you, what you kind of think about with this is you imagine, you know, okay, you’ve got incumbent Republican, you know.

[00:25:49] Josh Blank: Right. You know, in some sort of X urban area of the state, you run this poll and you say, well, you know, so and so voted for the biggest, you know, increase in border security funding. And, you know, Texas history, they voted to make it a crime to enter the state illegally. I mean, all the immigration stuff that’s on the ballot right now, you know, they voted for, you know, basically putting, you know, one of the biggest homestead exemption, you know, by more than doubling the homestead exemption, all these things like, um, They voted against, you know, establishing a school voucher program.

[00:26:18] Josh Blank: And you think to yourself, how do you think the voters are going to respond to these? And you think both about the direction and the intensity of this stuff and on all the other things that they’re, that they’re hitting and that they’re going to continue to hit, especially around the border. You’ve got strong.

[00:26:31] Josh Blank: strong, positive policy among Republican voters that is going to lead to, you know, in most cases, intense support, say, very likely by positive

[00:26:39] Jim Henson: policy. You mean affirmative and yeah,

[00:26:41] Josh Blank: affirmative policy that reaffirms sort of the commitment to border security and whatever else, right? And then on the other hand, with vouchers, you know, you sort of say, okay, well, so some, you know, again, I think Republicans are not only supportive of vouchers to there’s a Republican say, yeah, sure, you know, again, I say, yeah, sure.

[00:26:58] Josh Blank: Because of these other results we’re talking about. But if you basically found out that a member didn’t, you know, vote to or voted against establishing a voucher program or didn’t even do another one thing right now, there may not even be a vote, right? But let’s say, you know, they, they stood in the way of a voucher program.

[00:27:11] Josh Blank: Do you think that, you know, those Republican voters on average are going to be negatively predisposed? I’d say, yeah, I think probably negatively. Are they going to be? Yeah. You know, extremely just because they’re going to be very unlikely to support this candidate in the future, even given that they’ve done all these other things.

[00:27:24] Josh Blank: And I think the thing is, is that both from the regular session and actually because of the governor put more border security on the special session call, he’s almost provided them with even more cover on the issue that their voters actually care about. So in some ways, I’m actually just thinking about this now.

[00:27:39] Josh Blank: You do wonder to what extent that actually backfires because now they can say, yeah, we went in for the third special session. The second, the first two specials, you know, we did, we decreased your property taxes. One of the big issues, and you know what we did on the other special edition? We spent a ton more money on border security, we’re expanding the wall, we’re gonna, you know, we’re gonna have state police deporting people, and say, oh, what, didn’t we get to, yeah, we didn’t establish a voucher program.

[00:28:00] Josh Blank: You know, I

[00:28:01] Jim Henson: mean, well, I mean, you know, to a conversation we were, I mean, you know, and I think, well, you know, I mean, we anticipated this in terms of talking about why there was such an, you know, border security was such an, an immigration were such an expansive presence on the call. And we should note that there was, you know, the debate on, on.

[00:28:24] Jim Henson: Some of this legislation in the House late last week was extremely hot and extremely divisive and extremely emotional You know, and it’s you know And I think you know the scenario you’re talking about Makes a lot of sense and it kind of speaks to the question that we were talking about earlier today before, you know off air Which is you know if you look at the most likely outcome and we’ll maybe lay this out a little more detail in a future podcast of The failure to pass factory legislation and what following the mean results of, you know, of precedence, a relatively minimal or at least hard to confirm impact in the primaries.

[00:29:09] Jim Henson: Do people just kind of walk away from it? Cause it’s certainly not going to be, certainly very unlikely to be a general, a general election issue for anybody. So, you know, I mean, I think that coheres with what you’re saying.

[00:29:20] Josh Blank: Yeah, I mean, I mean just, just a, just the one thing that we’d said earlier, I want to put in here, which is, you know, I mean, if you think about it, right, so Abbott gets, you know, a bunch of border security stuff, he can sign and he’s not going to veto it.

[00:29:31] Josh Blank: They come back again, ya know, let’s say for another, for another special session on vouchers, ya know, which looks probably a lot like this one. Right. And then, you know, if Abbott is true to his word on this, then we move on. And as you said, you know, okay, there’ll be some primary challenges. They’ll, you know, some of the campaign will be based around this to what effect, you know, again, guess, probably minimal just based on history and what we know about the data.

[00:29:54] Josh Blank: And then and then we says our vouchers, a general election issue now.

[00:29:59] Jim Henson: Right.

[00:30:02] Josh Blank: So,

[00:30:03] Jim Henson: um, one more thing before we go, and so just, you know, yesterday, uh, just to switch gears here and tap into another body of data in, in the latest poll, uh, we’re recording, you know, late morning, Tuesday. Yesterday, Attorney General Ken Paxson was back in a, you know, regular court, shall we say, um, to be, you know, muted about it, uh, in his long delayed trial on security, on security fraud charges.

[00:30:35] Jim Henson: Um, while, you know, his defense team and, and the attorney general have repeatedly been saying, you know, for years that, you know, these charges would be eventually thrown out and were trumped up and et cetera, et cetera. You know, he’s got a trial date set for April 15th. Um, uh, the attorney general was at this particular trial and.

[00:30:55] Jim Henson: like most of his last one in the Senate, um, did not speak. Um, and just, you know, to remind people, Paxton was indicted on these charges eight years ago, early in his first term as, as attorney general. And these charges stem from accusations that prior to his election as attorney general, but while he was in the Senate, he tried to solicit investors in a.

[00:31:19] Jim Henson: to invest in a McKinney technology company without disclosing that that company was paying him to promote the stock and this is a federal crime and one with some, you know, reasonable, reasonable, you know, reasonably heavy penalties should he be convicted potentially and he’s also still under, you know, federal investigation into the claims by his His former staffers that he had abused his office basically a subset of, of the impeachment charges.

[00:31:51] Jim Henson: So with that, you know, with that said, and remembering that, you know, we spent the summer following the impeachment and the trial we had, you know, I thought interesting if somewhat subtle results, um, related to Paxton and how the, how the public views him

[00:32:10] Josh Blank: now. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, it’s fair to say that he’s seen.

[00:32:15] Josh Blank: Some recovery in his numbers Um, only that. I mean, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t say it any more strongly, you know, than that, right? Uh, you know, overall in this poll, you know, we look, and really here we should say, you know, we’re looking among Republicans. I want to be clear. Yeah. You know, just to, just to set Democrats aside for a second, you know, Democrats have overwhelmingly negative views of Pax and their views of his, And they’ve not changed.

[00:32:39] Josh Blank: They’ve not changed, yeah. The views of his actions and his conduct haven’t changed. You know, but when we look at his numbers, you know, he’s got, you know, he’s on the right side. You know, 50 percent of Republicans approve of the job he’s doing. 20 percent disapprove. The 50 percent approval is up four points from the last poll.

[00:32:54] Josh Blank: Survey the disapprovals down three points. So that’s what we mean is about seven points swing in there, we say. Right. That’s, you know, mild, you know, mild improvement. I mean, what I notice, and I always look at this because I think before, you know, the impeachment, what was always remarkable to me was that Paxton’s and Patrick’s numbers really tracked, I mean, incredibly well with each other.

[00:33:13] Josh Blank: Right. And you know, just to give you, you know, the context. So Patrick said, you know, 63 approve, 11 disapprove among Republicans. So about 13 points more approval about nine points, uh, less disapproval. And so that’s sort of, you we’re. He says, but we’re really looking at sort of what happened when we, you know, we have, I mean, you know, we love that this is talking about nerdy now, you know, we did, we, we conducted, you know, surveys sort of on packs and, and related to the impeachment in June, August and October.

[00:33:36] Josh Blank: So we had sort of right after the house impeached him right before the Senate trial. And now. After the Senate trial to see what, what happened here in particular. Again, we’re looking at Republicans. And so we say, you know, was the house justified in impeaching Paxton, you know, among Republicans in August.

[00:33:50] Josh Blank: It was amazing. I mean, the split was amazing. 28 percent said yes. 33 percent said no. 39 percent said they didn’t know, or they were withholding, basically withholding judgment in some way or just had no idea. We jump ahead to after the trial and the sure who didn’t know dropped from 39 to 31. The sheriff who said that the house was unjustified went from 33 to 43, went up 10, where the sheriff said that they were only dropped two points from 28 to 26, asked if, you know, Paxson committed acts that justify removing him from office.

[00:34:17] Josh Blank: The share of Republicans said that he did not, should not be removed from office, went up from 32 to 44, so up about 12 points. But again, still 27 percent of Republicans in October who say, no, he should be removed from office. Based on

[00:34:29] Jim Henson: what he’s done. Right. So I mean, you know, I, you know, the, as you know, we, I think we, we wrote about this a little bit at the rollout of the poll, and we’ll have a slightly deeper dive coming out in the next couple days of the Texas Politics Project website at Texas politics dot u texas.edu.

[00:34:44] Jim Henson: But I think the interesting thing there, in terms of the tenor of a lot of the coverage Yeah. In the aftermath of the trial, you know. Is that, you know, Paxton has recovered somewhat, but he’s only recovered to where he was around the time of the impeachment, right? And not to where he was, like,

[00:35:06] Josh Blank: you know, at his height.

[00:35:07] Josh Blank: Yeah, his height was really December of last year. After his reelection, about I think about 72 percent of Republicans approved of the job he was doing only about 10 percent disapproved. I mean, those are very high numbers for him. Very high numbers in general.

[00:35:20] Jim Henson: And that’s where he was in the Patrick range.

[00:35:21] Josh Blank: Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, here’s a little, I mean, it was a little above, I mean, there was, you know, anyway, but I mean, but I think to your point, I mean, it’s interesting sort of, you know, I, I always liked that. I mean, it’s interesting because we, you know, we study public opinion, we watch what’s going on and then you see people talking about public opinion in an effort to shape it.

[00:35:38] Josh Blank: Right. And there’s this sort of interesting thing going on where, and I think part of this is, is making the comparison to Trump and we, you know, we also, there’s a piece on our website that explains and looks at data that shows that Paxton is not Trump, but I think some of the initial reaction to Paxton’s acquittal was to say, kind of look at the Trump effect and say, okay, he’s stronger than ever.

[00:35:57] Josh Blank: And the idea here is more logical than data driven. It’s that, well, you know, this happened, he’s come through the other side. Right. Seemingly unscathed, at least legally, he hasn’t been removed from office. And so therefore. You know his enemies better watch out now some of that is coming from his own supporters, right?

[00:36:14] Josh Blank: In fact, it’s especially coming from his own supporters and and and the

[00:36:17] Jim Henson: attorney general

[00:36:18] Josh Blank: himself and the attorney general himself and the attorney General’s already, you know inserted himself into upcoming republican primaries. I mean he’s he’s making a play here but this sort of Assume something that I would say is not entirely in evidence, which is that, you know, he’s recovered back to where he was or

[00:36:32] Jim Henson: Exceeded not in

[00:36:34] Josh Blank: evidence.

[00:36:34] Josh Blank: Yeah, well, I’ll say well I’ll say even further or exceeded where he was The point is is it no and in fact, you know I mean the thing that’s kind of i’ll be watching as we go ahead is Is how durable that that negative contingent within the republican party is for right because I mean having you know A quarter to a third of your own party holding, you know, kind of negative views across multiple measures about you It’s not A great place to

[00:36:58] Jim Henson: be.

[00:36:59] Jim Henson: Well, and as you flagged, I mean, the movement. between August and October among Republicans was not the Republicans that were negative came home. It’s that the Republicans that were on the fence that were with reserving judgment kind of came home and came to, you know, and you know, I mean, I, you know, I don’t want to beat a dead horse here, but we keep talking about this relationship between elite signaling and public opinion.

[00:37:29] Jim Henson: And all during the trial, we. The impeachment in the trial, we attributed a lot of, you know, that reservation of judgment among Republicans to mixed messages coming from different elites. I mean, the governor was very quiet about it. You know, we now have a sense of what he was thinking, but the lieutenant governor wasn’t saying much about it.

[00:37:50] Jim Henson: And much of the Republican signaling was negative, you know, was negative to mixed. Yeah. Other than, you know, the narrow range of kind of Paxton allies. But, you know. Now that, you know, we’ve got, you know, he seems to have come out of this winning. Yeah. There’s a little, you know, if you follow the internal politics of this, there’s still a lot of fighting over this.

[00:38:10] Jim Henson: But most of the public messaging that’s coming out, and I was talking to a reporter about this a couple weeks ago, or shortly after the… I guess right around the time the poll came out is that you can, if you’re just your average person watching a two minute package on your local news or beginning to read a news story on the internet, you know, if you just read the first few graphs, it’s going to be mostly positive.

[00:38:36] Jim Henson: Now, if you read far enough, there’s going to be the graph that says there’s going to be the, on the other hand, graphs that talk about the speakers pushback and all of this, but you know, it’s subordinate to the message of. You know, Paxton came out of this. He was found not guilty. He is now going to seek vengeance.

[00:38:53] Josh Blank: Well, I mean, you know, Dr. Shaw was with us last week and he brought up the concept of motivated reasoning. And so ultimately, you know, if you haven’t been paying a lot of attention to the trial, which most people were not, and you, if you haven’t been paying much attention to a lot of the details, which again, Most people were not, and especially if you’re a Republican, and this is true for Democrats too, you know, for a Republican, you sort of hear something, there’s some negative thing about Republicans.

[00:39:12] Josh Blank: Honestly, you know, the, one of the first impulses, if you have a positive view of Republicans, is just not to read it. It’s true for Democrats too. It’s like, I don’t want to know about that. Yeah, because, because you have to, it’s cognitively difficult. You have to deal with this dissonance, right? Now, on the other hand, you may, you haven’t been paying attention to this for a while.

[00:39:27] Josh Blank: Let’s say you’re a Republican voter and then the end is, well, Ken Paxton was acquitted, then you reason for yourself without having to read the whole article that he must have not done anything wrong. Right. And move on, right? And that’s the easiest thing to do. That’s what a lot of people do. But I mean, I mean, I’d say not that many people in the case of this, right?

[00:39:44] Josh Blank: I mean, we’re looking at a narrow band of Republicans who kind of, who went from, oh, let’s see what happens to, okay, I see what happens. I guess it’s fine, right? He’s okay. But it doesn’t mean that the people who have developed negative attitudes are just gonna go away or all of a sudden decide, you know, next week that, you know, essentially, well, I guess he didn’t do anything wrong, even though I thought he did for the last few months and I still do

[00:40:05] Jim Henson: now.

[00:40:06] Jim Henson: Right? And not to put, you know, I mean, not to be too blunt force about, you know, the fact that, you know, he’s not, you know, you know, he’s not completely recovered. I mean, we’ll see what happens as you say, going forward and what happens to those people that have negative opinions. And, and even for those that still have negative opinions, you know, if you’re considering the period in which Paxton, you know, however, absolutely you gauge his influence because His initial report, his initial support and now his subsequent lingering support is still strongest among the most conservative Republican voters who are likely to be engaged in primaries to the extent that he’s going to get any leverage out of this, you know, whether he’s, you know, dominant or going to go on a vengeance tour or whatever now is the time because it’s primary season and the people that are going to be most responsive to him are likely those that are Republican primary voters.

[00:41:06] Jim Henson: So if he’s going to get Any kind of, uh, recovery bounce, however high the bounce, you know, he’s going to get the most out of that in the next

[00:41:16] Josh Blank: couple of months. Yeah, and the truth, I mean, and when you talk about the way, actually, it makes me think about the fact that, you know. Even that might be somewhat illusory or hard to manifest because he’s really speaking to the people who are always on his side from the beginning.

[00:41:27] Josh Blank: I mean, most of those people that he’s going to try to, you know, again, mobilize in those primaries were already pretty big Kent Vax supporters to begin with. The other thing that I think is interesting, and you know, again, we have a piece we’re going to put out in a few days, is, you know, when you think back, you know, on his 2018, Uh, election, you know, Justin Nelson, the Democratic nominee for attorney general in that race made, I mean, explicitly, and I’m not downgrading, downgrading this at all.

[00:41:52] Josh Blank: I mean, or, you know, I’m sorry, not downgrading. I’m not trying to, you know, I don’t know. I mean, he explicitly made Ken Paxson’s legal issues the centerpiece of his campaign. And that was before the whole Nate Paul affair, before the impeachment, before this became much, much more, uh, salient to voters. And so that’s the other piece of this is that, you know, it’s interesting.

[00:42:14] Josh Blank: And in that election, he only won, he won by under three points. He had a very close shave. He won by less than Patrick, significantly less than Abbott.

[00:42:21] Jim Henson: It was in the, the, the, the cruise. Yeah, I

[00:42:24] Josh Blank: think it was like 2. 83 something as opposed to 2. 5 something. But it was so narrow, just based on this idea that he had legal and ethical problems, and that was before all of this.

[00:42:36] Josh Blank: And so, you know, again, good democratic

[00:42:39] Jim Henson: ear and all that stuff. The flip side to that would be, you know, in 2022, he won a little more comfortably, but as I recall, still below, well, definitely below where The governor was, yeah, by a few points,

[00:42:51] Josh Blank: um, but closer, closer to Patrick and that race still, but this is one of those things, you know, you start to game this out and you say, okay, you know, if Trump were to, were to, you know, Trump’s remains, the Republican nominee stays out of jail, wins the election.

[00:43:03] Josh Blank: And then you’ve got, you know, a midterm election with a Republican president and you’ve got Ken Paxton, you know, near the top of that ballot, you know. The interesting race.

[00:43:13] Jim Henson: Well, and it depends. Yeah. And you know, that raises a whole other, you know, 2024 or 2026 seems like just a universal way right now, given a lot of contingency.

[00:43:24] Jim Henson: So, um, we’ll add data, you know, that we’ve discussed to the post with this podcast, uh, on our website. So if you’re listening to this on. One of the podcasting or audio platforms, and you want to kind of look at this data, you know, while going on, while following along, just click over to texaspolitics.

[00:43:41] Jim Henson: utexas. edu. There’ll be a post on Paxton by hopefully by the time you see this or shortly thereafter, but certainly some of this data will be in a post in the blog section of our website so that you can look at some of the data we’re talking about. Um, with that, thanks again to our excellent production team in the dev studio in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin here.

[00:44:04] Jim Henson: Uh, thanks to Josh for being here on a Halloween morning. Uh, thank you of course for listening and we’ll be back soon with another Second Reading Podcast.

[00:44:20] Jim Henson: The Second Reading Podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.