September 14th, 2021 – Second Reading Podcast

Jim: 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 part. So I tell people on a regular basis, there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called the problem is these departures from the constitution.
They have become the norm. Point must’ve female Senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room.
And welcome back to the second reading podcast for the week of September 13th, 2021. I’m Jim Henson, director of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin. Joined again today by Josh blank research director for the same Texas politics project. Good afternoon, Josh. Thank you. Good afternoon to you.
Yes and not raining here. So, um, best wishes to all our friends in Southeast Texas, where it’s raining a lot and many people are without power, but I would say that after some promised rain, I went out and watered the yard today because the rain was now out of the forecast. Is it, is it path of
Josh: that storm?
Is it lame to be disappointed? I mean, for me just personally, like I was, I was going to water and then I didn’t and, well,
Jim: I think there’s a lot of that going on here, but, um, we were important and again, say, sorry, you know, sorry to our friends in, in other parts of the state that are probably undergoing a lot of hardship.
What are the major issues looming in Texas right now is the delayed redistricting process. Uh, which is the main item on the agenda of the third special session that is about to meet in Austin next week. So we thought we’d do a bit of a preview of the issue given the start of the special session and the likely availability of maps either formally or informally, you know, in the next few days, certainly, uh, or by early next week.
Now a little background. I mean, this was supposed to take place during the regular session per constitutional requirement, uh, at the federal level with rules governed by the Texas constitution and statute. Uh, but the process was delayed as a result of the holdup in the census. Due to the pandemic, but the con you know, conducting of the census and the gathering of the data, then the processing of the data, the pandemic response has just ripple have rippled through the whole process, uh, nationally.
And, and we’re now on the, on the receiving end of that, but we’re finally there now, you know, the issue has been lurking in the background. You know, one could say for years, I mean, almost since, you know, the, as the, as the old maps expire people very quickly begin to think about the new maps. Um, but it’s been hovering in the background for the session.
I mean, I think there’s a sense of. People legislators and staff and people in the capital world expect to have to do this in the regular session that gets bumped. And then the sense that throughout the late part of the regular session and the two special sessions we’ve had so far. There was hovering over all that was this idea that we’re coming back in the fall to do redistricting, and that’s going to be a thing.
Josh: And you could eat, you could even argue that it was hovering over the whole fall. Not even in the sense of we were going to do it, but in the sense of, you know, it’s a very political process that changes the outlines of the maps, obviously. And so, you know, once I we’ve talked about this previously, but you know, to the extent.
The Republican led legislature focused on really issues that were important to Republican primary voters after a pretty competitive 2018 election in a less competitive, but still competitive 2020 part of at least, you know, the, what goes into that was the expectation that with redistricting Republicans, Really solidify their majorities.
Jim: Right? I mean, I, I, yeah, I think it cut it colored. I think a Republican confidence, even as it led to, you know, a lot of everybody looking over their shoulder or maybe given people some side eye, including within the Republican caucus as the, the very contentious politics of the law. You know, basically of, of all year, so far, the last unfolded.
So let’s, let’s start then a little bit with what the, what the basics are, what the mapmakers are working with. And. What this much anticipated data told us. So, first of all, of course not surprisingly Texas.
Josh: Yeah. But it’s not just a Texas got bigger. So first of all, just numbers, you know, we went from about 25 million to about 29 million people.
That’s an increase in that 4 million or 15.9%. And that’s a lot. So, I mean, we’re, you know, the second biggest state to California in
Jim: 10 years,
Josh: that’s over the, yeah, that’s over the 10 year to 2020, and that’s over the 10 year period. And if you look at, you know, uh, you know, the other big states, you know, California, 6% New York grew 4%, you know?
And so at 16%, we’re actually not only one of the fastest growing states, but we’re an extremely fast growing large state. So that’s one of the, you know, one of the pieces of this, and that’s why Texas gained two congressional seats out of the process. But what a lot of people have also focused on is, is the, is the underlying composition of that change.
You know, we know the Texas is a majority minority state, you know, we’ve been talking for years about, you know, a declining share of the white population, but these numbers really crystallized the extent of that in the last decade. So when we look at that 4 billion, uh, person increase in tech, Little under 5% of that entire change, that 187,000 people is attributed to non-Hispanic whites, which means 95% of the increase in population in Texas can be attributed to, uh, African-Americans Hispanics, Asian.
Other races and ethnicities and people who identify as multiple races and ethnicities. And so if you think about the, if you look at the difference here, the percent changes of the groups, the white population only increased by 1.6% compared to 19.3% for the black population, 20.9% for the Hispanic population and 64.6% for the Asian population, which has been consistently one of the fastest growing groups in the.
Over the entire decade. So this is sort of the top line takeaway about sort of the demographic shifts in Texas and how you know, we’ve again, we’ve been talking about this for years, everybody’s been talking about, but, but I mean, it’s almost, I mean, it’s almost a hundred percent of the changes is non. I mean, it’s so close.
It’s really overwhelming. And in terms
Jim: of all the political discussion or a lot of the political discussion, we’ve heard again over the last, you know, decade, if not decade and a half, about half 49.5%, call it. Half of that was. Right. That’s right. So that leaves us just to get the top lines in place with, you know, non-Hispanic whites being per the census 39.7% Hispanics being 39.3%, which is, you know, close to even.
Yeah. And, uh, the black population at 11.8 and then the Asian population of 5.4. And if you’re. If you’re doing column, if you’re, if you’re adding this up and you’re going to say, oh wait, that’s not a hundred, but 3.8 is other groups just for those of you checking the math at home. Well that’s anyway. Now the other, yeah.
I mean, that’s presumptuous perhaps then the other big shift was in the urban, rural, suburban population, which we’re going to talk about a bit in, in a, in a moment because it’s so central to everything, but what did that look like? I mean, the
Josh: thing is. You know, the main point is, is that a lot of counties in Texas lost population, Texas has a huge number of counties cause it’s a huge state and, you know, a large share of those counties lost population overall.
Uh, I think we have 143 counties lost populations about 56. Percent, but it also ties to the distribution of race and ethnicity and the state, which you can’t help. But notice here. So the, the rural parts that say not all, not uniformly, obviously in the Rio Grande valley, along the border, this isn’t true, but a lot of the rural counties in the state have larger white populations than the state as a whole.
And so when you’re talking about these kinds of declines, you can look at it by. And you find that 198 counties in Texas lost non-Hispanic white population. So 78% of all counties. And when you’re talking about that, you’re mostly talking about rural counties. You’re talking about counties up in and around the panhandle and kind of down and then into the east, kind of heading towards Dallas.
Not getting too close to Fort worth and Tarrant and all that because obviously the outer counties are also where the fastest growth is the valor. I mean, suburban counties, which we’ll come back to. Uh, so 78% of counties lost white population compared to 62% of counties and lost black population. Only 25% of counties lost any Hispanic population.
Uh, and so this is kind of, you know, again, this is going to replay itself out of this has to do with the demographics of the state overall and the nature of where people are live. But the sum total of this, as, you know, population gains in the air in and around the urban centers and it including, you know, the counties that are adjacent to the big urban counties, that population being driven by, in most cases, there’s a few exceptions, but in most cases by nonwhite populations, uh, and then, you know, uh, declined.
Population and much of the other rest of the state.
Jim: Yeah. I think this is where we do two things. One note that as a. As an, as a non visual medium, this is where podcasts kind of fall down on you because where you can really, I mean, this becomes just so incredibly immediately apparent. If you look at a map that looks at the numeric change and color codes, you know, losses versus gains on a scale and.
You know, you just look at this and it was just immediately apparent where the wide swaths of urban to rural Texas are in continue to decline. Now, this is not. News per se. The other point I would make here is it is a, is a hat tip to our friends and colleagues at the Texas demographic center. But by state demographer Lloyd Potter, their website is terrific for all this.
Now, not too. I don’t want to sell the, the U S census short. The U S census also is a probably unequaled sense of data in some sorts of ways about these things in terms of, you know, the depth and the extent that we can just go and. And drill into this data, but the folks at Texas demographics center do a great job providing not only the data and, and some background data and lots of tools for manipulating the data.
But they’re very generous with their presentations following up, I think on their premise on the, on the, the. Pattern begun by the last demographer state demographer Lloyd Potter. I’m sorry, Steve Murdoch. But Lloyd Potter has been doing a great job out there, given tons of presentations and their slide decks are all on the website and, and very easy to find.
They’re not, they’re kind of hidden. It says right on the front page, Hey, here’s all our presentations and, you know, use them to your heart’s content. So a real, you know, real hats off to them for their approach to. Yeah, I mean, and, and everybody should, so you know, some of the practical implications, then if you think about, about redistricting here and we want to get to the suburban piece, but you know, to get to a mechanical piece, remember that, you know, the reason this matters is because it fuels the redrawing of district so they can be.
In a sense re equalized since it’s a requirement that the districts have equal population with it, uh, a range that is defined depending on, on what level we’re talking about. And just in terms of thinking about elections and thinking about turnout, I do think it’s interesting. To know just what the size of these districts is.
So, you know, uh, under the new, you know, w uh, given the new data, the new Texas Senate district size for the 31 seats in the, in the Senate will be 940,000 and a hundred and seventy eight, ninety nine hundred 40,178. Uh, Texans are actually what we should say. Residents, right. People that live there, people that lived there for a house district, it’ll be 190, 4,000, 303 for a you for it.
That’s a Texas house for congressional seat for you, us house district, they’ll now be 38 seats. So that’ll be about seven hundred and sixty six, nine hundred and eighty 7,000. Again, with the plus or minus margins allowed the map jars of course, hitting these exactly would be. Nearly impossible. So, but you know, those are all pretty big district.
So one thing I think to note that at the top level is that as Texas gets bigger and those numbers of seats stay the same. Representation gets more diffuse.
Josh: Yeah. I mean, there’s no, there’s no where to go. I mean, we’re not, we can’t add seats. I mean, we could add seats, but we’re not going to add seats anytime soon.
So whereas the cost of the Texas system. Right? Right. So where’s the congressional system equalizes itself through the reapportionment of congressional seats to, to at least maintain some kind of, you know, it says it reduces the impact of the population gains by spreading the population across more seats.
We don’t do that in the Texas Senate. We don’t do that in the Texas house. So you end up. You know, Texas Senate seats that are, um, you know, significantly larger than congressional.
Jim: Yeah. I mean, the increase from 2010 was, you know, almost 130,000.
Josh: Right. So basically, you know, oh, not quite there, but almost the size of what a house seat was in 2010.
Right. So that’s how
Jim: that’s a lot. Yeah. It’s pretty interesting. So, you know, keeping that in mind. You know, I mean, I think, you know, a number of political questions arise here. I mean, I think, you know, one of the ones that, you know, that comes up frequently, it’s come up in conversations I’ve had with a lot of people.
And, you know, I was a panelist on a, in a professional meeting late last week, which redistricting was discussed quite a bit, you know? And I think one of the central questions that, you know, you kind of. Set up when talking about, you know, Republican confidence in the, in the session and in shaping the agenda.
For the primary, you know, that is geared towards Republican primaries is, you know, how ambitious can GOP map and Republican mapmakers be, how ambitious will they be? You know? And there’s a, there’s a subtle relationship, I think, between the can and will question. I mean, it’s a fact that in 2010, the Republican mapmakers were very ambitious.
I mean, they drew more than, I can’t remember what the exact number was, but okay. W well, upwards of 90 Republican districts in the, in the, in the Texas house, you know, some of which decade over time as we discussed on the podcast and, you know, the premise of that, or kind of the, the way that that works is we’re thinking about going into the next session.
So at that point, you know, Republicans were very ambitious. They drew a lot of Republican districts, some of which were getting them somewhat close. Now they had a lot of Republican voters to work. And they, you know, made the most of their projections of differential voter turnout, you know, on top of the demographics.
But nonetheless, we started seeing, you know, more competition in those areas in some ways, fairly early, some of those house districts were becoming noticeably more competitive in 2016. Obviously we saw several flip in 2018 and, you know, as we’ll get to, they were in these suburban areas and suburban and ex-urban areas.
That grew very rapidly. And, and in which the population shifted, nonetheless, it’s hard not to have the feeling that those Republican lawmakers knew that there would be changed, knew that there would be growth. Now nobody can know exactly how fast or what that’s going to look like, but they were bold in drawing those districts.
And so now the question is given all of these fundamentals, we just talked about. How ambitious will they be this time? Will they play it a little bit safer in order to build a more stable, if smaller majority or will they take the same approach? Just extend their majority just as much as they can. And, and then work the dependencies over the next 10 years, but both in elections and.
Yeah.
Josh: I mean, I don’t know if I have much to add to that. I think you’ve laid out most of it. I mean, I think where you started was a good starting point, which is the will versus the can, right? I mean, in terms of ambition, right? I mean, I think, I think they will be as ambitious as they possibly can be. The question is, as you kind of say, you know, how did.
How did they think about what ambition looks like now? I mean, you know, again, there’s, there’s a good article in the Texas Tribune a little while back, uh, sort of somewhere to kind of, you know, the later part of the decade, talking about how the, the focus on the last round of redistricting of holdings was to get them to the biggest majority they could possibly find.
And one thing, you know, just, I like to think about, about redistrict and just say out loud every once in a while. Cause why not is the fact that there is no, there’s no solution to this problem. And what I mean by that is that you could draw. In an infinite number of ways and satisfy the requirements that are necessary under the constitution, the voting rights act, et cetera, et cetera, that they have to be contiguous all the, all the things that are sort of required of redistricting.
Um, and so
Jim: continuity and respecting county lines, right?
Josh: Those kinds of things. Yeah. Uh, compactness, you know, for the most part, all that’s pretty loose. Um, and that decision here, you know, and obviously, you know, the ambition that Republicans sought in 2010. And beyond was to get the most seats they possibly could out of the process.
And I mean, you know, you kind of wonder, you know, looking at where we are now. I mean, just thinking again about the politics of this, whether that’s really, you know, what I would be doing if I were, you know, sitting there in the room is, you know, if I were, if I had my Republican hat on, I’m sitting in the room trying to make the maps.
I mean, I think one of the things that you could see is you could see the Republicans looking for a much more stable majority, as opposed to the extent of the majority. And if you think about. I mean, not that there’s not still in fighting the Republican party and you want to be able to have some extra space in your margins when you’re in the house and you’re having a vote.
But the flip side of that is in a state that is increasingly described as competitive. You also don’t want to be creating a bunch of seats that you then go and lose two years down the road, four years down the road, six years down the road, and create a narrative that you’re losing your grip on the state, as opposed to basically maintaining.
A solid majority. And again, I’m just working, just sort of thinking about the argument you might have out loud about what kind of ambition you would seek, but then the other piece on the can side of, you know, how, you know, how ambitious can they be as you know, the, the things we’re talking about at the beginning about, you know, the nature of the growth, demographics of the growth, but also the concentration of the growth.
It’s so concentrated in and around urban areas. And it’s so driven by. Nonwhite and younger populations that, you know, it’s not clear to me that, you know, the Republicans can just kind of make some, some minor tweaks, you know, to. To, to districts and kind of get right. Kind of arrive at the same place.
Jim: Yeah, I think that’s right.
I mean, I mean, one example of that is, you know, the, that came up in, in conversation with this at the meeting I was at the other day and I don’t think I’m betraying any competence this year is to look at Senate district two Bible halls district. Now, you know, this is a district in north and kind of north, Northeast, Texas, um, Stretches from the Oklahoma border down to the Eastern Dallas suburbs and exurbs.
But if you look at these maps that we were talking about earlier and where the population, uh, has, has either not grown very faster, where there’s been a decline, you know, that district is going to need some folks. Or they’re going to have to, if even not even at that district, that just the rural districts adjacent to it will.
And in a case like that, and this just gets down to the kind of dilemmas that people are having to deal with, the problems that people have to solve. You’ve got a hard stop at the Oklahoma border. Right. You know, if you’re a up there, I mean, it would be convenient if you could swing up and probably get some far Southern Oklahoma and the senior
Josh: annexation in your
Jim: history.
Good dispute the border, perhaps between now and then that border, but the kind of way that, that works out causes all kinds of trouble. So if you bleed farther south in that district and you get a little closer to Dallas, you know, I mean, you think about this a lot in terms of, well, a safe Republican seat and protecting it from a Democrat, your problem might be, I mean, look, there’s a possibility of creating a problem.
If you try to slide into. A more urban part of Dallas and, and you pick up some democratic voters, but the bigger problem there or a competing problem that is probably bigger in terms of the practicality of what kind of adjustments might get made, is it, you pick up some more urban, Republican. Right. And then, you know, while we act like they don’t exist, there are plenty.
And if you can incorporate them, then all of a sudden the politics of this internally, as you’re saying, ah, ah, here’s the map and Senator hall walks in and kind of goes, uh, I have a question, right. You know, and it’s not about Democrats, it’s about Republicans and that, and that problem is going to be.
Really present in west Texas and the, and the panhandle where, you know, you have only maybe two or three counties at most, as I look at the map that can claim some population gain. And one of them is, you know, urban Lubbock, which we don’t think of as an urban center, but as the urban, you know, is urban for that part of the, certainly the urban center for that part of the, of this.
And there are going to be a lot of hard, hard calls in those areas that are going to involve exclusively Republicans.
Josh: Well, I think, you know, I mean, just to put a fine point on, I mean, you, you raise here, what is kind of the challenge in this, which is that, you know, when you’re looking at, you look at them, you know, you raise, you know, Senator Hall’s district.
And I think about kind of like the Congressman McCall’s district that goes, you know, from sort of the east, you know, sort the east side of Austin all the way to the west side of Houston. And the issue is that, you know, A lot of the counties in there are that are sort of in the middle that are the Republican strongholds that make the base of these districts.
I think in a Roger Williams is another good example, go to the north all the way up to south Taron county. Basically, you know, the base of the Republican support in those kinds of districts are in the rural parts of the state where the rural, the rural parts of those districts, those, those, you know, those areas.
You know, almost entirely or losing population. And so what do you have to do to equalize that? Well, you have to reach either further into the suburbs, further into an urban area, and ultimately you’re bringing in it at the very least, you know what say, decide the exact balance you’re bringing in less Republican voters.
Into the district, if you’re doing that. And that’s just how, and that’s just, if we just say, you know, just in terms of the balance of Democrats and Republicans in urban environments and suburban environments, as opposed to rural environments. And so the idea of, you know, making these districts that, that rely on a base of rural Republican support, and then can kind of pick off pieces of the city.
And in the, in the surrounding areas that just becomes, it just becomes more challenging
Jim: just well, and that brings us to the last thing we should talk about for the last few minutes. And that is when you’re talking about in, in both of the cases, we’ve talked about the Senate district to the McCall district, the number of which is at 20 by, I can’t remember what district it is, you know, those, those Austin districts that are all carved up, I get the numbers, you know, I think it’s 25, but you know, you know, we’re talking about urban and rural areas.
But where the kind of money shot is for the mapmakers. If you’re a Republican is figuring out where those concentrations of suburban exurban voters are Republican and not. To do the kind of good you want to be able to do. And that’s very unpredictable and we know that not just, not from the data or not from the redistricting data, but from what we’ve seen in both the mat, you know, knowing where they they’re the most competitive elections, particularly at the state house level, because those are the most finely grained districts, you know, but also from what we see in, in our polling, in which.
You know, you ask on a, on a whole range of questions. I, I want to say all of them, but it’s not all of them, but certainly on, on most of the policy stuff and political questions that we ask, you know, when you look at what we call our, our location variable, that is people’s self declaration of urban, rural, or suburban, you know, you can see the polarization between urban and rural districts, you know, very clearly in truly.
In terms of like lopsided distributions of public opinion on issues, but those suburban areas move a lot. I mean, and they move a lot within a range, which is, you know, clearly, much more divided. Then are the urban and rural results are much more evenly. And
Josh: just, just because I feel like every time I do this, I can get throughout out a social science term at least once.
And it’s all indogenous to itself. It’s all everything’s affecting itself. So if we look back on the previous election cycles and sort of the focus, I would say the. You know, tacit, if not explicit focus on suburban voters of late. These are also the areas of the state where we’ve been seeing the most growth.
This is not just true because we just have the census come out. Every check-in that, that the census bureau does has shown the Texas has some of the fastest growing counties in America. And those counties aren’t necessarily Harris county or Travis county. It’s Williamson county and Hays county in Rockwall.
It’s in Fort bet. It’s the. Outside of these urban areas, which we think which we can think of as the, you know, as the cities get bigger in the suburbs, you have the definition of what is a suburb kind of shift. This is what we’re talking about, but when we’re talking about this in Texas, we’re talking about a young and diverse population moving towards those areas because that’s, again, that’s where the growth is.
And just to kind of, I want to make this point explicitly, you know, just to tie something together here about the size of Texas, as popular as you gain and the type of game we’re talking about, this isn’t trivial or relative. It’s not as though, you know? Yeah. There’s a lot of gain here relative to some law to relative, you know, there’s a lot of gain in the urban areas relative to the, to the rural there’s no, no, there’s a lot of gain here, period, for any state in the country for any city or any earlier, these are the fastest growing places in the entire country.
And so, you know, the, to the, to the extent that politics has been focusing increasingly on issues that, you know, in the state that. You know, uh, excite or, you know, some cases really upset, you know, voters in the suburbs. That’s this is, this is why there’s so much attention to that because ultimately this is becoming the battleground and there’s no way to avoid it.
Jim: And voters are heterogeneous and it’s hard to, you know, you can’t really just say, oh yeah, let’s just go grab these conservative suburbs and this’ll help us. You know, I mean, again, tons of examples in our polling and we’ll post some of these with a podcast on our website, but, um, you know, I mean, one example concern about community, but the, one of the polarizing issues in the state right now, if not obviously in the country, when we asked about, you know, Texans concern about the coronavirus spreading in their community in August of 2020, Well, you know, among suburban, you know, self-declared suburbanites 44% were extremely or very concerned and, uh, 43% or were either somewhat or not very concerned with another 13, not at all concerned.
So you see this kind of, you know, this. You know, these kinds of splits. And if you go down that, I mean, it’s just it recurs again. And again, if you go to think about a Republican issue that you know is, or at least an issue that we expect Republicans to make something of in the fall, you know, and that has been a huge issue in the last two or three years.
Never very far from the surface on the question we ask about, do you think the deaths of black people during encounters with police in recent years, Are assigned a broader problems or a sign of isolated incidents, 45% say broader problems, 47% say isolated incidents. Now you unpack that. And that just points to the.
A lot of aspects of suburban demographics and suburban politics that are weighing heavily here.
Josh: Yeah. And I think, you know, and I think it’s an, you know, I don’t want to say it’s the only aspect. There’s another aspect that, that clearly contributes probably to the nastiness of the politics. And the current moment is that, you know, you have, I would say, I mean, in some ways you could say partisans of both sides, except for the fact that Democrats have no control over the process.
So I would just Republicans, I think Democrats would be doing the same things if they could looking for issues that are. You know that where they can get support from 60, maybe 65%. Of suburban voters. Cause that’s pretty good because if you do that, you know, you probably, if you’re a Republican, let’s say it’s a Republican issue that has supported about 65% of suburban voters.
You know, you probably have the support of 75 to 80% of rural voters. You probably have about a similar share of urban voters, maybe a little bit less, but 70 to 80% in opposition, but you’re okay. You’ll take that trade if you’re a Republican voter and you know, or you’re Republican elected official and you’re setting the agenda, you know that you’re going to have near unanimity in the rural parts of the state.
You’re going to split the suburbs in a way you’re comfortable with. And then you’re okay. Losing the urban vote that you weren’t going to get in the first place, but it requires looking for issues that, you know, I think reinforce a lot of this polarization and really, you know, and it also requires looking for issues that are divisive because they’re, you know, we’re trying to, trying to wedge out.
Just a, you know, something over 50% in the rural areas and the suburban parts of the
Jim: states. And I think something that, you know, you kind of raised the Democrats in that, in making that point and, you know, sort of the competing agendas in the, in the electoral political world. But the other piece to remember, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of internal procedural factors and, and internal political factors that color, how people navigate.
You know, the kind of, uh, you know, the demographic and terrain that we’re talking about. Um, a former, you know, staffer on the redistricting committee at one of the events I did recently, you know, recounted how in the year. They were involved in redistricting the way that the Republican speaker and the Republican chair of redistricting handled, it was to go, you know, handle the fact that in the big urban counties, it was virtually virtually or entirely Democrats.
They would go to the, to that county’s delegation and say, Hey, why don’t you guys recommend us some maps? Why don’t you recommend is how you would, how you would do your, and they leave that element of the fighting to their. You know, to that. And then, you know, whether they accept it or don’t accept it. I mean, it still goes up the chain.
And so, you know, there’s a lot of interesting elements that have. Yeah. In some ways, nothing to do with what we’re
Josh: talking about. I love it. I know. I love that. Just as it’s sort of like here, let me, let me do.
Yeah,
Jim: you guys. Yeah. You guys should have some say in this,
Josh: why don’t you guys all get your dives out with each other?
And then
Jim: in my impression from talking to people over the years is that, that is, that does happen. That, I mean, it, you know, those things where, you know, where there’s a severe party split, you know, you, it gets left. You know, to regional and, and, and county level to the delegations and then to how the, you know, whoever is influencing those delegations and having a say in that, and, and that, you know, that can have a lot of interesting repercussions.
I mean, it’s, you know, sort of the, uh, part of the lore that that’s how Barbara Jordan’s congressional seat got drunk. Was, you know, out of that negotiation process that came out of, of redistricting in the, in the early seventies. So in thinking about that, as we draw to a close, I mean, I, I think, you know, we should end on the bald politics of this in terms of the process that, you know, no maps are gonna get drawn in either chamber.
Displeases in any way that Lieutenant governor or the speaker of the house, and they have different kinds of interests at play. I mean, as with everything, you know, the speaker has a different level of, of board play here due to the fact that the coalitional politics, that, that form, the, that shaped the foundation of any speaker’s power within the chamber also shape redistricting.
And that also brings in. You know, interesting politics across party lines. And so I think, you know, we’re, you know, there were lots of, you know, suggestions we may or may not have talked about it in the podcast that, you know, this was influencing and influencing some of the Democrats and putting pressure on them as the quorum brake limped to an
Josh: ed.
I mean, we’ll go into much longer as we’re finishing here, but I mean, you raise something I think is just so interesting about redistricting, which I should say, people aren’t paying. Just real quick in our polling, for the most part, it’s not something that’s a, it’s a high salience issue for most people, but what sort of makes it so interesting to the sort of people like us, and then probably the people who listened to this is the fact that, you know, there’s a baby.
In a version of fact and measure, just say there’s probably a severe under in our census data. That’s almost certainly to be the case for lots of reasons, but it’s the data that we have to use. So on the one hand, you start with this basis of fact, right? Here’s where the people are. Here’s what they look like.
And then, you know, on the one hand we know that there’s all kinds of sophisticated tools and analyses available to people to try to cut the maps. To create either the most advantage they can weather for one election cycle or many and balancing these issues we’ve been talking about. But then there’s also just the raw , which can, which can manifest in a bunch
Jim: of different ways.
Yes. Yes. The beautiful and frightening and the beautiful and terrible play of self-interest. Well, you know, what are you going to do? Okay. I think on that note, we will call it a podcast. I want to thank Josh for being here. Thank our crew in the liberal arts development studio at UT Austin for as ever there.
Excellent production. Yes. You can find some of the D all, you know, the, some of the data we’re discussing, of course, as we said, on the website of the Texas demographic center, public opinion data on our website@texaspoliticsdotutexas.edu. As I did last week, I’ll put up a blog posting up at our website and the blog under our polling section at the same website with some of the graphics that we’ve talked about here, since we’ve emphasized so many visuals, thanks for listening.
And we’ll be back next week with another podcast.
The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas politics project at the university of Texas at Austin.