September 7th, 2021 – Second Reading Podcast

Welcome to the 2nd Reading Podcast from the University of Texas at Austin. The republicans were in the Democratic Party because there was only one party. So I tell people on a regular basis, there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called texas. The problem is these departures from the constitution, they have become the norm at what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room? Yeah. And welcome back to the second reading podcast for the week of september 7th. I’m Jim Henson, director of the texas politics project at the University of texas at Austin, joined again today by josh blank, a research director for the texas politics project. Good afternoon, josh. Hello, good afternoon to you. Well, in a post labor Day weekend huh podcast. It is though. Um I don’t know, I don’t feel amazingly post holiday, but that may just be the general state of things. I suppose it’s like the longest perpetual summer ever. Just keep such. It’s september, it just keeps going. I think we’re still in the summer, right? I don’t write perpetual dog days. Um It’s july right. Yeah, exactly. So, so last week we took we took a first cut at some of the macro level results from the texas politics project poll that we released last week on thursday. The poll came out just as the legislature was a journey and signing die from the special session. And and we spent most of last week talking about the big uh you know, the, you know, the view of things that, you know, overall the kind of overarching view of the political landscape, at least as as in public opinion, which I think we’ve we’ve characterized repeatedly as dour, um which I think is which kind of caught on and I think is about right. Um and we promised to drill down a little more so I think for for this podcast and for where we are right now. I think the question we had a dwell on today or the set of questions is revolve around the legislature, the texas legislature. What does the poll tell us about the legislative session, how the public views the legislature and vice versa, how legislative expectations of the public might be playing into the management of the agenda by the governor and and by the legislature. So I think the, you know, the place we need to start, which I think is also part of the answer here, is who’s paying attention to the Legislature now. We get up in the morning and read clips and hang out with people more or less that pay a lot of attention to the Legislature and this is kind of their thing. Um but that’s not true of everybody that said, we did see when we asked about Legislature about about attention to the legislature and in this poll, the special session, that, you know, no small share of people reported paying attention, I guess that’s a cosmic characterization, but right. I mean, I was struck by how many people, how much attention there was during the summer to this thing. Right. And the thing is, I mean, that’s relative to our usual expectations, which I think is you kind of alluded to. And I’ll say, you know, explicitly as we generally don’t expect people to pay a ton of attention to the legislature, you know, we kind of expect them to pick up, you know, some of the high level happenings, you know, there’s a big fight over something, whether it be abortion rights or or what have you. We expect there to be a little bit an uptick intention. But we asked throughout the session, you know, how much essential attention people are paying to the legislature. You know, usually when when people say we ask that, you know, maybe about tend to percent say a lot, maybe as high as, you know, 15 or 18% say a lot. But when we asked in this most recent poll, in august about attention to the current special session of the Legislature, 36% said a lot with another 38% saying some. So even though, you know, a third doesn’t sound like a lot saying they’re paying a lot of attention actually, it kind of is uh, in terms of what we would normally expect. And especially during the middle of the summer, when people generally are expected to tune politics out for the large part and go do other things. Yeah. One of the things that struck me about this is we drilled down is that there’s, you know, I’m not surprised by the fact that there’s not much difference between democrats and republicans and I think we’ll wind up coming back to this. But independence were to me surprisingly likely to say they had heard some or a lot about the current special session and that that’s definitely higher than normal, right? And the reason that, you know, that that stands out is because, you know, if you’re someone who’s listening to this and you consider yourself a true political independent, you don’t lean towards one part of the other. I’m sure that you’re obviously paying a lot of attention. You’re listening to this podcast, but you are an outlier and most independence and most true independence people without partisan attachments tend to be less engaged in politics, pay less attention, no less of what’s going on. So when, you know, from an attention standpoint, when the independence look like partisans, it kind of says, it kind of raises a flag and says, oh, this is really actually breaking through in some general sets and and then if we add to that, then so if we if we set the if we acknowledge that or, you know, we sort of seem to think based on the data anyway that more people were paying attention. There’s also a uh another interesting thing that was in the poll, in terms of the Legislature that was there. The legislative approval level, which we tend to expect is not very high, but was pretty dismal this time. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I was historically dismal, right? So, overall 28% of Texans in this most recent pulse, if they approve of the job, the legislature is doing 48% that said they disapproved. So that’s net -20, that’s the highest disapproval and the lowest net approval rating that we have on record. And we usually assess this pretty regularly after legislative sessions sessions worth the data. Right? But all, but also, uh, you know, since june disapproval of the legislature has gone up, so it’s gone up 10 points since we asked, just at the end of the session, two august approval went down seven points. And the truth is, this was across the board. So we can’t Exactly, you know, so it’s not like we can say, oh, well, this is just democrats, or this is just, you know, whatever fill in your group, Um you know, back in June, it was 35 approved 38 disapproved. So almost even Republicans went from 61 approving 250 approving and from 15% disapproving to 27. So almost double the share of Republicans disapproving democratic disapproval obviously went up as well from 65 to 73%, but that’s relatively actually minimal Compared to the increase in Republican disapproval. Independent disapproval went from 39% in June 2, 51%. So majority of independents disapproved. And so really, this is sort of, you know, an across the board, if you go back to the conversation we had last week about the 30,000 ft view of all of this, and and sort of how are people, how are people in general interpreting what looks like dysfunction? You know, in one way or another, it seems that people were in fact interpreting some kind of dysfunction, which isn’t to say again, that there’s a direction here about the nature of it is possible that some of these republicans were disapproving because the legislature wasn’t accomplishing what they said they were going to. And if we measure again, their approval might bounce back when we measure again next time we go into the field. But needless to say, you know, all of the in fighting and consternation and difficulties didn’t lead people to think, you know, legislature is doing a good job. And, you know, if anything that went in the opposite direction well, and I think one of the things, you know, some of, you know, is he drilled down into the internals of that, you know, one of the things that’s that’s interesting is that even among republicans to use a phrase we deploy every so often, It’s a certain amount of damning with faint praise, only 13% of Republicans approved of, Serving strongly of the job that the legislature was doing. The, you know, you mentioned that 50% figure the other 30% of 37% only approved somewhat. And, you know, I think that is striking to me to the extent that a big part of the discussion that is going on right now is how, you know, everything that was done in the legislature was done to police republicans, uh, please and to please republican primary voters. And while we see some other indications that that might be the case, if you break it down by intensity of party identification, You know, the approved strongly 1919% of those who say they’re strong Republicans say that they approve strongly. That’s a lot, you know, higher than the others, but it’s still not very high for a model of government. That seems that we’re all talking about, seems to be moving, you know, as we said last week, almost towards a responsible party model of governance in the sense that, you know, the, you know, the the agenda is being set and policies are being pursued by and large to appeal to the majority party with scant regard for the for the minority party and the minority that’s showing up in the minority party numbers. And that 53% more than half of democrats disapprove strongly of what the job the legislature is doing, but you’re not getting this, that that level of return among republicans. Now, we can, you know, straight back into the negative partisanship piece of this and this could that could explain part of this. But I mean, I think if you’re a Republican and you’re looking at these numbers, it’s fair to ask, well, what, you know, what what else should we do or are we doing something wrong and not knowing it? Yeah. And as or are we trying to do too much? I mean, I think one of the, you know, and this is one of the difficulties in in writing the pole like this and and interpreting, you know, results even at a high level like this, is that, you know, it requires a certain amount of guesswork as to what exactly is driving these changes in attitudes, right? And when you start to, you know, ask that question, I mean, you’re already kind of set it up, which is, well, it could be a number of things, right? That’s look lucky for us. We did in fact ask people how much they had heard about a bunch of items in the news and you know, and that was this was kind of a mixture of news stories and explicit agenda items, most of which though, revolved around what was going on with texas. State government is certainly uh what was in front of the Legislature and we did see a lot of variants in there that maybe does help us work through some of this, I think, Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, going, you know, when we started talking last week about the 30,000 ft view and I think over the last couple podcasts, we’ve talked, about you know the the breath and range of conflicts that were taking place in state government, both between the parties, but also, you know, within the institution, between the chambers, you know, within the parties themselves, amongst democrats and amongst republicans, between state and local governments, uh school districts. And ultimately, there’s there’s a lot of, you know, there’s a lot of places that, you know, a consumer of political information could turn their attention uh and it wasn’t exactly clear to us what, you know, what all people were paying attention to. And that’s why we said this battery, that includes things like, you know, both the Governor’s executive orders to prohibit business, you know, basically local governments from instituting business limits, you know, his executive over prohibiting local governments from instituting mass requirements, the veto of the legislative funding, the democrats leaving the state to deny a core. Um you know, the Governor’s call, promised to call multiple special sessions new legislation of voting elections, the border wall and says, I start going through this list like, oh my God, it’s just so it’s like, Yeah, exactly, and for most people, this is kind of overwhelming, but, you know, to the extent that people were paying attention, what really seemed to to move uh to the top Of the list was, you know, sort of two items, kind of stood out from the rest, which was, you know, the Democrats leaving and breaking the core. Um, so 63% of Texas said that they heard a lot about that, which is not surprising given how much attention the Democrats, you know, sought in doing that. And the other one that was almost even was Governor Abbott’s decision to prohibit local governments from instituting Mass meant is that with 62% of people had heard a lot, uh, you know, in the case of mass mandates, more Democrats and Republicans have heard about it a lot, about 72% of Democrats, of Republicans, slightly more Republicans have heard a lot about the Democrats leaving. Uh, and then, you know, the other issues certainly generated a fair amount of intention, but just, just to pause on those two for a second, it’s interesting to note that, you know, you can almost imagine a counterfactual universe in which, you know, the governor doesn’t pick a fight with local school districts over masks. And the leading story right now, is the democrats leaving the state and denying the court, uh, and based on the other results we have in the poll, that that probably would have been beneficial to republicans, just to keep that issue on front, I think, well, you know, I, you know, we’ve talked about that, and I thought about it a little bit more, and I, I think that’s probably right, but the more I think about the counterfactual of that, you know, a universe in which, you know, and this is probably a straw man in the other direction. But say the governor, you know, didn’t issue an executive order prohibiting mask mandates in schools and left it up to the schools with the idea that, hey, you know, the democrats, you know, leaving the state and busting quorum is going to lead, is going to lead the political world, is going to lead the political news and occupy the political world. But it’s possible that another story would have arisen from him allowing schools to do that. And that would have been the pushback from his own constituents saying, hey, how come you’re not preventing them from doing this, Which is an expectation that at this point in time he’s cultivated Right. I mean, he spent much of 20, you know, listen to be fair, he spent the second half of 2020, uh, trying to clamp down on local governments and school districts ability to make their own policy. And then when the delta variant came and schools started making their own and he didn’t do anything pretty likely that was going to, we probably would have had the same kind of conflicts that we talked about on the podcast and everybody listening has seen of, you know, this fight’s and yelling and stuff at the schools. So I’m not, you know, so I don’t know, I mean we talked about that and the more I thought about it, you know, I’m not sure that he wasn’t a little more boxed in than that. Not that I you know, that’s to say, you know neither not that’s not to pass judgment on the wisdom of the policy in either direction, although you know, but you know, I do wonder you know how if it wouldn’t have like happened in a different way. Yeah. No, I mean I mean this is where it’s kind of, I mean this is where I think one of the difficult things that you know, it’s really there’s a certain member of you know, how many mast angels dance on the head of a pin. But well I mean this is one of those things where you know even you know studying public opinion and study it closely, you’re somewhat left it a bit of a loss because from time because a lot of times we can measure the direction of opinions and to some extent we can measure the intensity but you know, another sort of way to think about. You know, people’s opinions is sort of the centrality of it or the salience of it, which is, you know, relative to all the other things that they’re thinking about, how much are they thinking about this, right or or how you know relative to all the other things they can, they can think about, you know, how important is this or how primary is this thing when they then go and evaluate, you know, the politicians and the parties and the and the role of government. And I think that’s part of what’s difficult to unpack even in this very, very information filled poll is that, you know, you look at this and you say, yeah, you know, that’s right. You know, I agree with you. But then when we look at, you know, some of the items down the list, when we asked people whether they approve or disapprove of some of these things we’re talking about here and we ask about local government efforts to slow, you know, the coronavirus or local I. S. D. Measures to slow covid in schools, You know, you have 87 or 84% of Democrats in favor of those things, But you also have about 35% of Republicans in favor of what the local governments and localized Sar doing. And that’s where the difficulty comes in. So you have about a majority of republicans who are on board with what with what Abbott is doing. Now, the question is, do they hold those opinions really closely? Are they super important is making sure that kids don’t wear masks or don’t have to wear masks in school central to, you know, how they’re evaluating candidates right now And you know, or is that more likely to be the case for the 34% of republicans who are kind of like, hey, wait a minute, I just want to, you know, but, but it’s difficult because as you’ve said repeatedly, particularly on this mask wearing and the school thing, There’s a lot of cross pressures here because in that same reading, 34% approve of school districts, implementing of Republicans, approve of school districts implementing measures to slow the virus as you were saying, but 75% approve of governor rabbits, executive order prohibiting local government. So there’s a couple of things about that one, you know, obviously, you know, there’s, there’s some movement there. I think that, you know, that as you point out frequently has to do with kids, right? In other words, you know, the 70 75 34 don’t add up 210 so somebody’s moving because of the school piece. But I mean, to the point of, you know, had Governor Abbott not, not issued that executive order, I’m pretty confident a big share of those 75% of republicans may well have noticed, but I’m, you know, this good, this gets back to one another, complicated thing about public opinion, you know, At this point, I think they don’t need Greg Abbott to lead them to that position, but it’s going to be a lot easier to get to that position of Greg Abbott axe. Yeah, I mean, I think the other side of the way that you frame that in terms of the question is to say, and then for that, you know, again, exactly those numbers don’t add up to 100%. And the point is, but one question is asking, hey, like, you know, basically you take a step back and just look at these isolation, One is basically saying, you know, this is how I think of people in Germany, hey, do you think, you know, the school should be doing what they can, and you know, under the best wisdom they have to keep kids safe? And the reality is, most people say, yeah, I think so, you know, and again, with republicans more complicated because of the politics of this, what have you. But ultimately there’s a fair number of people who say yes, when we say, hey, do you think Greg Abbott should be, you know, making an executive order that lays out clearly what the districts can and can’t do, let’s just say in the most an indian way possible partisanship plays a big role. And then ultimately, if you look across all these items, if we include Greg Abbott in the stem, that’s a cue to republican voters and I probably agree with this, even if I’m not sure it’s a nudge in that direction. And so I think, you know, that’s that’s part of the difficulty, it’s part of, you know, it’s both the promise and the peril of what Abbott is doing right now, I mean, there was an article in the trip today that I thought was pretty good. And kind of pointed out something I’ve been thinking about a lot, which is, you know, it seems like the legislature was kind of keeping their hands off this issue as much as they could. And, you know, the, you know, the tribune article basically made the point, you know, yes, they directly did that. They chose not to take get the in the middle of this fight between the governor and school districts on masks, because honestly, who wants to be in that fight? I don’t know, I Yeah, and I think that, you know, and there are two institutional things that are interesting there, right? One is, I mean, I guess these are two sides of the same thing, but, you know, an example of the legislature, looking at the, you know, looking at the politics of this, knowing, you know, that there to the extent that they are going to benefit from this, they can let Governor Abbott take whatever backlash there is um you know, in terms of the at the individual decision making level, but how that all aggregate, it’s into the, you know, the legislature ultimately dominated by a Republican majority ceding authority to our republican led executive. You know, and, you know, I think this is one of the things that is, you know, driving, you know, some people internal to the legislature, kind of kind of crazy. Um but it’s more old timers and staff people rather than the elected officials who are, you know, the agents of this, of the seating of authority. But this is why, I mean, as I still kind of go back to the counterfactual, what you’re talking about. That point is a really, you know, inter institutional kind of like, you know, historical argument about about, you know, the manifestation of mask mandates and all that. But when I think about, you know, the counterfactual about the democrats leaving it was to do what it was to stop republicans from passing, you know, and their construction of the story. It was to stop republicans from passing restrictive voting legislation. Ultimately, that voting legislation was overwhelmingly supported and wanted by republican voters, much less conflict there than in other places. And truthfully for most of the issues that republicans were addressing in addition to voting legislation, uh, you know, they know, they have strong constituencies for, you know, stricter, stricter restrictions on abortion for, I mean, they know they have strong, you know, constituencies for critical race theory limitations, whatever that means, they know that they have, you know, certainly a very active constituency that wants to limit, you know, basically what transgender students can do in public life for you. I want to prohibit you from using the term critical race theory in this broadcast, whatever it makes some listeners feel uncomfortable. Well, I said, whatever that means doesn’t that work, isn’t that the same as like a no offense, but I just did it afterwards. So, but these are clear constituencies for these things. We know it we’ve measured it, you know, time and time again. You know, these things come up and so I would think even some of these fit into these historical context. Whereas, you know, fighting the pandemic and the pandemic who’s on the ground impact is changing. You know, let’s say, a week to week, you know, it’s odd to me, you know, again, to shift the conversation to, you know, the governor versus school districts. So we generally trust to protect the kids. You know, it’s like a basic level, you know, it just seems to me it took a lot of the oxygen out of the room where they could have just been happy saying, hey, look, we’re trying to do all this stuff that our voters who elected us statewide and to a majority in both houses want us to do, and they’re keeping us from basically doing the people’s business. The mask thing just kind of cuts across that to me in a very in the school district fight in the local government cuts across that in a way that just yeah, I understand that it’s probably necessary for Greg Abbott in the Republican primary for sure. But I mean if if he got to choose, I think, you know, I mean, look, it says it would be clear that if he got to choose, he would much rather be focusing on the voting bill and immigration. Well, that’s another interesting thing about these numbers is that is salient is immigration is as a problem when we asked, you know, really at the bottom of the list of how much people have heard a lot about, um, and, you know, by some small margins, but nonetheless, you know, two of the items are, you know, Governor Abbott’s, how much have you heard about Governor Abbott’s plan to use state money to essentially build a wall? We didn’t use that language, you said to add more barriers, et cetera, or Governor Abbott’s veto, or the number of migrants detained crossing the U. S. Mexican border. Um, you know, those were well below a lot of the other items that we that we tested. I mean, they were that was eight and nine of, you know, the 10 that we that we asked about. And I think that was surprising. I don’t know, we don’t really I, you know, I was surprised by that too. No, we haven’t. I mean, the fact that, you know, so 51% of Republicans said that they’ve heard a lot about the number of migrants crossing the us Mexico border recently, you know, and this is again in a state where Without fail, you know, somewhere between 40 and 60% of Republicans regularly say that immigration or border security is the number one issue facing the state. We know that this is a topic that’s regularly discussed on conservative media, the governor has really made a lot of, I think effort to talk about the situation of the southern border and to blame the current administration for it. And so the fact that this number wasn’t even higher given what we know about, you know, how to use for immigration. But you know, maybe the answer is simply the way we started, which is, there’s a lot going on right now, you know, hard to, you know, attention to be fair, TRX to our pre existing expectations. But no, I mean, if you if you look at my break it down by party, You know, Republicans were, you know, significantly more likely than Democrats or independents to have said that they had heard about the number of migrants, you know, 51% of Republicans, they had heard, You know, a lot about it. Well, and to be fair, that’s 7% of independence and 31% of Democrats. And to be fair, again, saying that, you know, look, there’s a fire hose of information right now. That’s still fourth highest on the list of the nine items in terms of the things that Republicans heard about. So the number one was Democrats leaving the state, 68% hurt a lot. Abbott’s exec over prohibiting, you know, mask mandates was 57% Abbott, special session calls was 52 and 51 was the number of migrants crossing the us Mexico border. So it’s not like it was up there. But I mean, I think it also, I mean it also, I think does underline what we’ve been saying here in a different way that, you know, the fight’s over covered policy and masking, I mean anything that’s competing with immigration and border security is really loud in the ears of republicans. You know, I mean, you know, assuming that, you know, one of the things or you know, sort of fleshing out the fact that one of the things we’re seeing here is that, you know, we think about this environment and about what’s selling to people. And even we asked people how much have you heard, uh, you know, people are listening to our hearing different things, you know, they’re, you know, these things have very different ways. So, you know, I I think that um as we look at this, to step back to, you know, another kind of broad view of this, you know, there’s a lot of, you know, interesting data here to me that I’m still kind of processing in a lot of ways about just where the legislature is in the real estate of Texans and you know, and I asked that now, I mean, normally what I would think is, yep, you know, there’s been a couple of special sessions and they paid attention to all this stuff because it’s been very conflictual and as you say, it’s it’s been a very crowded environment and then people are turning on the local news and seeing stuff about the legislature as 1st, 2nd 3rd story before the first commercial break. And so there, you know, they’re getting exposed to it. Um and normally I think again, but now it’s kind of over, but we’re gonna have yet another session and they’re going to be back in less than two weeks by, you know, rumor at this point, if not, you know, official pronouncement to do redistricting. And I think there’s every expectation, as we had, sort of discussed on here 23 weeks ago, that it will not just be a redistricting session, that there will be other things added to that session. Um And so, you know, it’s interesting to me to see that the legislature is becoming, you know, is is gonna is likely to retain a certain level of science. We also saw that people were paying said that they were hearing more about redistricting, which is going to be the focus of this um at a moment when, you know, on the pointy headed side or on the insider east side, you know, we’re paying a lot of tension to what looks like the declining power of the legislature within the institutional arrangements of texas politics, you know, situated within, you know, the partisan universe right now. You know, it’s a tough break for them. I mean, not that I feel sorry for them, but it’s it’s a funny tough break for the legislature that, you know, they’re gonna have a lot of eyes on him again at just the moment, that they’re really not at their best to not to uh understate the case. We’ve had this conversation like a couple of months back where, you know, I had sort of raised this sort of speculative thing. And I was thinking, we asked this question about the texas model of government and whether it’s a good model for other states to follow. And part of, you know, what is the texas models like? Well, you know, it’s a low taxes, low services model. So it’s a small government model. And part of that is the legislature convening for 140 days every two years, which whenever I tell someone not from the state or, you know, someone even reporters remind them of this fact or let them go for the first time, they’re shocked that a state as large as texas has this part time legislature. But it’s part of the set piece. And one of the things that I’ve, you know, having been here a while and, you know, done all this public opinion. You know, you sort of come to realize that, you know, the things that people have internalized or internalized. And so one of the things I was I was sort of wondering about through all this is as, you know, the way you put that I think is great. It’s like, you know, well, At what point is R- 140 and a part time legislature start to look like a full time legislature that nobody wants. I don’t mean that is and I don’t mean that as a comment on this legislature per se, I just mean it as a comment on for doing their part. Well, I’m just saying that’s just me saying that I’m no I appreciate that. Well, fare well, I think you’re right. And I think that, you know, I mean, it’s also good to look back and parse the way that this question has been phrased for the decade. We’ve been asking it, which is, you know, generally speaking, you know, do you how do you feel about the essentially agree or disagree with the following statement. Generally speaking, the way state government runs in texas serves as a good model for other states to follow. And, you know, what’s interesting is what I was thinking is when you said, you know, when we think about what people are thinking, thinking about low service, you know, low tax, low service model, you know, I don’t think that’s what’s coming to mind first for a lot of people right now, not right now. And that’s and that’s the thing though, you know, actually, I’m glad you brought up the specific wording, because I mean if you even think about, I mean, the way you just phrased that right is that you go back you say you were in a moment when like, it seems like the legislative branches isn’t a bit of decline yet. It’s happening when they’ve basically been in session since the beginning of the year. Right. But you are talking about a version of texas government where, you know, the question is great, which is, you know, is it a good model for others running to follow? And if you think about right now witnessing over the last few months, it would be hard for anyone Democratic republicans say. Yeah, this is pretty good. This is 26% strongly agreed. Well, yeah, you know, the including almost half of republicans and 75% of Republicans still say yes, but that also, you know, and so with that underlines is that, you know, the the part of this question that invites projection or at least, you know, a projection onto the phrasing of the question, you know, begs the question of not only has the content of what people read into the question change, but if the criteria of, you know, I mean, you know, are the criteria that people are using in their own evaluations. How much has that changed? And and and it points us to that question that I think we need to, you know, probably, you know, engaged soon and maybe on the podcast, which is, what is it to be a texas republican right now, which ultimately gets to the question uh, that has come up a lot in a lot of different settings right now is, well, people would say, look, if you’re the first thing people are gonna say, if you’re a texas Republican, you’re Conservative. Well, that doesn’t help. Yeah, I was going to say was meaning what exactly conservative how, and I think that’s a huge question right now, because I think, you know, I mean, you know, in terms of looking at how the sausage gets made around here, I mean, I’ve had this title, you know, in my mind for a few weeks now, which is, you know, the reactionary moment in texas. Yeah, I mean, to assume, you know, is this ideology is a very complicated construct and, you know, to the extent that, like ideology exists in any sort of real and meaningful way we, you know, I think it’s a lot more, it’s a lot easier to say that, that it exists amongst the elected officials and it does in the electorate in some clear and consistent way. However, you know, to the extent that, like, you know, the last decade plus, and maybe putting this in the last year, this is sort of a long term, I think, trend here. But to the extent that, you know, we’ve seen, you know, numerous instances in which, you know, what we think of as ideology sort of ignored or subverted or somehow? Well, it’s changed or change, I mean, well, I mean, but that’s, I think, well, I mean, the only reason, the only reason I resist changes because it requires an adherence to the idea of ideology or a new definition of what the ideology is for it to actually apply across domains and time. And some sort of at this point, the idea I would say is I’m reluctant to use an ideology because usually think about, you know, a consistent set of four. I mean, there’s a lot of definitions, Yeah, before we because jim and I could get into this deficient, I refer is, you know, some sort of an abstract world view that allows for a consistent set of preferences across time and space. Right? I was I was going to preference this discussion by saying, I don’t think we have the same definition of idea. I know, we don’t know, we go on. I know we don’t have the same definition of ideology, but generally, like, I think you could you could generally you could witness, you know, ideology as defined in any number of ways in the legislature. You know, I think amongst the members who are professional politicians and political actors who have to think about these things a lot, Right? Whereas, you know, the electorate and somewhat whereas now it just sort of seems to be totally broken down. So the things would you say, you know, when when texas goes, it increases its border security funding on an issue, that’s a federal issue to, you know, three times what it used to spend and, you know, almost $2 billion you know, it’s like, so is that fiscally conservative? It’s like, well, you know, I guess, you know, I don’t know, but it’s what people want. And that’s the other thing that I think we’ve noticed in the last couple of years, we asked a lot of questions in the last 5, 10 years about, you know, kind of trying to probe at this idea of local control, state government, blah, blah blah Point being people want what they want and the and the idea that ordinary citizens have some sort of an abstract view about, you know, proper government roles in power and stuff like that. It just doesn’t really bear out in the data most of the time. But what you do find is that they want the policies they want. And so, you know, to your point here, on the one hand, the sort of the Texas models definitely seems to be changing in some ways. But ultimately, if you’re a voter and you’re getting what you want, are you happy with the way it’s working well? Yeah, sure. I’m getting what I want. So, you can still have 75% of Republicans in favor of a limited government model that’s running all year, you know? Well, the trick is under, you know, I think is understanding, you know, how it is that those underlying definitions, you know, how people ideologically frame or frame as ideology, what they want, what affects the changes in that, you know, because it’s, you know, I mean, I think what this is really what we’re really seeing now in this very moment is how much those things can move around and be shaped by a bunch of a bunch of different factors that are, you know, structural slash contextual and our and our flexible and are, you know, and change. And I think it brings back some we’ve said, you know, numerous times recently, which is that, you know, donald trump, really shifted the content that the, you know, the ideological content and the agenda of the Republican Party a lot in a way that I think reflects the kind of the notion of, of ideology we deploy in public opinion polling anyway. You know, it’s not completely different. But I mean, priorities in the in the various weights and balances have changed. Yeah. And I think to be fair and to acknowledge something to it also changed the way the democrats think that I just want to make sure that’s that’s clear, that’s not going to, you know, I mean, yeah, it moved things and we and we’ve seen that in texas and we’ve talked about it and so, you know, what that means for the legislature now, I think is, you know, the kind of, you know, instability and and in some cases, both, you know, political ideological and practical gymnastics that we’ve seen, you know, in the legislature to make this all, you know, sort of coherent away that I’m not, I’m not sure as we look at these numbers, you know, is only working unevenly and and sets the stage for the coming year for the politics in an election year. In a way that I think it’s going to create a lot of uncertainty for both Republican and Democratic candidates because that universe has become so scrambled and less reliable. Right? I mean, you know, the same dynamic that says, hey, people may be thinking about like what a good model for government is differently than they used to five years ago or 10 years ago when we started. So when we started asking this question, and, you know, that’s a that’s a pretty big element of uncertainty. And so you look for you look for certainties and that may be part of why we saw some of the, you know, some of the impulses that we saw in the legislature and some of the legislation, but there are, you know, I think probably institutional factors that also made that maybe not go exactly according to plan or, you know, I don’t know, I mean, I don’t know how you explain us being in a position right now where the state has, you know, all but outlawed abortion or at least all but abolished it. If not, you know, I mean, I’m sure brian Hughes was with us on the podcast, you say, well, look, we didn’t make it illegal. We just created mechanisms for people who object to it too. Stop it, you know, so, you know, to take that at face value. But nonetheless, there’s certainly no no lack of republicans right now. I mean, it’s muted, but they’re out there saying, I’m I’m not sure this is gonna work out exactly the way we expected it to. Well, I mean, that’s an interesting thing. I mean, I’ve been here in my whole life since I was at least, you know, politically cognizant and that’s that’s the word I used when I became politically cognizant that the time at the time. Yeah, when I was like 11, I said, I think I’m politically cognizant now. Um, but anyway, you know, but we’ve heard for years that, you know, look, when, when, when, you know, abortion gets outlawed, you’re going to see, you know, a big shift in the electorate, you’re going to see a bunch of people who had thought this was an issue who thought that was settled. Wake up and, you know, I put him, I’m shrugging my shoulders right now, cause I mean, we’ll see, but I mean, but it’s going to be tested and that’s and that’s kind of, I mean, the interesting issue here is that, you know, as much as, you know, the way this session has played out will allow for republicans, you know, to pick and choose when they go back to their primary electorate, what they want to talk about. They don’t get to choose what democrats want to talk about, and they don’t get to choose what their challenges are going to talk about. And the truth is just as much as there’s a bunch of issues that I think republicans can look, you know, basically pointed their electorates, they see we we did what you want. Democrats also have a bunch of issues to turn to. And when I looked through this poll, it’s notable one, the unanimity and extremity of democratic opposition to most of the things that republicans have done, and this goes over the course of our polling during the session, and it’s not like, you know, it’s not just a lot of daylight there, we’re talking 70 80 90% of strong opposition in most cases among democrats, amongst republicans, there’s some issues that generate more support than others are all generate majority support, but there’s plenty of issues that we’re kind of seeing that there’s a third of republicans who are not into it, or, more importantly, I think there’s a majority of independents who don’t think we should let’s say have permit, let’s carry. And so, you know, just as, you know, so, all this activity, you know, it is really allowing for, I’m in some ways, it’s interesting, it’s endogenous to, you know, the political competition in the state, right? We see more competition. So we’re seeing if anything, you know, the first round of that was republicans really focusing on bread and butter issues, we’ve come back around to the second round of it now, republicans are really focusing on their republican voters and republican primary voters. And so, you know, this next round of this is to say, well, what do the democrats do? It doesn’t matter. Does any of it matter? But there’s a lot of possibilities when you say it part of his I don’t think it’s about it all matter. And it’s about what is the, you know, what are the elections that campaign actually coalesce around? And what are the candidates focus on and what impact does that have? And I think the question, you know, that we sort of sort of engaged today is going to be part of that, but I wonder if it won’t, you know, I mean, it will want to keep an eye on it as the as the primaries in this election season unfolds should the legislative session ever end. Um you know, which is, you know, how did the institutional dynamics feed that? You know, because, you know, the legislature is supposed to is one of the key places where at least per initial design that’s supposed to check some of those impulses and not to sound like an old timer. But, you know, if we had an old time around the podcast right now, they’d be saying, yeah, look, it was the job of the state affairs Chairman to not let that happen on the abortion issue. You know, if you want to put some limits on abortion, you know, we’re all but you know, you this other stuff, you know, it’s that it’s the job to have those, you know, those big late night hearings and then to not keep that stuff bottled up or slow down in a way that we’re not in this position. Yeah, I think a generation of activists and republicans and conservatives, you know, could say from their perspective and, you know, not questioning their perspective. Well, that’s what was bad about that system. But I think the election is going to is going to test that theory, as you’re saying, um it’s not going to be a conclusive test because the context of the democrats being so weak is not, you know, it’s not, you know, affects that as a test of that, of that theory. But nonetheless, you know, this has been an interesting moment for seeing this how these institutions, how institutional performance or changes in the relative power, the relative powers between different branches and different centers of power and the political system uh affects that. So, I think with that we’ve got a little over, I want to thank josh for being here and a good rousing discussion about the texas. Legislature. Thanks to our crew in the liberal arts development studio at the University of texas at Austin, uh you can find the data from the latest texas politics project poll that we’ve been discussing and much much more as always at texas politics dot utexas dot e d u I’d say, go to the latest poll page first, but you can also go to our polling archive to get not only documentation, you know, summaries and cross tabs, but also the data file and the code book for the pole. Thank you for listening and we’ll be back next week with another Second reading podcast. The second reading podcast is a production of the texas politics project at the University of texas at Austin