Texas Public Opinion as the #TxLege Agenda Develops

2025-01-30_Second-Reading-Podcast_master
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[00:00:00] Intro/Outro: Welcome to the second reading podcast from the University of Texas at Austin.

The Republicans were in the Democratic Party because there was only one party. So I tell people on a regular basis, there is still a land of opportunity in America. It’s called Texas. The problem is these departures from the Constitution, they have become the norm.

At what point must a female senator Raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over the male colleagues in the room

[00:00:34] Jim Henson: And welcome back to the second reading podcast. I’m jim henson director of the texas politics project at the university of texas at austin Joined today by josh blank research director for the texas politics project happy, uh soupy morning Yeah, it’s been wet. Little wet out there, but you know, not as cold.

[00:00:52] Joshua Blank: Yeah. Well, you know what? And we need, we need the rain.

[00:00:55] Jim Henson: Half full.

Yeah. That is just perpetually half full.

[00:00:59] Joshua Blank: Yeah.

[00:01:00] Jim Henson: Well, speaking of half full today, we’ll pivot back to talking a bit about the political context of the 89th legislature here in Texas and what, what is going on at the legislature and in part.

By going back and, and kind of looking a little more closely at the polling we did on legislative priorities, legislative policy in December, you know, and, and we talked about this a little bit, but not really looked at it, you know, full on when the, The post we did when we rolled out this poll, we kind of drilled down this legislative stuff and really focused on that.

And you’ll find that blog post at our website, texaspolitics. utexas. edu. For those of you that have not been to the website in a little bit, we have soft launched a redesign, refactoring, rebuild, all of those things, I think to some degree, maybe least refactoring. Yeah, actually. You know, but a redesign and a, and a relaunch with a new backend of our website, which, um, you know, as you go, and if, uh, we are still fine tuning, you know, when I say soft launch, we didn’t really do a big rollout because we’re, uh, We’re not building the airplane while we’re flying, but you know, we’re,

[00:02:14] Joshua Blank: no, we’re

build, we’re building several airplanes while we’re flying , right?

[00:02:16] Jim Henson: We’re, we’re still, you know, making sure all the fixtures are tightened and everything. Let’s put it that way. In the airplane, all the, and

[00:02:22] Joshua Blank: throw, we’re throwing the duct tape back and forth to each other in different, right?

[00:02:24] Jim Henson: We didn’t get

gear basically, you know, all the end, you know, the equipment basically works in is safe, but,

[00:02:29] Joshua Blank: right.

[00:02:29] Jim Henson: Anyway, probably not a good day to use that extended airline metaphor, but nonetheless be that as it may this week we, you know, we moved beyond the kind of. from a distance perspective that the poll took in, in finding kind of leading indicators of the legislative agenda and we’re getting closer to more concrete indicators of what will be battling for pride of place on the agenda of Republican leaders and more specifically, you know, we’re seeing a few more of the opening bids, the obvious example of that being SB2, the voucher, ESA, School choice bill, which is moving through the Senate as we speak, right?

And you know among those leading it other leading indicators other than just the legislature being back and people being more focused and sending More signals in a big signal burst governor Greg Abbott will deliver his state of the state speech this Sunday That’ll be, you know, once again, an apparent close cooperation with Nextstar Media, as has been in the last couple of State of the State addresses during session in which we’ve moved from the tradition slash norm, terms that are thrown around a lot lately in state and especially national politics, of that speech being Delivered before the legislature for the last three now, starting with the COVID year in 2021, the governor has chosen on, you know, locations that highlight business and entrepreneurship in Texas, basically, as the site for these speeches, not giving them to the legislature.

So we’ve got that coming up, and in a familiar instance of institutional jockeying and, and, and institutional and individual jockeying to shape the legislative agenda, we’re recording Thursday morning. Yesterday, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick released the first round of his, what will be his top 40 priority bills for the regular legislative session.

A lot of content in there. And in thinking back, I believe Lieutenant Gov, that this pacing is fairly familiar. I believe the Lieutenant Governor has kind of jumped a little in front of the State of the State Address for the last few sessions. You know, lots of meat on there for us to talk about it a little bit today and certainly moving forward.

[00:04:50] Joshua Blank: One thing I think is really great about the way that you’ve laid this out, and I think one of the aspects of this data that’s actually, you know, in some ways I was a little bit probably reluctant, even if I didn’t express it. in which none of this was going on. So we, it wasn’t as though voters. primary voters, Republican voters, Democratic voters are hearing about the agendas of the lieutenant governor.

They’re not trying to understand, again, the jockeying, if they’re paying a lot of attention, in terms of what the priorities are, and then sort of putting that into their own sets of attitudes about what the priorities are. So in some ways, the way that I mean, I think I like to think about this, is this is a relatively clean measure of the priorities in some sense, right?

Because we’re not, At the point in which again, these legislative leaders and statewide leaders are really trying to, you know, go out and say, this is the most important thing facing the state, because honestly, for some number of people, if they just hear, well, I think the governor said this is the most important issue, basically, that’s going to push people.

Now, that doesn’t make that, you know, a non attitude. It just makes it a little bit less deep, whereas by going in December. Outside of all the noise, this gives us a sense of what is the context in which this stuff is being received?

[00:06:03] Jim Henson: Yeah, it’s a little yeah, that’s exactly right I think and then you know, we you know, we talked through it at the time and while yeah I think we both had a little bit of reluctance about jumping the jumping the gun.

I think we did arrive at the right Place on all this for all the reasons you’re talking about. It’s a You know, contaminated is the wrong word, but it’s, you know, it’s a little less shaped by powerful signaling. I used the term signaling earlier, and that’s not to say there wasn’t signaling going on inside the capital circles or the, you know, Professional circle, professional political circles, but it wasn’t very public in December and, and even had it been, people are not paying attention.

They’re paying attention to other stuff. So we got an interesting, an interesting measure.

[00:06:46] Joshua Blank: One thing that, you know, we’ll probably come back to you throughout this session and it’s worth just setting up right now is when we ask people how much attention they’re actually paying to the legislature during the legislative session, the share of Texans who say they’re paying a lot of attention usually increases over the course of the session, but from about like, 12 percent to about 18%.

[00:07:02] Jim Henson: Right. You know, so, you know, if we hit 20, it’s like, wow, people,

[00:07:05] Joshua Blank: something must’ve

happened.

[00:07:07] Jim Henson: And to be fair, these are the people that say they’re paying close attention, a lot of attention,

[00:07:12] Joshua Blank: so people are paying some attention. But the point is, you know, for those who are listening to this, you’re in the very narrow band of Texans.

[00:07:18] Jim Henson: And, you know, and we’ve mentioned, we should note, and I kind of flagged this little, you know, the unveiling of these priorities, isn’t all news. Per se in quotes. Mm-hmm . You know, there have been a lot of early indicators that, you know, within the community of what these priorities are gonna be. One of which is the speed with which the Senate has already, you know, had committee hearings on the school choice bill happened earlier this week, or maybe late last week.

Earlier this week.

[00:07:44] Joshua Blank: Yeah. Maybe that’s,

[00:07:45] Jim Henson: you know, and that has moved through the education committee and it’s, you know, it’s an interesting. point for institutionalists and insiders, you know, people that follow this closely inside. That was a very aggressive move to hear the bill so soon.

[00:08:01] Joshua Blank: Yeah.

[00:08:02] Jim Henson: And to basically anticipate, probably with some degree of communication, coordination.

It’s a good bet, no matter whatever the degree of coordination. That some kind of a school choice bill or some kind of school choice as a topic will be an emergency item.

[00:08:20] Joshua Blank: Right.

[00:08:20] Jim Henson: When the governor releases those in the next few days. And this, of course, enables the legislature to bypass constitutional provisions that limit the passage of bills in the first 60 days.

[00:08:31] Joshua Blank: And I think what makes us familiar is what we’ve seen over the last number of cycles, especially around the lieutenant governor’s priorities. You know, one of, I think, the standard strategies at this point is to pass a bill, pass a big bill. Throw it over to the house and then ask them like, you know, when they’re on it, why don’t you pass that one or whatever?

And I think that’s, you know, what you’re seeing right now, right? I mean, I’m sure we’ll talk about there’s a lot of various points, but, you know, big bill. Kind of Cadillac looking, you know, and the question then becomes okay, what are what’s actually gonna happen here? And you know the house is over there like hey, we’re still signing committees

[00:09:01] Jim Henson: Yeah, and I think there’s oh, you know again minor, you know sort of but interesting insider You know, you know the Senate governor made a point of saying here’s the first handful of priorities But we’re reserving 40 slots for priority bills last year.

He reserved 30 slots I think, you know, the norm is a little bit more around 20.

[00:09:23] Joshua Blank: I was going to say before that it was fewer because I remember it the neighborhood of 20.

[00:09:27] Jim Henson: Right. And so, you know, the expansion of 40 for those, you know, if you think back to where we were at the end of the election and the discussion we’ve had that’s been going on publicly, including with reporters is how aggressively conservative is this session going to be given?

Trump’s victory, Republican successes statewide, statewide elections in the 24 cycle, you know, the margin of victory for Trump, all of the indicators that this is what the voters want, the voters want Republican rule, they’re good with it, how aggressive were they were going to be now, Lieutenant Governor is always going to be on the aggressive side of the norm.

[00:10:03] Joshua Blank: Yeah.

[00:10:03] Jim Henson: Or the medians

[00:10:04] Joshua Blank: where he lives.

I mean, it’s fine

[00:10:05] Jim Henson: Yeah that’s his spot.

[00:10:06] Joshua Blank: Yeah.

[00:10:06] Jim Henson: Um, but you know, it’s, it’s worth noting that, you know, they’re kind of going for it. And, you know, one might argue in the first 25 priorities that there were some things that seemed a little like holdovers from, you know, previous sessions, but that’s not obviously his prerogative, but also understandable, not too odd, but there’s a few things that do feel like, you know, we haven’t heard a lot about.

Yeah. You know, drag queen story time since it was an issue during session politics in the run up a couple of years ago.

[00:10:39] Joshua Blank: Yeah, we were talking about this in the

[00:10:40] Jim Henson: And that’s just

one example. Yeah,

[00:10:41] Joshua Blank: that’s one example. There’s a couple. And if you go and look at the list, you know, you’ll find various examples that seem, you know, more or less to you on that.

And I think, you know, we were talking about on the way up and we’ll see how aggressively the lieutenant governor fights on these issues and how publicly he fights on some of them.

[00:10:54] Jim Henson: Right. But

[00:10:55] Joshua Blank: it does speak to, I think, sort of two, two sort of things struck me right at the bat looking at that. And one is, of course, you know, without.

Democratic control in the, in the wake of a, you know, again, a pretty solid Republican victory, you know, there are actually fewer obvious enemies. And so it might be the case we do need to go back to the well on some of this stuff, right? Because it’s not as though the Democrats are in an active space at this point to combat.

So essentially fighting yesterday’s battles that haven’t been won. You kind of make some sense, I think. Yeah.

[00:11:21] Jim Henson: Well, and look, it’s, yeah, I mean, it’s utterly consistent with the critiques of the house leadership. And, and the tone of the primary by saying, you guys aren’t getting enough conservative stuff done.

[00:11:34] Joshua Blank: And that’s the second point here. If you look at some of these and you can kind of say, you know, yeah, the house makeup has changed. So the way the house reacts to some of these things might change, but also the house has expressed some clear resistance to certain aspects of the things that he’s put in that first 25.

And if that doesn’t shift, I mean, the way that I think it looks from people like us who look at this institution, it’s like, well, that’s a great way to make a distinction.

[00:11:53] Jim Henson: Right. Well, and you know, I don’t know how much I’m going to keep that going. And I’m sure you’ve seen this, but I, you know, there’s also this interesting dynamic that is part of that, you know, and I, you know, I gave a talk to a community group from out of town, I guess that was late last week, you know, one of the things I was talking about with them was an aspect of the general sense of the dynamic we’re talking about, that with a weakened, less agenda, you.

uh, relevant Democratic Party? I don’t want to say they’re powerless because, you know, right after this house election, clearly, there are points when Democrats are still weighing in and have a presence. But in terms of agenda development, not a lot. That the fights you see are more between Republicans?

Factions in the Republican party. And an interesting, I think, illustration of the point you’re making, but also it’s an interesting, On where we are as you know, we’ve seen, uh, freshman represent state representative money introduce a bill on the House side, essentially ratcheting up, you know, the punishment of women receiving abortions, trying to cut out Medicaid and abortion.

This particular bill seems to me a bit of a Uh, I’m sorry, I didn’t have a bank shot on that, but that’s clearly the intent and govern or Lieutenant Governor Patrick coming out and saying,

[00:13:05] Joshua Blank: Yeah,

[00:13:06] Jim Henson: Hey, this looks like it might be trying to crim you know, penalize women and we’re not doing that.

[00:13:11] Joshua Blank: Right.

[00:13:11] Jim Henson: So you know, or I shouldn’t say penalize, you know, prosecute women criminally and that’s, you know.

You know, we, you know, we got to be careful about that,

[00:13:19] Joshua Blank: right? There’s some lines.

[00:13:20] Jim Henson: So, you know, if ever there was a sign of where this debate is, I mean, it’s an interesting point and where,

[00:13:27] Joshua Blank: well, it’s interesting

[00:13:28] Jim Henson: where the center

of the debate is and where the action is.

[00:13:30] Joshua Blank: It’s funny. I mean, it’s one of those things where it does, it does remind you that, you know, the The enemy of my enemy isn’t always my friend.

[00:13:37] Jim Henson: Yeah

[00:13:37] Joshua Blank: think, you know, there’s only so much, and I would say more so than that, you know, amongst, you know, politicians, there’s only so much space, and there’s only so much oxygen in the room, and it’s interesting to, you know, to that point, just because, you know, Patrick and sort of the, the farther right of the Republican caucus in the House might, you know, be allies in some things, it doesn’t mean he’s about to, like, cede over the messaging here, or just kind of go in on every wishlist item that could come up from that.

And just

[00:14:01] Jim Henson: completely open it up for what everybody, you know. It’s

[00:14:03] Joshua Blank: basically the same right there.

[00:14:05] Jim Henson: So we should put a pin on that for when we come back to the strictness results, right? For sure. So it’s a good, uh, all this is a, you know, a long intro to saying it’s a good opportunity for us to talk over and review the legislative agenda related poll results from the poll we did in December when there were a lot fewer signs to read, as we were saying earlier.

Yeah,

[00:14:24] Joshua Blank: we can take a look at what kind of, what do voters expect, but there was plenty

[00:14:27] Jim Henson: enough to put together, you know, a good battery or two. And I would say, you know, as a general comment, as we go through this, we’re pretty happy with these results and the. We got a lot of variants, it all kind of makes sense.

We learned some stuff, but it all, given the setting we were talking about, it was pretty helpful. So talk a little, Josh, about, you know, what we found in terms of top priorities and these came from this open ended item that we asked on the poll that asked directly what, what voters thought should be the legislature’s top priority in 2025.

[00:14:59] Joshua Blank: Right. And this was open ended so people could provide us with, with. Any possible answer and, and not surprisingly, uh, slightly more than one in five voters. 22 percent said, you know, they should do something about immigration or the border, you know, obviously much higher among Republicans. 37%. So nearly four out of every 10 Republicans who we asked said legislation should focus on immigration or the border.

After that, the economy and prices. Cost of living 16 percent public education came in after that at eight again for Republicans, immigration, the border clearly out front, followed by the economy and prices at 14 percent for Democrats. It’s much more of the economy, 18 percent and then public education at 11.

And I think that’s important to note there that even that public education percentage. It’s being slightly driven more by Democrats and independents than Republicans. So 6 percent of Republicans said public education should be the focus, as opposed to 8 percent of the overall public, 11 percent of Democrats, 11 percent of independents.

So for Republicans, it is a somewhat familiar story, which is, you know, what can the legislature do on the immigration issue once again, which is, you know, again, why you. Not surprising to see a pretty initial, big initial focus, and even really from the governor outside of the legislature, right, in terms of, you know, in terms of cooperating with the Trump administration, mobilizing National Guard members.

I mean, really, you are responding directly to electoral concerns right now.

[00:16:14] Jim Henson: Yeah. And, and, you know, I guess two follow ups on that one. We kept an eye out and created a bucket for ESA’s voucher related, school choice related responses, and it didn’t really move the needle much, right?

[00:16:28] Joshua Blank: Yeah, I mean, as kind of, we’ve repeatedly found in Poland where we try to get a fair measure about, around the salience of vouchers.

And we say, you know, is this something that people, I mean, what we can say is, look, there’s a basic sense, and you look at the polling, and we talk about this a lot throughout the session, you know, yeah, people generally are kind of pro. More choices, you know, so the idea is if you’re going to say, Hey, should we give people

[00:16:49] Jim Henson: when it comes to this, when

[00:16:50] Joshua Blank: it comes to this?

Well, I said, generally people are into more choices. And so here, I think you see that at the same time, it’s not necessarily a high priority for a lot of people. When you start to ask about, you know, other things, they’d say, well, you know, I’m much more concerned about the border. I’m much more concerned about the price of, you know, groceries and gas.

And even when we get to the education space, it’s like, well. Yeah. But like the facilities are really old and like, you know, the teachers haven’t gotten a raise. And so

[00:17:13] Jim Henson: kids are getting shot.

[00:17:15] Joshua Blank: Kids are getting shot school safety. Right. And so there’s a lot of other, I mean, it’s, you know, whether you want to, however you want to place it, there’s a lot of competition.

Both generally, but in the education space, And so it’s not surprising that you know You don’t see a high share of voters and even a high share of republicans because for republicans are just much much bigger issues out there

[00:17:33] Jim Henson: So then let’s just you know, I mean I think we could you know, I think we can kind of tie this together as we go Yeah, so let’s move So how about and then another way we approach this was something also that we?

Have a lot of trend on that. We’ve done before we did, you know, what, you know, I always think of is The Goldilocks construct for a question on spending, asking, giving people 12 different policy areas, asking whether the respondents thought that the state was spending too much, too little, or about the right amount in each of these areas.

And, you know, I, These are pretty interesting responses that map on to the priority responses.

[00:18:09] Joshua Blank: Yeah, that’s right. So, uh, what we found was, you know, across the 12 different policy areas, there were only three areas in which a majority of voters. Said the state was spending too little. Two of those were healthcare related, so mental health services, 58% in healthcare, 55%.

And the next one was one that we know is very salient to Texas voters. Electric infrastructure at 50%. Just below that majority was K through 12. Public education at 49%. And children in the state’s care, 49% border security was at 45%. Well, water infrastructure, which is sort of a big kind of. I mean, it’s a big issue for sure, but it’s one of those where you can kind of see elites really trying to push this message out right now before the session that this is going to be a water session, but actually, voters have expressed a lot of concern about water and a lot of polling we’ve seen all over the state.

44 percent thought the state was spending too little on water infrastructure. Now, it’s really easy to kind of see this and kind of think, well, this is a preference for higher spending, and I will say there is one thing I do want to bring together here, which is the two big areas are healthcare and children.

[00:19:06] Jim Henson: Yeah.

[00:19:07] Joshua Blank: And so you see right there, there’s definitely You know, it’s I wouldn’t I don’t want to say a consensus because that would be incorrect But you could say there is definitely some kind of critical mass around, you know, sort of people in the state’s care like that

[00:19:18] Jim Henson: Yeah, I mean, you know and I like the broad construct of the people’s in the straight and the people in the state’s care But I think it’s worth flagging.

It’s interesting because we’ve seen this and we’ve seen this in some more, you know consulting side

[00:19:32] Joshua Blank: Mm hmm

[00:19:33] Jim Henson: elite level polling How large health care looms out there.

[00:19:38] Joshua Blank: Well, you know, if you go even in this poll, and I didn’t put it up in these notes, but if you go back to the economic concern battery, and we ask people, uh, you know, what it is they’re concerned about, you know, obviously prices, kind of the cost of daily life.

Kind of

[00:19:50] Jim Henson: the price of everything.

[00:19:51] Joshua Blank: I think it was 69 percent said they were very concerned about it. I believe, and I’m pretty sure this is right, 68 percent were very concerned about the cost of healthcare. Yeah. And it’s one of those things where when we think about, you know, inflation and we think about all this stuff, yes, there’s sort of this daily, you know, okay, now your groceries cost 10 percent more now, eggs are 5.

15 instead of 2. 60 or whatever it is. But at the same time, one healthcare issue, and that’s like people’s savings are wiped out. Yeah. And so that’s something that, again, when we talk about salience, it’s important to sort of understand that, especially people who have any sort of chronic conditions, anybody who’s Has someone close to them who has any sort of chronic conditions or deal with healthcare?

These costs just don’t go away, and as people who do polling, you can’t conduct a poll where there’s not at least about 10 percent of the public who’s like, healthcare is just a huge problem.

[00:20:33] Jim Henson: And I think, you know, I think we have to fold that in to some degree. I mean, at least partially, there’s, you know, there’s kind of a, there’s an overlap, but it’s more of a Venn diagram, right?

That, you know, this is reinforced by the price anxiety, because I think, you know, there’s all the cataclysmic kind of, And I think that’s all converging in, in a way that I, I think, you know, there’s also a lot of data out there that, you know, co pays are going up, insurance costs are going up, you know, the prescription drug market is, you know, the recipient of a lot of attention with the, you know, the prices of prescriptions, the prices of drugs and all that, and I think that’s all converging in, in a way that I, I think, You know, and I kind of said this in a talk I gave to this group last week and with a legislator in the room or a couple, you know, I think lawmakers ignore that at their peril.

Now, I, I understand what the, you know, this is one of those areas where, you know, I don’t want to be diplomatic here at least to some degree. You know, there’s all this. concern that we’ve been seeing, as you say, it’s, you know, it ebbs and flows, and it’s kind of in a flow right now, you know, that we’ve seen in polling as long as we’ve both been doing this.

Um, but there’s also this countervailing, you know, the interest group universe on the healthcare side is very large and very powerful. And I think, I think it has a somewhat, I think it has a somewhat, It’s a parallelizing effect on, or at least, you know, at the very, I should paralyze you too strong a word, I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but it’s got a very moderated influence on, on how legislators approach these issues.

I think,

[00:22:16] Joshua Blank: yeah, you know what I mean? It’s interesting you bring that. And it’s

[00:22:17] Jim Henson: complicated to be fair. Well,

[00:22:18] Joshua Blank: you know, and you bring that up and there’s, I mean, this is sort of a. adjacent to it, but I’m going to link it in, which is like, you talked about health insurance, but it’s also like, you know, the cost of insuring anything.

I mean, there’s a lot of concern about home insurance costs thinking about what’s going on in California, but Texas is, you know, in a similar situation. And what I would say is, you know, this is all a general space we call, you know, there’s a little bit of a of a risk management problem going on right now.

And you see that in a lot of different sectors. You can see it both in the business sector with our concern about health care costs. You know, in particular, you can see it sort of in the insurance and home building sector. And to the extent that the government. Is there is not going to engage in that. I think you’re right.

You kind of ignore it. Your peril, because to the extent that the, you know, the risk management becomes, you know, essentially, you know, triage.

[00:23:00] Jim Henson: Yeah.

[00:23:01] Joshua Blank: Well, now you need a strong, effective government. And honestly, that’s not the political dynamic that we’re in right now.

[00:23:07] Jim Henson: Yeah, I think that’s I think that’s a fair.

So I think that’s a fair statement. Yeah, keep keep going on some of the internals. So I mean, but

[00:23:12] Joshua Blank: I don’t want to overstate this, right? So why this? May, you know, seem to indicate like a preference for some higher spending. You know, the partisan difference here is here are incredibly important, right? So a majority of Democrats feel that the state, state is spending too little on eight of the different 12 policy areas.

We don’t need to go into all of them. Uh, but among Republicans, a majority said the state was spending too little in only one area, border. Wait, wait, wait, sorry. I’m sorry. I thought everybody already knows anyway. Okay. Wait for it. We listeners. Yeah. Border security. You knew it. Right. Um, but I think it’s important to note that a plurality of Republicans still said the state was spending.

Oh, spending too little in seven of the 12 policy areas, uh, including border security. But it’s not an overwhelming call for more spending by any means. I mean, even on electric infrastructure, which is sort of, you know, 30 percent of Republicans said the state was spending enough, compared to 45%, who said the state was spending too little.

[00:24:00] Jim Henson: And we should note that, you know, there are, you know, the, the preliminary budgets that we saw, which is another set of leading indicators. Right. I should have put I should have mentioned earlier. The preliminary budgets at the House and the Senate have both put up, you know, You know, is, you know, dedicating more money to, you know, energy and the energy fund, et cetera.

[00:24:19] Joshua Blank: Right. So, uh, you know, how do we take this? I mean, I think one sense is, you know, I think, I mean, one of the things that my takeaway kind of thinking about this and Gary is, you know, one of the things that we’ve asked less. about less directly than we have in the past is sort of just a commitment to small government like a commitment to Essentially, you know keeping government small Limited services and we will come back to some of those questions.

I’ve already, you know, got some of the next draft You know for the next poll But I think you know, what’s interesting is that that stuff’s still there, right? I mean, it’s it’s not as obvious I think as it used to be but I’m and I think one of the things that’s gonna come forward is you know What do we think about that?

I mean, I’ll just sort of throw a couple thoughts out there. You can react a little bit. I mean, one is how much of this is sort of the the changing kind of ideological underpinnings of Republican Party and conservatism at large as it becomes more at least if not a populist party at least a Party that is aware of populism and sort of the role that the government plays and kind of you know Yeah, I just old term like bread and circus You know, like, I don’t remember where that came from.

Right. But like throwing out, you know, again, people want stuff. I mean, that was one of the things I think about the government freeze this week. That was like kind of a big deal, which is, you know, you got a bunch of legislators getting calls and you know what, there’s a bunch of Republican legislators getting calls because people get worried when they don’t get the things they expect.

[00:25:36] Jim Henson: Right. Well, and I think the interesting, you know, and, and I think most of this happened, although not all of it. Yeah. Most of that happened probably behind the scenes, but I mean. You know, I, it’s hard for me not to imagine we could not find actual instances of, you know, Republican representatives, Republican governors, you know, calling contacts in Washington going, uh, Hey, you guys just turn the Medicaid money off,

[00:26:01] Joshua Blank: right?

I mean, you know, you’ve been tracking this for a long time. I was telling my wife this, you know, Jim, Jim, Jim isn’t really interested in this, but I mean, the share of Texas is. Budget that relies on these federal funds is pretty astronomical because anything in Texas is astronomical, right?

[00:26:15] Jim Henson: But I mean, yeah,

[00:26:16] Joshua Blank: you

can’t just turn it off,

[00:26:18] Jim Henson: but you know the second federal, you know federal income versus Texas federal, you know, federal funds are the second largest source, single source of revenue behind behind only the sales tax.

[00:26:38] Joshua Blank: Right.

[00:26:38] Jim Henson: And we all know that we rely on the sales tax massively in the absence of a, of an income tax in the state.

[00:26:44] Joshua Blank: Right.

[00:26:45] Jim Henson: Yeah. I mean, I think you can’t, you know, when you, when you look at what the number was, and this was, I didn’t, you know, I was looking at. you know, one of my favorite sites, the receipts

Yeah

[00:26:55] Joshua Blank: exactly

[00:26:55] Jim Henson: comptroller site, you know, and looking at some of the, you know, the, the data from last year on this and looking at the trends, as you know, which I’m interested in.

Um, but you know, the, one of the stories, I believe it was the Tribune coverage of the initial. Uh, order that came out of the white house or that came out of OMB to. Turn the spigot off on that money and then turn it back. They wound up turning it back on pretty quickly. Um, was that You know, one of the estimates of how much money was at risk there, you know, in the current budget was in the ballpark of high eighties, close to 90 billion, I think, which, you know, is getting, you know, more than a quarter and almost, you know, more than a quarter, but not quite of a third of what the overall biennial budget is.

[00:27:43] Joshua Blank: And,

[00:27:43] Jim Henson: you know, that’s a lot.

[00:27:45] Joshua Blank: Yeah. You keep wanting to think you can’t just replace it and you can’t just. Cut it away. And, and that’s the thing. I mean, my sort of, you know, go to example is, you know, there’s a lot of Republicans in West Virginia who rely on heating subsidies. Yeah. And it’s just, you know, whatever, pick, pick it up, pick a policy, pick a group, whatever, you know, and it’s, so I think that’s one of those things you see, it’s going to be one of the challenges going forward.

It kind of dovetails with last week’s podcast about, you know, trying to transform government is going to be painful and you have to be willing to take on that pain. And what you could see right away is, you know, as much as, and I agree with you, I mean, there’s a lot of behind the scenes discussions are going on and as much as there is, you know, sort of this Unflinching support, especially among Republican elected officials for whatever the president is going to do right now.

You know, they were making a lot of calls. There was some flinching going on. There was a lot of flinching going on.

[00:28:27] Jim Henson: And, you know, people are afraid of Trump and afraid, you know, and I, you know, rational response that’s been well cultivated. Yeah. Um, and, and a strategy. Um, but I think it’s, it’s hard to imagine that there was not a lot of pushback on that.

Um, and that’s part of why we saw the response we did. Yeah. I mean, look, so I think, you know, there’s two things going on here. I think, you know, you kind of touch on them both and I don’t want to be repetitive, but I mean, I think, you know, one of the things you said is like, you know, where, where is the Republican party?

Where is conservatism on spending in small government? And look, there’s a long time and. You know, academic research, and political argument that says, yeah, look, people always talk a good fight about small government when they’re talking about what government is doing for not them. When you start talking about what you’re doing for them and their direct interest, then all of a sudden, you know, the government is too big in other places.

[00:29:27] Joshua Blank: Right.

[00:29:28] Jim Henson: You know, and that’s, that’s always been, there’s always been, you know, whether it’s, Bill Clinton in the era big government is over and Al Gore and his task force that you know Some people out there will remember to make government more efficiency. I mean, this isn’t the first You know DOGE that’s been attempted and it’s been attempted by Democrats.

No matter what there’s always a sense of You know, the struggle between some kind of principle and some kind of abstract idea of what the ideal size of government is and what, how that actually happens, which is just going to be inherently political, as we say, about a lot of things. It’s not, you know, unlike voting.

[00:30:09] Joshua Blank: Yeah, I mean, what I’ve been saying, you know, I’ve been saying to a lot of people in the last few days about this is, you know, it’s not as, I mean, based on our polling, there aren’t a lot of people who voted for Trump with the idea that he was going to go in and just totally dismantle the federal government.

Right. And it certainly says, and those people were going to vote Republican regardless, a hundred percent of the time, no matter what, and to the extent that, you know, Trump can claim a mandate, can say that, you know, he performed so well, whatever, that’s really largely off the back of people who decided late and probably decide based on like, I hope this guy improves the economy.

[00:30:36] Jim Henson: Yeah. And again, I mean, I think, I mean, I think that is exactly right. And I think that. You know, cognitively, you know, the kind of cognitive science cliches here are really helpful because, you know, there’s this idea where you want to go, well, you know, people like, you know, they want limited government.

They don’t want, you know, blah, blah. But, you know, people always want contradictory things and are more than willing and able and wired. You know, to continue to think of themselves as a small government person, but say, but you know, you better not cut my social security.

[00:31:12] Joshua Blank: Yeah, I hate PBS, but I love Daniel Tiger.

[00:31:14] Jim Henson: Yeah, you know, there you go. Or

[00:31:16] Joshua Blank: whatever, right? Yeah,

[00:31:17] Jim Henson: so there’s, you know, I mean, I, you know, I don’t want us to be naive. And I also want to, like, on this tax thing, you know, I’m You know, I know that there are people listening going, well, look, you know, yeah, you can, you can be as fascinated as you want by all the money the federal government gives Texas.

They take more in income taxes and I, you know, that argument is out there, does not.

[00:31:36] Joshua Blank: Yeah.

[00:31:37] Jim Henson: To my mind have any bearing on the fact that the budget relies on huge amounts of federal spending and were that federal spending to disappear There would be for be even be cut in half Yeah, there would and should it happen will be howls

[00:31:53] Joshua Blank: Well, you know it’s I think great and just to bring it back to this data for a second and What we don’t see in this data is any sort of sense by anybody that Texas is spending too much on, on almost anything.

And I think that’s here. And I think what I would say is, you know, just to, just to move this on to the next piece and just sort of think about, again, the Republican coalition. I mean, my actual full on takeaway from this, just keeping it focused on Texas for a second, is this actually gives legislators a Fair amount of flexibility and state leaders because really all that the Republican electorate is calling for is keep that border security spending high, you know, make sure we know it seems to be the lights on, keep the lights on, keep the borders warm, keep the, yeah, keep the lights on, keep the border security spending high, but after that, you know, they’re not asking for massive shifts in what we see, you know, in terms of the distribution of funds, like we don’t see that anywhere.

So I think that’s kind of now look, The lights go off if the water stops running, right? Things can change dramatically very quickly, but I mean, there has to be something like, I mean, what we’ve seen in the past, I think this is really important here, and there’s a difference between abortion on the one hand and electricity on the other.

One of those impacted almost everybody in the state. One of them is, is relatively targeted in some ways, comparatively.

[00:33:01] Jim Henson: Now, to be fair, we realize that, you know, one could perceive that targeting is at a little more than half of the population. But. Your point is well taken. That’s more of a caveat, but you do.

That’s a good transition. Let’s talk about the, let’s finish up with the last battery then, which is when we asked about whether or not the state’s laws should be made more strict, less strict or left alone. In some of the high profile, historically active domains, you know, including gun laws, abortion laws, gambling laws, marijuana laws, and then the thing that is a little unlike the others, but which we couldn’t leave out, and that is voting laws.

[00:33:40] Joshua Blank: Right. Um, you know, and here once again, you know, you see some pretty, some pretty mixed results, um, and I want to just say, you know, about our approach, I think, to this, because I think both of this is kind of here and I, you know, I’ve been having some discussions with different people about this, you know, because as the legislature gets more active, you start to get what seemed like more solid proposals, you know, you start to say, well, wait a minute, though, that’s, You know, don’t ask about, why are you asking about vouchers in general?

Why don’t you ask about the Senate’s voucher bill? And the answer, you know, in our cases is sort of twofold. One is the fact that I think we’re trying not to do on this is message test other people’s stuff that’s already been message tested, right? There’s a reason that things are described the way they are because there’s a lot of work that goes into that.

Uh, and additionally, it’s going to change, right? I mean, we already said that, you know, the Senate voucher bill is a great example. That’s a, that’s a really strong. Negotiating position to begin negotiating with the House. Assume the House gets something to them. It’s probably not going to look that way.

They’re going to have a conference committee. We could spend the entire next poll testing provisions in the Senate Voucher Bill if we wanted to. And, and, none of those provisions may actually carry through the final legislation that passes. So some of it is just about that. But the other thing is an approach, which is to say, I think we try to take one step back from the policy and try to get a little bit of a better sense of the general underlying attitudes, knowing a, that most people aren’t paying that much attention to this, B, there is a lot of flexibility, and C, people generally don’t, most people don’t hold very, very strong policy views in terms of what the policy should actually look like, but they have a sense of like, they want it to be tougher on X or easier on Y or less regulation for business or whatever.

[00:35:10] Jim Henson: Z should cost me less. So that’s, you know, yeah, exactly.

[00:35:13] Joshua Blank: And so at least at this point in the session, it doesn’t mean that later in the session, we’re not going to go and look at specific, you know, ideas as best we can. But at this point, we really want to get a sense of, you know, should we go this way or should we go that way?

[00:35:24] Jim Henson: And, you know, I’m trying to think of a way to. The best way to put this, but you know, we want to both respect our respondents and by extension, the people of Texas, but also be realistic about the limits of what, how deep and how complex people’s attitudes are about complex policy issues, you know, One of the functions of representative government is to offload the complexity to the people that you elect.

Now, one could argue about how well that works, but, or how well it’s working at the moment, but nonetheless, I mean, you know, I, I think it’s part of our, and you know, and look, we, you know, I don’t want to present this as just something we easily do and the, you know, but, you know, I mean, is calibrating, at what point are we overtaxing?

I think that’s one of the things that we’ve seen, I think, in the recent years is that people have started to be more reflective of the existing attitudes of our respondents. You know, if I give them a, and we’ve done this occasionally because we felt like we had to, but you know, we try to avoid giving people the complete policy package of something very complicated because, you know, I, you know, I still think you kind of lose people and it makes it harder to interpret the results where you want to spend more or lesser about the same.

You know, you think something should be more strict, less strict or left alone, you know, defines the universe people are in and at and, and if we do have to go back later or down the go down the road, say back going forward, if down the road, you know, we do find it appropriate, necessary, mm-hmm . To ask something in a more detailed, perhaps even, you know, multi-part way, which we try not to do.

[00:37:12] Joshua Blank: Mm-hmm .

[00:37:13] Jim Henson: You know, we’ve at least. Got the parameters out there to interpret that can also be used and brought to bear to interpret those results,

[00:37:19] Joshua Blank: right? Yeah, no exactly, you know is your opposition to vouchers because it’s too much too little is it because it’s giving 2, 000 to the homeschool kids or because it’s you know, like and that’s not enough.

You just don’t know is that

[00:37:31] Jim Henson: the religious, you know I mean, you know, there’s a bunch of different things that are lurking in there, right? And and if you’re giving you know, if you’re you know, it particularly you take the proposal on the table right now Yeah, if you are Trying to get a sense of, you know, either how much The state ought to spend overall, or, you know, what the spending levels should be for certain constituencies.

You know, you’re asking a lot of your respondent.

[00:37:56] Joshua Blank: Yeah, I mean, it’s funny. I should admit something. I’m going to admit something here.

[00:37:59] Jim Henson: Okay.

[00:38:00] Joshua Blank: I’m going to be vulnerable.

[00:38:01] Jim Henson: Oh, yeah, let’s be vulnerable.

[00:38:03] Joshua Blank: So, I’m not from Texas. And, you know, one of the things that strikes me is, I know, I, but listen, I know I have two Texans.

I live here. I love it. I got Texas shirts. I’m all about it, guys. Don’t worry. But, one of the things that struck me about moving here that’s so funny is like there’s this tendency to always tell you what things cost. You know, you’re watching the local news, you’re like, oh, they’re putting new, new, uh, you know, lampposts up on Lamar and it’s gonna cost X, you know, hundred thousand.

And it’s like, I don’t, you know, I’m a smart guy. I follow a lot of stuff. Is that a lot of money? Is that what lampposts should cost? Should a lamppost cost more or less? I don’t

[00:38:33] Jim Henson: know.

[00:38:34] Joshua Blank: Right? But that’s the sort of thing. At a certain point you’re like, you know, you kind of got to say to yourself Should

[00:38:37] Jim Henson: 500 million dollars or a billion dollars going to buy me enough vouchers?

[00:38:41] Joshua Blank: I don’t know. And for me the question that kind of comes out of that always is like, well, what’s the Texas budget? Are you know dorks and we have a pretty good sense of what that is But I can tell you right now most people have no idea what their city spends annually What the state what the county spends what they’re spending on health care with the distribution I mean So this is why questions like this are probably at the right level which is like hey Do you think we should be spending more on health care?

Or less or the same. Do you think, you know, we should make the gun laws more or less strict. We’re not telling you what we’re just trying to get a sense,

[00:39:08] Jim Henson: you know, and frankly, as soon as you get into large numbers, people aren’t, you know, doesn’t, you know, it means nothing. It just doesn’t mean anything.

[00:39:14] Joshua Blank: Nobody knows what a billion dollars is. I mean, just realistically.

[00:39:17] Jim Henson: So what did you really noted? What really struck out, stuck out to you in this battle? Yeah,

[00:39:21] Joshua Blank: I mean, this is again, this is a high profile area, a lot of mixed results, you know, only gun laws saw a majority of Texans asking for more restrictions and only barely.

50%. So 50 percent of Texans said we should make the gun laws more strict. A plurality, 43 percent said the state’s abortion laws should be made less strict. Along with 41 percent who said the same about the state’s marijuana laws. Now obviously, neither of those positions are likely to hold the day. And if the Lieutenant Governor is to be believed, certainly not on marijuana.

But here, like in most places, you know, the views of Republicans are the ones that are paramount because they’re going to kind of give us an explanation about where the thrust is, right? Uh, and what you find is, you know, making the state’s voting laws more strict or leaving them alone, 85 percent of Republicans, 49 percent would make them more strict out of that 85%.

Uh, You know, 86 percent of Republicans would either leave the state’s gun laws alone 40 percent or make them less strict, even 26%. So again, if you think there’s going to be a bunch of big, you know, if you were wondering why aren’t there going to be movement on red flag laws or raising the age to purchase, you know, semi automatic weapon I talked about last time.

Well, because two thirds of Republicans would rather either leave them alone or make them less strict.

[00:40:25] Jim Henson: Yeah, and you know, I just want to flag that less strict and again, you know people, you know, it’s a quarter of Republicans And, you know, who don’t want who want gun laws made less strict still, you know, you look at the internals on that.

It’s strong Republicans and strong conservatives. You know, she tells you a lot about the political dynamic given the context of the state,

[00:40:45] Joshua Blank: right? Uh, you know, Leaving the state’s abortion laws alone or making them more strict, 68 percent of Republicans, 37 percent of Republicans, the plurality there would make them more strict still.

So that’s why, you know, to the extent that there are, you know, bills being filed, there’s still appetite out there, even though, again, a lot of the public discussion has been about the fact that maybe these laws need to be clarified, that’s not where the, again, The ma, you know, the majority opinion is in the majority party’s voters.

And then lastly, you know, again, the Lieutenant Governor’s made clear that, you know, if anything the Mari marijuana is not getting decriminalized. And if anything, maybe more criminalized, 59% of Republicans would either make the laws more strict around marijuana, cannabis, 39%, or leave them alone 20%. Right.

So that gives you a pretty good sense of, you know, the fact of when you know, I mean, I get a lot of calls like, well wait a minute. You know, we see a majority of Texas voters say, you know, they basically don’t agree with the state’s abortion laws. Yeah. But. Gotta dig in a little bit here.

[00:41:38] Jim Henson: Yeah. And, and I think, you know, we saw Republican attitudes moving on that for a little bit, but I think if they’ve reset, I have to go back and look the trend there.

There’s been

[00:41:45] Joshua Blank: a bit, there’s been a bit of a reset. I mean, it is interesting. I mean, yeah,

[00:41:47] Jim Henson: it’s not a complete reset, I don’t think, but it’s, you know, it’s rolled back a little bit from a period where it looked like, you know, I mean. You know, in the popular culture, I mean, you know, it’s become a talk show joke, you know, I mean, it’s become a mainstream thing to refer to, you know, your gummies kicking in or, you know, going home and we’re not talking about kids and hippies.

We’re talking about grownups. Yeah, right. Suburban moms. Yeah. And so You know, but it is interesting to see the 39 percent more strict on the Republican side and, and see the degree to which the lieutenant governor is, is making some moves on this and, and look, it’s been an open semi secret that. You know, at the peak a few years ago of probably support for both relaxing on the criminal justice side, criminal penalties and more legalization and access, you know, consumer access to THC products, basically, um, You know, it was an open secret that the lieutenant governor was, you know, the, the barrier here.

[00:42:53] Joshua Blank: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that doesn’t

[00:42:55] Jim Henson: mean that every senator is like great with it, but, but the lieutenant governor has been very definite about saying this is, you know, not on Yeah. Essentially all but not on my watch.

[00:43:03] Joshua Blank: Yeah. And it’s part of a piece to say, you know, in sense of, you know, bail reform means not letting more people out on bail that’s still there.

Yeah. So, I mean, to the extent the whole sort of the sort of drug criminal justice system intersection, you know, has been an ongoing discussion. There’s very little indication that Lieutenant Governor is on board with that. But also, I mean, if you look again at the electorate and you look at the voters that he’s responding to, that makes a lot of sense.

I do think it’s important to say that because it’s very often I think people look at a place like Texas or they look at results and they say, well, this is just, you know, the, you throw around the word undemocratic or something as well. I, you know, I think you need to be a little bit more fair here and looking at these sorts of results a little bit more closely.

[00:43:39] Jim Henson: You know, you know, it’s interesting you wouldn’t mention that and you and I haven’t talked about this and you know, this is. Should probably be an offline conversation, but I’ll just flag it online for a sense of us, you know, whatever, you know, giving people a peek behind the curtain, you know, there have I have noticed that I’m wondering if you have an uptick in Reporters calling me with somebody where the framing that’s floating around in there is, well, it seems to me your polling shows the public wants this and the legislature’s not giving it to them.

[00:44:13] Joshua Blank: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[00:44:14] Jim Henson: And, you know, that’s, you know, look, that’s a, you know, and it’s a good, I mean, you know, journalists should be watching out for government responsiveness. Yeah. You know, I’m not. I’m not arguing with that at all, but it just seemed like there’s been a bit more of that to me. I’ve been noticing it more.

And again, we’re talking about cognitive habits, could be recency bias, could be a million things. But it seems to me that I’m hearing that a little bit more in the discussions as people are reaching out and letting me know like a story they’re working on and they’re, and they’re letting, they’re conveying how they’re framing it.

[00:44:44] Joshua Blank: Yeah. I wonder if. Yeah. One, I, yeah, I totally agree with that. And I feel like you’re experiencing,

[00:44:48] Jim Henson: I’m experiencing that

[00:44:48] Joshua Blank: question. I mean, I feel like there’s a lot of discussions that I’m having with people where I have to say, okay, before we talk about what you want to talk about, let me just sort of explain, you know, the role of the Republican primaries and kind of conditioning Texas, the Texas political agenda,

[00:45:00] Jim Henson: what is the institutional and political context for public opinion data?

[00:45:04] Joshua Blank: Yeah. I’m wondering, you know, to some extent, you know, I’m wondering, I’m glad

[00:45:07] Jim Henson: we need to do that or we probably wouldn’t have a job.

[00:45:09] Joshua Blank: Yeah, no, I love it. I’m wondering if, you know, part of the reason that that’s kind of taking place is because, you know, the primaries last time were so noisy, you know, here in Texas and sort of, and I mean, I think for a lot of, uh, non Texas based.

Journalists trying to make sense of what was going on here when you see, you know, a powerful governor going after incumbents within his own party. Seemingly, you know, seemingly conservative incumbents. It sort of required kind of, I think, a lot of cognitive effort on a lot of people’s parts to sort of try to unpack what’s going on in a way that, just to be honest, like to write this out in 750 word column or it’s difficult.

I mean to sort of explain these kinds of things. So I’m not I want to say right now It’s not actually easy to do and so I usually have to spend, you know The first like 5 10 minutes of the college bill. Let’s just talk about this for a second Then let’s say then think of these are still the same questions you want to ask but I wonder if the noisiness of that sort of distracted from some ways, you know, what are otherwise, you know, kind of just the normal, normal politics of this.

[00:46:09] Jim Henson: Yeah. I’m writing a note here. The scribbling’s probably getting picked up on the recording. Sorry. Maybe it’s happening for real, but that’s okay. It makes it, yeah. Makes it real. I mean, you know, you know, a post on that might be a good idea.

[00:46:23] Joshua Blank: Yeah, you know,

[00:46:25] Jim Henson: um, so, you know, I want to ask you one more thing about this before we wind this up, because we’re getting to that point.

Um, you know, there was. Some discussion in among the polling team on Including laws regulating online porn access to online pornography on this. Yeah, but you know, it gave us some variance I’m just wondering what you made of the what you made of the results. We haven’t really we’ve talked about it briefly, but not much

[00:46:50] Joshua Blank: Yeah, I mean I think this you know It both showed what I thought it would show and didn’t.

I mean, in the sense that, you know, uh, what you found was a similar pattern in terms of kind of the ideological expectations. You know, you saw republicans expect, you know, wanting, uh, stricter laws around regulation of access online pornography. And for those of you who don’t know about this, there’s a law passed by the legislature In the last session that essentially requires stricter age verification requirements and are currently required on sites that host adult content.

I mean, that’s not exact. I don’t know if that’s exact, but that’s that’s pretty close to what the laws, um, you know, there might be some minor differences here. And ultimately what this has meant is that, you know, essentially a lot of the largest pornography websites on the Internet essentially shut down in Texas.

And so

[00:47:33] Jim Henson: because there were, you know, there were significant penalties per violation, I think that made it, you know, it was an economic club.

[00:47:40] Joshua Blank: Right. And I think, you know, they would say, well, we don’t really know how to do this. And I think the legislature would say, well, you better figure it out. Um, but

[00:47:47] Jim Henson: privacy advocates have privacy concerns because the verification required, I think, providing ID and things.

[00:47:52] Joshua Blank: Yeah. I mean, it’s, I mean, look, you know, I mean, I think you don’t need to be a, you know, a social scientist who studies people to know that, you know, asking mostly men to provide their driver’s license before looking at. pornography, probably going to drive down your, your, your audience a bit. So, so again, little

[00:48:08] Jim Henson: decrease in traffic, but

[00:48:10] Joshua Blank: that’s, again, to the point, and I don’t have the numbers right in front of me, but again, you know, Republicans reacted somewhat as you’d expect in the conservative sense, 58 percent said make them more strict, but look, Democrats too, 46 percent said make.

The more strict, uh, and that was the plurality position for Democrats. There was a gender gap. I don’t have it in front of me, but there was definitely, I think, about a 10 to 20 point gender. I was going to say it was 10 to 15 points. Yeah, 10 to 20 points in there, you know, where men were, you know, kind of.

We just

[00:48:34] Jim Henson: want to say we’re modern people. We know women both enjoy and want to and have should, but there was distribution

[00:48:41] Joshua Blank: of the market is clearly different.

[00:48:42] Jim Henson: Yeah.

[00:48:43] Joshua Blank: But it’s one of those things. I mean, I think, you know, because we were just kind of curious just to see what kind of, you know, how, what is the reaction to this going to look like?

And, and ultimately, you know, it definitely kind of looked like what we wanted, but I think with the Texas. Twist to twist. Yeah.

[00:48:56] Jim Henson: And you know, the other thing I would clarify there is like, there’s a difference between Republicans and Democrats. It wasn’t that big.

[00:49:01] Joshua Blank: Yeah. No.

[00:49:02] Jim Henson: Right. I mean, plurality, you know, a majority of Democrats or a majority of Republicans, you know, wanted more strict laws, but a pretty big plurality, almost half of Democrats too.

So

[00:49:13] Joshua Blank: yeah, exactly.

[00:49:14] Jim Henson: Um, and then, you know, we were curious about the, I, you know, I was in particular, I was curious about the gender gap, curious about the partisan gap. Age gaps.

[00:49:20] Joshua Blank: I mean, there’s, you know,

[00:49:22] Jim Henson: there’s interesting things lurking in here. Yeah. Absolutely. Maybe lurking, sort of a hard word to use in this context.

Um, well, there’s all kinds of, you know, yeah, yeah. I’m going to indulge the worst of my dad humor here. I’m just going to go dad slash high school slash college adolescent humor. So I won’t do that.

[00:49:41] Joshua Blank: Please don’t.

[00:49:42] Jim Henson: But. You know, it was an interesting, it was an interesting, uh, thing in there that I think gave us, you know, the other thing I would just notice in this, given the amounts of money and probably employment, you know, among people that are likely to listen to this on gambling, still no consensus, right?

Uh, 30 percent wanted the laws more strict, 30 percent less strict, 20 percent left as they are now. And the highest don’t knows in this, um. 14 percent saying they didn’t know, didn’t have an opinion, uh, among Republicans. Critically, 28 percent more strict, 30 percent less strict, 29 percent left as they are, and then Democrats, basically the same, 31 percent more strict.

31 less strict, 25 left as they are now. So for all those people that’s going like, how long can the lobbying boom and gambling last? I would say a while.

[00:50:34] Joshua Blank: Yeah, actually, you know, one of the things, you know, having seen those commercials up, you know, recently, I’m sure you have to, you know, let the voters decide, you know, and stuff.

I mean, I think that’s actually really wise because when you look at something like this, I mean, one of the things is a public. Someone who studies public opinion, when you see a result and the responses are essentially evenly distributed across the options, you have to ask yourself how much of that is real opinion, how much of that is kind of guessing.

Right. Because there’s, because I mean, ultimately there are three substantive options and you have about a third of people each choosing them, you have to say to yourself, now, look, that does mean that there is no consensus, but it also kind of tells you there’s probably some movement available in there.

[00:51:11] Jim Henson: Right.

Well, and, you know, look, no, no, no less than the Lieutenant Governor, you know, made a very similar argument about this, you know, in an interview, you know, late last year that I’ve referenced a few times in which, you know, he was playing his hand diplomatically soft, but, you know, I think left not a lot of doubt about what.

He thinks in terms of him saying, yeah, you know, I know that polling shows that there, you know, a lot of people that are interested in this and, you know, a lot of people are making an effort to, you know, to persuade the public. But I do think that, you know, I’m paraphrasing, you know, we’re, you know, this proposal to really start moving a proposal to expand gambling, start moving.

We would start hearing from a lot of people that are not in support of this, like in the faith community, et cetera, you know, saying, you know. You know, do not take this for where it stands now.

[00:52:00] Joshua Blank: Yeah, go, go convince the hardest people to convince and then come back and talk to them.

[00:52:03] Jim Henson: Right, right. So, so with that, I think, um, you know, this is a pretty good, you know, introduction to all this.

Hope you got that the listeners have found this review of the polling and a little more detail with a little bit updating the current events useful. Um, we’ll keep an eye on this and of course, do more polling on this. Uh, if you’re listening to this on a podcast platform, you know, if you go to our new improved website on the very front page, you will see a link to the podcast that will then link to a lot of the results we’ve talked about.

So I would urge you to do that and poke around at the new website. Beyond that, thanks to Josh for being here on a rainy day. Thanks to our production staff here in the audio studio in Liberal Arts instructional Technology Services at the University of Texas at Austin. Thanks to you for listening.

Remember all this and more at Texas politics dot u texas.edu and we will be back soon with another second reading podcast.

[00:53:03] Intro/Outro: The second reading podcast is a production of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin.