September 19th, 2024 – The latest round of GOP efforts on “election integrity” in Texas, and the long term consequences of two decades of voting politics in the state

[00:00:00] James Henson: Welcome to the second reading podcast from the University of Texas at Austin.

[00:00:05] Voiceover: 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 point? I’m

[00:00:36] James Henson: Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Joined today by Josh Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project. Welcome back, Josh.

[00:00:47] Joshua Blank: Thanks for having me.

[00:00:50] James Henson: My pleasure. Um, so we’re maybe a little punchy, a lot going on, a lot going on here at the Texas Politics Project this week.

Look,

[00:00:59] Joshua Blank: it’s getting busy. The election is getting closer and closer and you know, and I, you know, look, I’ll say this, we do a lot of press calls. You expect to pick up, it’s picking up a little bit earlier, I think, than it has in the past. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know.

[00:01:10] James Henson: A lot happening. So, all that aside to, or all that what it is, today we thought we’d talk around, uh, the subject of a piece that we’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks that, you know, we’ll be out at the website at texaspolitics.

utexas. edu by the time this podcast is posted, we think, uh, that connects public opinion data from the August UT Texas Politics Project Poll poll. Uh, that focused on elections and voting and stories that have been in the news over the last few weeks about recent rhetoric and actions by Texas officials in the realm of voting and elections, uh, in the run up to the big election in November.

Now that piece observes, argues, you know, a few different things. It’s, it’s a, it’s a first kind of a long kind of deeper piece we’ve done in a, in a couple of months, I guess. Um, I’m I think. And the piece kind of observes, argues that, you know, patterns in public opinion suggest that over the last two decades of a, a kind of call and response between Republican voters and Republican elected officials on the themes of voter fraud and, and election integrity, you know, something of a term of art.

have had some troubling effects in the Texas political system. And we kind of unpack some of the connections that have been feeding this dynamic and, and the piece goes in a couple of different directions. One of the important themes of the piece is that this, what we’re calling this kind of call and response here, and we’ll unpack that a little in the podcast, has made distrust of elections and a voting process a pretty standard, almost Fixed is a little

[00:02:51] Joshua Blank: too strong a word.

You have a baseline, maybe, isn’t it? But a

[00:02:53] James Henson: kind of, you know, yeah, a baseline ever present attitude among the majority of Republican voters in the state.

[00:03:00] Joshua Blank: Right.

[00:03:00] James Henson: Um, and, and this dynamic has eroded some of the key norms around elections and voting that provided the boundaries for legitimate policy and rhetoric.

by policy leaders historically in Texas, and I would argue to some degree in the country. You know, so today we’ll cover some of this ground, and we’re going to try to do that as quickly as possible and let the peace do some of the work for us, um, and discuss some related takeaways from looking at this.

Not just the latest data, but at the sequence of events and, and the longer history of voting politics in the state and the patterns in public opinion that have developed as these politics have unfolded. So we’ll start the discussion with some, you know, current events, you know, and when you’re teaching, you know, current events or.

Always a good hook. So, you know, Josh, just give us the bullet, maybe the bullet list of some of these stories.

[00:03:51] Joshua Blank: Yeah. I mean, it was hard sort of, you know, people who follow this stuff regularly not to notice in the last couple of weeks, sort of the convergence really across multiple political actors around this issue of, you know, sort of concerns around the upcoming election.

So it started a little while back, and again, in the most recent instance with, with Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office investigation into allegations of non citizen voter registration, which led to the raiding of homes of some Latino voting activists. And a Texas House candidate whose, uh, opponent, Ken Paxson, has actually endorsed.

This has resulted in calls for civil rights investigations by a lot of civil rights groups, both inside Texas and beyond. You know, following that was Governor Abbott’s, uh, sort of trumpeting of routine state efforts to clear the voter rolls of deceased, relocated, usually to different states, and very, very rarely, potentially, Potentially, I should say that ineligible voters who somehow made their way onto the voter rolls Abbott used the word purge in this case, you know, his choice, you know, not not mine here in terms of describing these efforts, but it’s kind of

[00:04:50] James Henson: off noticed, but it’s a notice.

[00:04:52] Joshua Blank: It’s a noticeable choice of words. Paxton’s office continued with legal suits against Bexar County to stop the county from setting voter registration forms to unregistered residents in the lead up to the election. Uh, the office made similar efforts to stop Travis County from hiring a third party to contact non registered county registered, uh, registered, uh, residents and register them to vote.

This has resulted in a countersuit from Travis County that they’ve moved this into federal courts. Uh, and then just yesterday, uh, Secretary of State Jane Nelson, former state senator, sent a letter to the Director of U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Quote, requesting or requesting your assistance in verifying or ascertaining the citizenship or immigration status of certain individuals on the state of Texas’s voter rolls.

And so this is, you know, to say this is a multi pronged effort going on right now, really, it’s been kind of hard to, I mean, hard to avoid in some way. I

[00:05:41] James Henson: mean, you know,

[00:05:43] Joshua Blank: Do I miss anything? You know, I mean, look, I mean, I, you know,

[00:05:46] James Henson: we, because we’re trying to keep this, you know, relatively, relatively succinct.

Um, you know, there’s also a lot of, you know, local level stuff. I mean, you know, the, the, the fights in Tarrant County, right? And the debate going on in Tarrant County now over the location of, of, uh, the placement of voting locations at, at community colleges in the area, et cetera. And I think, you know, to tie it all together, I mean, we want to.

point out that was, you know, good reporting in the Dallas Morning News from Nolan McCaskill that, you know, the letter that Secretary of State Nelson sent, uh, to this federal agency had its origins ultimately in Communication from Attorney General Paxton to the Secretary of State, urging her to take this action and even provide, helpfully providing a draft of the letter for the office and if you, and again, if you look at, uh, at Nolan McCaskill’s reporting in the morning news, there are links to these letters.

You can look at the letters, compare the language, et cetera. Um, now, it could have been AI, but it could have been AI. You know, I mean, as you say, you know, I mean, all of these developments, including the local stuff taken together, you know, suggest, you know, strongly suggest a pattern in which Texas Republican elected officials are, you know, going to some lengths to publicly promote their determination to act in the service of ensuring the integrity of elections in the state.

You can put that in quotation marks if you want. But there’s also a literal, you know, there’s a literal sense to that, I think, that helps them, that helps ground these efforts. But the, the issue that we kind of get out of the piece that we want to unpack a little today is, is the public opinion piece, of course.

And that is that, you know, if you go back in the 20, Plus years that this has been going on in Texas. And we talked about the roots of this in the piece. You know, at the same time that these kind of literal actions are taking place and the state actions are taking place, you know the actions themselves and the promotion of them are fueling citizens fears you know, about, you know, by Providing these claims about voting by non citizens or flaws in the process, you know, um, and, you know, or, you know, in the case of the Secretary of State’s letter, to be fair to, to Jane Nelson, you know, there are no outright accusations, at least in her draft of the letter, um, but it fans suspicions about this threat.

Just the very presence of these discussions means that. This notion that they’re, you know, that they’re either actual problems or hovering problems, you know, that come from ineligible voters being allowed to vote, it just keeps them very present in the mind of voters. And I, you know, I think it’s very plausible to argue that this has an impact on Republican voters attitudes.

I mean, we talk about Zoller and, you know, this kind of communication, you know, this notion that Partisan elite communication has an impact on the attitudes of

[00:08:49] Joshua Blank: partisans,

[00:08:49] James Henson: you know, and, and that there’s something of a, of a feedback loop here. And so, you know, and, and just, you know, a little example, I mean, in addition to the excellent reporting by the Dallas morning news.

The other reason we know about this is that the letter that the Secretary of State sent to the federal agency was posted on social media at, on X, from the official Secretary of State account. If you want to look that up, it’s at T X S E C O F S T A T E at Tech Secretary of State. So, I mean, the idea of, you know, I mean, I think you have, you know, one has to recognize that, However much one, Republican elected officials and their allies have relied on rhetoric that is on the face of it, perhaps a, you know, example of motivated reasoning, but also, you know, passes an initial very light, very light sniff test is that, look, you know, We are doing our jobs and this is, there’s very, this is very much the spirit of the Secretary of State’s letter.

We’re doing our jobs. It’s our job to protect, you know, and everybody knows that we should, you know, we want, Our electance our election, you know our elections and our voting systems to be clean and beyond reproach And so we have to make sure that we go the extra yard here even while fanning this certain set of suspicion.

So You know that is out there. So let’s you know, we want to unpack that We’ll come back to these linkages maybe and flesh them out But let’s look at the public opinion context briefly now josh, you know You noticed early on as we were looking at the results of the august ut texas politics project poll that we released You About a week and a half ago that there had been an interesting uptick in one of the election related items in our poll that we’ve asked on repeated, you know, in repeated polling, right?

[00:10:44] Joshua Blank: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that we’ve been interested in over the course of this election, and really, it’s, you know, over the course of a number of years now, because of the These sort of repeated efforts to call into question the validity of the electoral process, you know, both in Texas and nationally, is to look at attitudes towards the system, towards the functioning of democracy, towards, uh, potential threats to the electoral process and overall trust in the system.

So this is something that we repeatedly look at because one of the questions becomes over time, is this something that continues to erode or is it something that, you know, maybe is a little bit more fan in the elections and then bounces back? Is back or, or whatever. So this is one of the sort of the longer term motivating impulses here and sort of understanding.

And

[00:11:22] James Henson: within that we’ve also, you know, I mean, because we do so much, you know, we’re in the midst of election season right now. Mm-Hmm. . But is everybody, or most people that would be hearing this will know, you know, when it, as it gets close to, to the legislative session in Texas that it happens every other year.

You know, we turn our attention towards

[00:11:41] Joshua Blank: the policy making side, policy

[00:11:42] James Henson: making, and, and the bodies of laws that one exp expect that where there’s a lot of action.

[00:11:46] Joshua Blank: Right. I mean, we’re fortunate in that we get to sort of take what we learned throughout the course of the campaign and the issues that get activated among voters, and we get to see the way that that gets transformed into a legislative agenda or not, or how much of it does and how much of public opinion actually bears on those questions.

And this is sort of, in some ways, start of making that transition. It’s also the case that in polling about the elections, we want to pull on the issues that are most top of mind for voters, which is why we’ve asked a lot of questions about the economy. We’ve asked a ton of questions about immigration, about abortion.

is You know a fact here is that the system itself is actually part of the campaigning that’s going on That’s true on both sides. And so it’s a valid place just to just look

[00:12:26] James Henson: at it, you know There’s nothing nefarious about that. No, that’s kind of you know, I know that’s that’s kind of how it’s supposed to work No, I mean, yeah, i’m not saying you’re implying.

No, and

[00:12:34] Joshua Blank: no i’m thinking about maybe maybe you could take someone could take that as you know Oh justifying why you’re looking. He says well We’re looking at these attitudes because to the extent that at least one side is saying Saying you can’t trust the election results. And the other side is saying you can’t trust these people as a threat to democracy.

It seems worthwhile to ask questions about elections of the democracy. I

[00:12:51] James Henson: mean, I think that that the broader points of close out you can go on is, but like, you know, I mean, I think I’m always mindful that you know what one person, you know, what one person might see is responsiveness. Another might see as pandering

[00:13:03] Joshua Blank: Yeah. I think that’s fair. You know, and you

[00:13:05] James Henson: know.

[00:13:06] Joshua Blank: You know, luckily we’ve been doing this long enough. I kind of hear that. I throw my hands up. Yeah. Okay. We’re both struggling. Okay, so what did we find? So we asked a question about, you know, again, we’re looking specifically in some ways It’s state policy here And what we found was, you know, we asked the question best repeatedly about the state’s voting laws and whether they should be made more Strict less strict or left as they are now and interestingly in this poll We found 65 percent of Republicans So just about two thirds saying that the state’s voting laws which have repeatedly and been Strict have been repeatedly and significantly tightened over the last two decades of Republican rule, including, including very recently in the last number of years after the 2020 election, but 65 percent of Republican voters saying this thought should be more strict.

This was an 11 point increase over the share who said the same back in February of 2023. So a little bit over a year ago, that’s the last time we asked a question. So it was already a majority of Republicans saying, yes, we should, you know, even this was after SB one, this was another session later, this is saying, Hey, no, we.

Still majority still want the laws made stricter and as we get closer to this election, that’s uptick even further. Now this is pretty, you know, I think first and foremost, this sort of stuck out, stuck out to me, you know, kind of like a sore thumb. Now in some ways you look at these results and I think when you see a jump like that, there is a tendency, at least from my perspective to say, is this a, a one time blip?

What, you know, but the issue here in a lot of ways is that it’s so internally consistent within the other attitudes in the poll, right? So when we look and we say, given this idea, uh, You know, this, that we find is that this wide spread support for still stricter voting laws aligns with voters lack of confidence that Americans are actually going to trust the results of the outcome of the election.

So only 7 percent of Republicans were very confident that Americans are going to trust the results of the upcoming presidential election. So fewer than one in 10, and this is significantly less. then even the 18 percent who were very confident at the end of the last presidential campaign in October 2020 when again there were many many Public communications about how why the election process shouldn’t be trusted So what we see here is actually a further decline in Republican trust Just generally in the idea that Americans themselves buy into these election results.

[00:15:07] James Henson: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a You know, that’s, that’s a real linchpin of this discussion, I think, in a lot of ways. I mean, that is not, that is not just a little movement, um, you know, both in terms of thinking about domestic, thinking about state level laws and thinking about, you know, what the overall arc of that level of trust in elections is now.

Clearly, there’s an element of views about national politics here and, you know, we can’t talk about Republican views of elections without taking into account, you know, the influence of Donald Trump on this discussion nationally as, you know, if you will, the lead signaler of Republican politics and Republican attitudes.

I mean, you know, we’ve got, you know, we’d have to go back into the specific numbers. You know, we’ve asked people periodically. You know, we asked him during the primary season, for example, you know, whose endorsement, you know, matters most in Republican legislative primary elections, and the primary response far and above anybody else was Donald Trump.

So you can’t, I don’t think you can discount the impact of Trump on Republican, on Republican attitudes. Um,

[00:16:19] Joshua Blank: Right. And that’s right. I think the thing is, but at the same time, you could also overestimate it. Right.

[00:16:23] James Henson: Well, right. And that’s kind of the, you know, I mean, I think, you know, the, the, the thing is, you can.

And that’s really one of the birds under our saddle all the time. I mean, you know, We’ve discussed it many times in this podcast in a lot of different policy areas, you know, we, you know, and that is, you know, and we’ve made the point that many Republican beliefs, attitudes, and policies that we, you know, can be pretty sure are amplified, you know, and, and given pride of place.

place, you know, rendered more prominent by Donald Trump, still have precedents in Texas that predate his rise. We’ve talked about this a lot in the context of immigration, and you know, I think it applies here.

[00:17:05] Joshua Blank: Yeah, I think that’s right. So like, look, I mean, Just to put the number on it, you know, to the extent that Donald Trump is so doubts about the results of the last election, those took root among Republican voters and have remained.

So in August of this year, we’ve asked this question many times. 58 percent I’m sorry. I’m actually right. Still 58 percent of Republican voters said that Donald Joe Biden did not win. The most recent presidential election legitimately, right? So nearly two thirds. This has been pretty consistent. It’s not as high as it was right after the election, but it’s remained pretty consistent throughout, uh, you know, the last couple of years we’ve been pulling it,

[00:17:40] James Henson: right?

I mean, if you really want to be an optimist about this, but I think, you know, you’re really looking pretty hard. You can note that. I mean, you know, for the first year or so, year and a half after the election, the share of, of Republicans that said, you know, that they didn’t think Joe Biden had legitimately won the election, you know, stayed pretty consistently at 60 percent or higher and peaked at 69 percent a couple of times through 2023.

So, you know, if you want to say, Hey, look, the fever is breaking. It’s only 59 percent now you can, but I, you know, I, I think that’s, You’re trying very hard to be an optimist about that.

[00:18:20] Joshua Blank: And again, I think, you know, one of the things you could do here is you could, you could attribute that to Trump. But I think one of the things that we’re trying to do in the piece here is point out that the roots to this, the, the, the beliefs that make a claim like Trump’s take root and hold already existed and had been cultivated.

for a very, very long time. He

[00:18:38] James Henson: was planting that seed in very fertile soil.

[00:18:41] Joshua Blank: Right. And so there’s a little bit of a slightly extended discussion about the role of voter ID, you know, in this, but the, the part of the throw, the important, I think, you know, uh, public opinion sort of, you know, uh, observation to take away from this is essentially the big partisan differences in perceptions about essentially the, the frequency and seriousness of Illegal voting, you know, ineligible voters voting, voter fraud, whatever you want to call it on the one hand, uh, and how extensive that is among Republicans, and looking that also in the context of the presence and availability of attitudes towards voter suppression among Democrats.

Now, there’s two different points here, and we’ll sort of, let’s just talk about Republicans for a second, because I think this is actually the most important point. So consistently, and we’ve asked these sort of pairs of questions multiple times in a couple different ways, and we can talk about some of the details of this maybe a little bit later, but the takeaway point here is to say is despite Really extensive efforts.

And we can kind of go back and we sort of list some of these on the piece of the voter I. D. Laws. We talk about the difficulty, obviously difficulties, you know, increasing challenges that the state has put in place to register people to vote the way that the state has, let’s say, implemented changes to early voting laws, you know, really the entirety of S.

B. One and sort of the fight around that, among many other things. And then further discussions. I say, you know, I’ve been important sort of thing that You know, the criminalization of routine voting errors in some cases, whether, you know, in new laws or even just the public criminalizing and sort of, you know, promoting of what happens to people who usually accidentally vote illegally in the state.

You know, this has been going on for, you know, again, to two decades solidly. And yet these attitudes that Republican voters hold about both the frequency of illegal voting and the extent of its seriousness. Have not really changed appreciably over that time period. So

[00:20:24] James Henson: those attitudes are that it happens, you know,

[00:20:26] Joshua Blank: yeah, it happens a lot.

[00:20:27] James Henson: Oralities or majorities think it happens, you know, frequently or very often. And they think it’s extremely important

[00:20:35] Joshua Blank: and it’s an extremely serious problem. And what’s interesting about this, you know, we have a colleague here, uh, you know, Chris, who talks about, you know, these, these. You know, again, this sort of thermostatic policy response.

And the idea is that normally, normally I like to be casual. Normally, I’m just getting older. You know, I want to,

[00:20:51] James Henson: I’m the footnote.

[00:20:53] Joshua Blank: So normally the idea is, is the public, you know, in a, in a sort of a normal process, you might think the public has concerns, right? Policymakers respond to those concerns with policies.

And then the people say, Oh, okay, my policy concerns have been addressed in whole, in part, whatever, and then it becomes less of a concern. This is not, yeah. And this is not the, the, the nature of this system here, whereby even with concerted and consistent attention to the voting system here in Texas, Republican voters have in no point actually like really, uh, decrease their belief that there’s fraud in the system.

And if anything, as we saw in the most recent rules, actually think the laws need to continue to be made more strict.

[00:21:29] James Henson: Right.

[00:21:30] Joshua Blank: So that’s sort of, that’s the main kind of observation. Try to think

[00:21:33] James Henson: about how to torture the metaphor of the, the thermostat and the HVAC. I’m not going to go into it, but something’s broken.

Right. You know, you call a repairman.

[00:21:43] Joshua Blank: Yeah. And there’s even more things that I kind of left out of, you know, the over, you know, the, again, the overall RL arc here. You can think about redistricting fights. You can think about the, the Supreme Court’s limiting of the voting rights. and the impact that’s that.

I mean, these are extended fights to the public

[00:21:56] James Henson: fights over redistricting in two in 2010. Right? And so provide some overarching elite killing me.

[00:22:03] Joshua Blank: And what’s really remarkable about this is that, if anything, you know, none of these actions have actually done anything to assuage the fears of Republican voters, if anything, they’ve just merely hardened, right?

So if we look at the share, for example, of Republicans who say that ineligible voters are voting frequently in Texas elections, then again, they could say they’re voting sometimes, not at all. Right. But just frequently in June of 2024, it was one in four Republican voters say this is happening frequently in June of 2021, sort of, you know, again, during the SB one debate, it was 31%.

I mean, as far as we’re concerned, that’s not really an appreciable change when we’re talking about the sheriff’s say this is something that’s going on regularly.

So, you know, what this means is that if you look at this years of data, you can say that, you know, most GOP voters still see voter fraud as a major problem despite these decades of effort to shore up the system. And no substantial evidence that there’s ever actually been any sort of widespread problems.

So then the question becomes, why is this happening? Right? What is this sort of dynamic that’s producing that

[00:23:06] James Henson: keeps those attitudes in place? Despite this kind of, you know, what we would think of as this thermostatic dynamic, right? And I think, you know, there’s, and so we want to, you know, discuss and talk about the answer.

But I mean, I think, you know, if you go back to where we started a few minutes ago, You know, the degree to which, you know, these attitudes are being reinforced, you know, in the, in, you know, whether in the absence of evidence by action

[00:23:33] Joshua Blank: is really interesting. Well, what’s interesting is that the policy, so, you know, just to, just in a practical statement, we’ve talked about this before, but because, you know, this is sort of, because there actually is no evidence of significant fraud in the state and this, we talked about this in the wake of the 2020 election and sort of a lot of during that session, we talked about this a lot in terms of the voting bill, that the SB one that.

made its way through the process and sort of the weird twists and turns that it took to get there. And part of the reason that bill was actually kind of difficult to pass even before the democrats left Was in a lot of ways because the fact that it’s I mean, I hate I don’t want to use cliches here But you know, it’s a solution in search of a problem without an actual policy problem to address It means that really you need to find these policy solutions, but the policy solutions themselves in some ways Reinforce the message.

You know, if we do need again, stricter voter ID requirements, you’re implying because people are voting illegally. If we do need to clear the roles of, you know, potential nonsense and voters, and we’ll come back to that regularly. Or we do need you know, the counties to provide the attorney general’s office with you know, near constant updates about you know, potential discrepancies in their own you know, voting lists.

You’re implying that there’s serious problems here, even though we’re not actually seeing anybody point to real problems.

[00:24:46] James Henson: And look, I think to be fair, I want to Present what is often the fallback argument on this and it’s kind of a

[00:24:53] Joshua Blank: two part to be fair is my line

[00:24:54] James Henson: It’s a it’s you know, it’s a two point It’s you know There’s two main points to make here one of which you know, I think is evident if we go look at Secretary of State Nelson’s Letter, which is you know, it’s our job to be preventative.

[00:25:05] Joshua Blank: Yeah, absolutely,

[00:25:06] James Henson: right and You know, the second piece of that is the the grounding for that, which is, you know, we need to have something akin to a zero tolerance policy that the integrity of the electoral system is so important that even if the incidents we have are sporadic, there’s very little evidence that in, you know, 99 percent of the cases, and we should, you know, there’s a couple of cases that we, you know, should flag, you know, in out the outer areas of Harris County, a couple of cycles ago, et cetera.

But even if. Those incidents are sporadic and, and at best, you know, very uncommon that that should still drive our efforts. And I think, and so I think, you know, it’s fair to have that out there, but it doesn’t, but it, that does not. That’s not really responsive to, you know, the, the way in which, you know, these efforts are couched and the intimations that accompany them and how they plug into other elements that are out there.

[00:26:11] Joshua Blank: Well, and I think that observation is really important because it actually speaks to an asymmetry in terms of mobilizing on the one hand on the front. fraud issue. And on the other hand, on voters suppression, because Democrats have really not been terribly successful at mobilizing on this idea that the state is suppressing voters to my, to my, to my read, you know, and I would say that read is both based on what I observed in the campaigns and what the focus has been, but also even just, you know, in our own public opinion analysis, you know, when we ask people, people these questions about whether the Texas political system or the electoral system discriminates against racial and ethnic minorities.

We don’t see high levels of agreement with that. Even among Democrats, where you, you know, again, you see more agreement than you do among Republicans, where you see very little, it’s still not an overwhelmingly widespread viewpoint because it’s not a salient of an issue. And the question becomes, well, why is that?

And I think you really laid out in some ways what the asymmetry is here and it connects with the public opinion data that we go into more deeply in the piece, which is that for Republicans, not only do they see, uh, you know, again, voter, uh, Fraud is both a frequent problem and an extremely serious problem.

We say the

[00:27:08] James Henson: Republic is Republican voters. Republican

[00:27:09] Joshua Blank: voters.

[00:27:10] James Henson: Yeah.

[00:27:10] Joshua Blank: Right. So, so because of that, You know, I say it’s going to reinforce this view and why right well because ultimately if I am a voter going on voting and somebody is voting illegally, it can plausibly be argued that my vote is being diluted.

You can either say it depends. You know, you can you can mess with the extent of that. I can say, well, my votes being canceled. I can say it’s being diluted. You know, I can say the entire outcome is being called into question if you believe,

[00:27:34] James Henson: you know, the unsubstantiated rhetoric. That, you know, undocumented immigrants are voting in massive numbers for Democrats, you’re being swamped.

[00:27:41] Joshua Blank: Right. You’re not just

[00:27:43] James Henson: being diluted or can’t, you know, you’re being, you know, the imagery that, you know, Donald Trump deploys and that his allies in the state have. Period, you know,

[00:27:51] Joshua Blank: right

[00:27:52] James Henson: often choose to echo is, you know, there’s this reserve army of voters being mobilized by negative They’re not swamping you today.

They will eventually

[00:27:59] Joshua Blank: and and and is that voter, you know, I don’t I don’t mute, you know, the uh, The rage I might feel about that or whatever. It’s not mutually exclusive to me I can feel it someone else can everybody You know can feel that way about it if they want to now for democrats on the issue of suppression It’s a little bit difficult because when you’re talking to democratic voters, you’re talking to people presumably Who vote, which means they’ve engaged with the process.

The process has worked for them. And so at least, you know, in an experiential sense, it feels as though, you know, the system is working similarly. And this is just sort of the way this works. You know, if somebody else’s rights are suppressed and they don’t get to vote, it doesn’t actually suppress my rights as a voter.

So the direct connection between myself and the idea of suppression is necessarily a little bit more abstracted. And when we look at democratic attitudes, what we find is that, yeah, you know, they do think that, you know, Voters are basically being, you know, suppressed to some extent, they either think it’s happening frequently, but less frequently than Republicans think are voting, you know, and they think it’s less serious, because ultimately it’s just not as, again, directly attachable to someone who is already a voter operating effectively in the system to say, yeah, but other people can’t or other people aren’t.

[00:29:08] James Henson: Yeah, I mean, look, a third of Democratic voters, more or less, and in many of the. The results we’ve gotten about the seriousness of people voting who are not eligible also agree that, you know, that’s nobody wants that. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s dwarfed by the share of Republicans, but I mean, I think that’s, you know, that that’s sort of some of the empirical grounding for, you know, the The fallout from what you’re saying,

[00:29:31] Joshua Blank: one other issue I think, you know, I noticed we didn’t put this in the piece because a little bit again, there’s so many things you could talk about about this data.

But I mean, one of the things you notice, or we’ve noticed at least, you know, democratic concerns about these issues were a little bit less than they were in previous years a little in terms of the frequent, you know, the intensity of it. And part of that says, you know, what did we have in the last few years, really high turnout elections.

You know, we had a lot of Democrats turning out. We had, you know, again, the highest Democratic vote totals repeatedly, first in a midterm, then in a, you know, in a presidential, then in a midterm, then in another presidential. So when you ask Democrats, you know, are Democrats having trouble voting for a lot of them, the feeling of it is going to be no, right?

But the, but the specter of fraud, which has never gone away, remains.

[00:30:11] James Henson: And I, and I think, so, you know, and I think that’s a great breakdown of the internal dynamics here that helped fuel. The ability of Republican opinion leaders to continue to reinforce these attitudes among their voters, you know, In the absence of, you know, what we could quaintly call, you know, a surplus of empirical evidence.

[00:30:35] Joshua Blank: Yeah, and furthermore, in a context in which they’ve won every election in the last two decades, they’ve controlled the machinery of state government. And as I mean, you know, as some people pointed out to the extent that these, these sort of, you know, New flames about the possibility of undocumented immigrants voting and a friend of mine You know said hey wasn’t voter id supposed to solve that, you know, and that’s a fair question right at this point But that’s not really the conversation we’re having right?

[00:31:02] James Henson: Yeah, not at all. Um,

[00:31:04] Joshua Blank: so, let’s see What else should we talk about here? You want to talk about the practical aspects of this? Yeah, why

[00:31:07] James Henson: don’t you talk about that a little bit? You’ve done some digging in some of this county data and I think that’s you that’s that’s that’s interesting And then we’ll come back and kind of end with some some

[00:31:15] Joshua Blank: more normative points before we get into that So, yeah, you know You know, there’s something that you point out in the piece kind of near the end that you brought to light that I think is important to say here, and then we’ll kind of, you know, pivot off that, which is, you know, election rules are not normative by nature.

They’re made by politicians. They have interests in them. You know, there’s embedded features to all electoral systems that advantage some groups and disadvantage others, you know. Sorry, it’s just kind of is what it is, right? Yeah. So, you know, so just from a purely practical standpoint, looking at this, you know, if we look at how Republicans have targeted in particular, you know, the large urban counties, Harris, Bear and Travis in a lot of ways, Dallas to a lesser extent, but,

[00:31:56] James Henson: but I think there are explanations for the

[00:31:58] Joshua Blank: explanation for that.

But if we look just at those four counties, I mean, what you see here is a lot of the rationale for why Republicans are so stupid. Yeah. Probably. And I’m just, you know, I’m interpret something so concerned about voter registration in some of these counties. So if we look at Harris County, for example, in 2012, Mitt Romney only lost Harris County by 971 votes.

Right now I’m using legislative council data just for those who want to know that in 26 of 971 votes. That’s how that’s how close Harris County was in 2016. Donald Trump lost Harris County by 162, 000 votes in 2020. He lost it by 217, 000 votes. If we look at bear County,

[00:32:36] James Henson: so a trend of increase,

[00:32:38] Joshua Blank: huge increase in the, and this is, I’m just looking at

[00:32:40] James Henson: a steep trend in the increase in, you know, the, the loss margin in those cities of the Republican presidential candidate.

[00:32:46] Joshua Blank: And this is what we’re focused. I mean, I’ve chosen to kind of focus on here. What is the, what is the nature of the democratic or Republican advantage in each of these counties, right? If we look at bear County, Mitt Romney lost that kind of a 23, 000 votes. Trump lost it by 80, 000 in 2016 and by 140, 000 in 2020.

Travis, the most, the most Democratic county, Romney lost by 92, 000. Double that for Trump in 2016 to 181, 000. Add another 90, 000, he lost it by 274, 000 in 2020. In Dallas County, Romney lost by 110, 000, uh, in 2012, Trump lost by 198, and by 2020. And if we look at Tarrant County, where a lot of these activities, you know, some of the most recent, you know, uptick in attention has been, Romney won that county by almost 100, 000 votes in 2012, and the County narrowly went Democratic in the next two presidential elections.

So overall, if you combine just setting Tarrant County aside, but the biggest four counties here in terms of Harris, but not the biggest, but the big Democratic counties, always in Harris, Bear, Travis, and Dallas, this makes up about 35 percent of the statewide vote. It went from a 226, 000 vote Democratic advantage in 2012 to almost a million vote advantage by 2020, so it increased by almost four times.

So there is just a straight. You know, if you’re sitting here, you’re a

[00:34:01] James Henson: political rational,

[00:34:02] Joshua Blank: if you’re just looking at this and saying, okay, you know, the vote, the, the democratic advantage in these big counties has, you know, almost doubled or tripled or quadrupled in some cases over the last, you know, three elections, there is an aspect of this is a, you know, and I would throw myself in this game.

What’s going to happen in 2024? I don’t know.

[00:34:20] James Henson: Right. So incur, you know, so, you know, just to draw the picture as clearly as possible. So, you know, if you are a Republican statewide official and you see efforts to increase registration going on in those counties. Um, it is in your political interest, if you can, you know, to give people the benefit of the doubt, somebody to find legal means of blunting efforts to increase voter registration among a body of voters that, you know, is increasingly voting against you, uh, you know, we shouldn’t be surprised that people are doing that now, you know, in the piece, and I think that data really illustrates that really nicely now, you know, in the piece, you know, where we kind of wind up.

is where we kind of, to some degree, we want to wind up today, I think, which is, you know, to think about the implications of this dynamic over time. And by this dynamic, I mean, you know, thinking about the longer term cumulative impact. implications of the basic insight that we’ve used in here a million times, that if you’re an academic listening to this, you’ve probably used a million times this idea that, you know, we’re, you know, where you kind of, you know, sit back and go, well, you know, election rules, they’re inherently political, right?

It’s going to be politics. Let’s not get our hair on fire about it. Or, you know, let’s not be clouded by, you know, some kind of, you know, you know, pearl clutching over the fact that people are trying to, you know, adjust the election rules or address the administration of elections. Impact the

[00:35:53] Joshua Blank: composition of the electorate.

[00:35:54] James Henson: It’s what happens. But that said, you know, there is, like I said, there is a cumulative effect over time that, you know, the public opinion data points to. And that is, you know, there is, you know, a clear, you know, pattern in which The skepticism of the legitimacy of elections and of the process, both nationally and in the state.

Has kind of settled into a, you know, it’s almost, you know, I would even say stagnated, you know, that’s one way of thinking about the dynamic you were explaining so well, or you’re describing so well earlier. That is, you know, it’s a funny, it’s a funny thing. Republican legis, you know, lawmakers and the leadership in the state continue to ratchet down, you know, election laws to, you know, to make it.

The process more stringent, I would say, and yet public opinion doesn’t really go, Oh, okay, great. You guys have addressed that. There’s, there’s a demand for more and that demand for more, you know, which we can talk about in a minute, you know, is being, has been refueled by bringing the issues of immigration, border security, frankly, cultural identity.

Into the mix,

[00:37:07] Joshua Blank: right?

[00:37:07] James Henson: We’ll talk about that in a second and you know to kind of close out But I mean, I think we want to I really want to make the point that if we look at that in the longer term I think it’s easy for us and for people that watch public opinion It’s one of those things you go. Yeah, you know, there it is.

I mean, why would you expect it to change?

[00:37:25] Joshua Blank: Right,

[00:37:26] James Henson: right, and that’s great But there are side effects of the the settling of those attitudes that lead me to use the word stagnant

[00:37:33] Joshua Blank: Yeah, because

[00:37:33] James Henson: I think you know, I mean we you and i’ve talked about this a bit. I mean You You know, you can overthink this and get too wrapped up in the immediate context, and I think forget to step back and say, you know, not so long ago, there were boundaries to how we talked about voter participation and voting.

The effort to get people to more to participate more and even more concretely, you know, the idea of doing voter registration drives and encouraging people to register to vote that was seen as a public service, right? You know, to put it very directly, and that was all buttressed by a norm that said, whatever this other dynamic that we’ve talked about over here, this, you know, yes, we’re gonna have political fights over elections and voting.

Let’s all be adults about it. But the nature of that fight has changed. And the settling of these attitudes is both evidence of and a driver of, you know, what seems to me To be a real decay in the norms around voting I mean, I think if you had said to somebody 20 years ago, you know, the attorney general is going to be out telling You know counties and cities Not to make a big effort to register voters and they’re gonna, you know, be really enjoying them and really, you know, really leaning on them both rhetorically and legally when if not, you know, you’re a little paranoid.

And yet that’s where we are. And I think, you know, I don’t just don’t think there’s any way you can’t see that as evidence of an ongoing shift in these norms and worry about where we’re going.

[00:39:10] Joshua Blank: Yeah. I mean, I think when you look at the sum total of this and say, so what’s, you know, someone would say, well, what’s the boilerplate what’s going on?

And you’d say, yeah, Republican elected officials are using state police powers to try to limit what are generally considered normal campaign activities. And really the normal activities of. you know, election officials in the counties who the state have, you know, charged with running elections to basically make the process

[00:39:33] James Henson: easy.

And I think, I think we really want to underline that, the, the and there, right, because there’s, you know, the part is, you know, the nature of, you know, basically rolling out this investigation you know, that’s still foggily defined in legal terms, you know, in terms of what’s going on Bexar County and in that district, it’s not just Bexar County, but, and, um, You know, the, that actual, the political part, but then, but then also the change.

And again, what have been seen as civic functions, right? I mean, it’s kind of a real infection of what we, you know, had been previously come to find as a civic sphere and not, I’m not naive or, you know, I don’t want to rewrite history, you know, I’m sure there’ve been times when there’s been settling maneuvering where, and on both sides, frankly, more, more often And the Republican side, because of the demographics and the patterns you talked about in which people might have subtly said, Well, yeah, we should do a voter registration drive.

But you know, we’re not going to go out of our way, right? If you know, if you’re somebody that thinks that’s to your disadvantage. Yeah. And look, this has happened in almost certainly in areas of in Democratic strongholds and various in some parts of the state. So I don’t want to, you know,

[00:40:51] Joshua Blank: and this is also not to say that there aren’t, you know, instances in which You A voter votes who shouldn’t vote.

I mean just to throw this out there or might not be eligible in some way You know the issue here is the fact of you know Do we design a system around the possibility that one person might vote illegally? If that system means that it’s significantly harder for the vast vast majority of eligible voters to cast a ballot Or are we even going to discourage people who would be eligible voters from even registering in the process,

[00:41:18] James Henson: right?

And and that’s you know, and so that you know in the the change in the normative thinking about that I think is really an important piece of all this that, you know, it’s easy to be a little, again, too pearl clutchy in the way that you deliver this message. But I think in terms of thinking about, you know, the civic, you know, to use a hokey term, but the civic culture in the state and the way the political system works, this shift, I think, is very significant.

And I think we really do, you know, I think it’s Fair, and we should have a conversation about what the implications of that are for the state and for, for the residents here.

[00:41:55] Joshua Blank: Well, and maybe I am being too pearl clutchy, but I mean, there’s the only thing I take issue with in what you said was, you know, the use of the term stagnate, and I’m only just thinking about it in the sense that, you know, stagnate like a swamp, maybe, but the issue here, and, you know, what’s interesting, you know, we, we tend to be, again, I, I think, You know, not to speak for you, but I think, you know, we tend to look at the role that elites play in the formation of public opinion and see it as being a pretty, you know, prime driver, right?

Um, but I also think that, you know, Recently, and you know, there’s probably a bigger discussion for a different day, but you know, I think there’s been instances on both sides where you look at the public opinion, then you look at the actions of elected officials, and it’s it’s pretty easy to sort of make the case that we’re seeing some in the opposite direction here and there.

And I think about, you know, Biden’s move on the border a while ago and some of his movements there. You know, we saw In public opinion, the Democrats were expressing more concerns about the border. My assumption, and we said it at the time on the podcast, was that, you know, Biden saw that data about two weeks earlier of his own polling.

And so, you know, they change actions. You know, in the case like this, I understand that, you know, Trump is out there, you know, sowing distrust in the election system. But that’s not new. I mean, that’s not like something that big, big deal. Change, but we have seen this change in the last couple weeks again from a Republican elected officials in terms of what they’re choosing to Talk about the court.

I mean clearly I mean to your point when you didn’t say this about this the clearly coordinated efforts to some extent

[00:43:13] James Henson: Yeah, allowing for within the Republican, you know food fight going on factional fighting, you know, right who’s coordinating with who? Yeah,

[00:43:20] Joshua Blank: but both, you know, I see this core never to both on the one hand, you know tamp down registration efforts And you know really large urban areas, but on the other hand So this, you know, continue to push this idea of non citizen voting is this is this big threat now.

I do think that that’s coming in some ways. I think that’s actually coming from the bottom up, which is why I worry that the word stagnate actually is a little bit too new. Generous here because of the fact that there is no end point. Like we’re not seeing, you know, again, there’s no Republicans going out in Texas saying, Hey guys, we did it.

Yeah. And all I meant by

[00:43:54] James Henson: stagnate was, you know, looking at in terms of where a lack of movement induces Yeah, and decay that, you know, the lack, you know, the steadiness in public opinion. Yeah, it’s not that the dynamic right now. You’re right. That’s right But that’s what I meant by yeah, that’s that’s

[00:44:12] Joshua Blank: perfect so yeah, you’re right the the stagnant the stagnancy in the sense of the relationship between the voters and Elected officials when it comes to this issue leads to continually more efforts to address the issue But those efforts actually just reinforce the attitudes right now Um,

[00:44:28] James Henson: rather than, you know, resolve concerns and I think

[00:44:30] Joshua Blank: that and I think the thing is speaking of resolving concerns and secondly, this is where I think the most recent move is actually so damaging, right?

So what we’ve seen again historically here is first is focused on fraud. Absent any evidence of fraud, it became this idea to focus on election integrity because you can’t ever maximize integrity. So we see continual efforts to maximize integrity. And now we’ve moved back into this sort of fraud space a bit.

But here we’re not talking about, you know, you know, I don’t even know dead people voting. The issue here is this idea of non citizens voting. Right. And it’s relying on, like, a specious claim, and it’s a claim that’s already been, you know, adjudicated and thrown out by the courts in Texas recently, which is to say, what’s being done here is to say, well, if we haven’t confirmed that somebody on the voter rolls Is a citizen affirmatively, we are going to not assume that there are non citizen because if you look at the language that’s being thrown, they’re very careful about this because a lot of legal problems here, but we’re going to call into question their eligibility to vote now in some corners that’s being pushed further to say there are non citizens on the voting rolls.

And for a lot of people, that’s the quick jump is to say, look at this right now, setting aside. How small these numbers are, the fact that again, if you go back to the, you know, a former secretary of state’s efforts to purge the voter rolls of these exact same types of issues. And again, I suggest you look it up or go listen to one of our podcasts, like this is something that’s been adjudicated by the courts as one, not a way to identify non citizens voters because it’s discriminatory.

Two, it’s very, very highly flawed because of the nature of the data that’s being used to sort of reach this conclusion. And then if you do follow through on it, again, you are discriminating in who you’re essentially targeting. So like, just like a lot of these things, I mean, most of Ken Paxton’s efforts at the county so far have been stopped by judges.

I imagine that, you know, to the extent that this is floating around out there, you notice they’re not actually removing people from the roles. They’re not sending letters to people saying, Hey, we need to check your citizenship.

[00:46:18] James Henson: Well they are doing. They

[00:46:19] Joshua Blank: are. But, but what they’re actually using. I mean, to your point is kind of we’re putting on Twitter a letter that we’re asking someone else to help us out.

[00:46:25] James Henson: Yeah. And the, you know, and look, the politics of the federal government, you know, the Biden administration, you know, and there, and again, there is in the Paxton draft of the letter, there is language, you know, that I think didn’t make it into the final draft. Right.

[00:46:37] Joshua Blank: But what you’re doing is you’re taking this hot, hot issue that’s sort of, you know, unresolvable with no real effort to resolve it.

And now you’re mixing it into what everybody who listens to this now is the. Issue with the hot

[00:46:47] James Henson: button issue. The hot button issue voters.

[00:46:48] Joshua Blank: Yeah. Immigration, border security. And you’re saying, no, this is not just a matter of, you know, Democrats. You know, again, deceased people, people out of state, people voting twice.

No, this is about non citizens diluting your vote. And that just hits too many buttons. And so that’s why, again, you know, and again, not stagnancy, but like, there’s the possibility is this could get worse. Yeah. I mean, the way this is going,

[00:47:08] James Henson: you know, this is, I think, where the,

[00:47:11] Joshua Blank: you know, the practical

[00:47:12] James Henson: politics on the ground, you know, in, and the patterns in public opinion.

You know, meet this institutional, meet the communicative piece that we’ve been talking about and you are seeing, you know, a kind of, you know, innovation and, and modification of the rhetoric among Republican leaders. I mean, I think, and that’s why in this, in the, in the case of the secretary of state’s letter to the feds, whatever happens on, you know, with that, the underlying implication is conveyed.

And you’ve associated the two issues in a way That reinforces that, you know, you could put it, you know in a more positive way or in the more, you know stagnant figure of speech in both work, which is you know, this just further reinforces and Those attitudes among Republican voters and keeps those levels of concern in place And in that sense, you know, they’re you know what I you know You could say public attitudes are stagnant in the face of the changes That have bit that have been implemented in terms of voting and elections but you know they’re still being fed by this rhetoric that associates these voting rules in the absence of actual evidence with the threat there of You You know, quote unquote, illegals voting on, you know,

[00:48:34] Joshua Blank: so, you know, one final thought for me on this is, you know, I do wonder about the overall, you know, effectiveness.

I mean, the long term, I think there’s a real danger, you know, and I don’t expect that elected officials to think beyond a given election. So I’ll set that aside. Um, but I do wonder, you know, it’s notable to me that most of the people in Texas who are pushing this are not on the ballot. This time, this time, right during this, this, this recent moment or not on the ballot.

And I do wonder to what extent, you know, I mean, I get, you know, we’re doing a lot of events right now and, you know, I get the question kind of regularly about, you know, do I have concerns about, you know, whether polling impacts people’s likelihood to turn out or something? And that’s a topic for another day.

The answer is no. But, you know, I do think, you know, people pointed this out in 2020 in particular, you know, just saying that the system is rigged and really. Trumpeting that message towards Republican voters, help or hurt turnout. I mean, just saying, you know, that the system is flawed, that undocumented immigrants are voting, that the process is rigged.

I mean, is that really a winning message in a close election? You know, and I think, you know, where turnout is just so important for both parties. You know, I just, I do wonder whether there’s really a net benefit, at least on the mobilization side, in the most immediate term, to continue to fan these flames of illegitimacy about the process you’re asking people to participate in.

[00:49:55] James Henson: And I think, you know, that’s come up in a very direct mechanical way in Republicans in swing states response to, you know, one of the Trump speech set pieces about the evils of mail in voting.

[00:50:08] Joshua Blank: Yeah.

[00:50:09] James Henson: In which, you know, Republican, you know, Republicans are in charge that are trying to mobilize voters. Many of their voters who have traditionally until, you know, pre Trump,

[00:50:18] Joshua Blank: yeah,

[00:50:19] James Henson: like the mail in voting, um, or, you know, Absentee voting with excuse, etc.

Right. So no, I think I think that’s a good point. I think we’ll we’ll end around here. I urge you to to find the piece on the blog section at texaspolitics. utexas. edu and if you’re listening to this podcast on a platform, We’ll post that piece along with this, with this podcast and, you know, a little taste of some other illustrating data that we’ve referred to.

So with that, thanks to Josh for joining and, and all the prep work on the podcast as always. Also thanks to our excellent production team in the dev studio in the College of Liberal Arts at UT Austin, couldn’t do it without you guys. For more content, all our polling results, please go to texaspolitics. utexas. edu. We’ll While there, you’ll find all kinds of other bonuses, including our much trafficked internship bulletin board. If you are a participant in Texas politics or you’re somebody looking for internships for you or some young people, you know, that is the most trafficked source of internships and opportunities in the state.

And it’s just. Follow the link to internships on our website. And of course, most of all, thanks to you for listening. And we’ll be back soon with another Second Reading podcast. The Second Reading podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.