"I'm late, I'm late!"
Hi All,
The opening line of Donald Trump’s letter to Governor Greg Abbott captures the former president’s continuing ability to drag otherwise in-charge Republicans through the looking glass with the slightest provocation: “Despite my big win,” he wrote the governor, “I hear Texans want an election audit!” The president dismissed the audit provisions passed by the legislature in the second special session as insufficient (which they are, at least to his immediate goal) and urged the governor, who Trump has endorsed for re-election, to add provisions for an audit of the 2020 election to the call for the third special session. "Your citizens don't trust the election system," Trump advised the governor.
Within a few hours, Texas was down the rabbit hole. As covered by just about every press outlet in Texas and all the major national ones, the Secretary of State’s office (emphasis on office, the position is currently vacant) released a two-sentence statement which doesn’t take a lot of space to quote in its entirety:
Under existing Texas laws, the Secretary of State has the authority to conduct a full and comprehensive forensic audit of any election and has already begun the process in Texas’ two largest Democrat counties and two largest Republican counties—Dallas, Harris, Tarrant, and Collin—for the 2020 election. We anticipate the Legislature will provide funds for this purpose.
The letter and the response invite more questions and speculation than we can even begin to address, ranging from the practical questions that arise from the complete lack of operational detail in the announcement from the SOS office (along the lines of who/when/how, for starters) to who was coaching the former president on this since it’s, shall we say, pretty unlikely he’s been following the successive special sessions in Texas and can reel off bill numbers and amendments like a #txlege staffer looking to make the jump to the lobby. Who were the helpers? There are lots of candidates.
So we end the week simultaneously preoccupied with speculation and slack-jawed at the call and response that just played out between the former president and the current Texas governor. I don’t think it’s an exercise in over-interpretation to see the Secretary of State office’s communique asserting existing authority to conduct the announced “audits”, while presuming legislative acquiescence, as a pretty transparent fig leaf consistent with both Abbott’s ongoing assertion of a quasi-supreme executive but also with the fact that the governor's team wants Trump mollified, and fast.
But let’s turn to some data, which points to something more overarching than the immediate political dynamic between Trump and Texas Republicans. A quick response to the language in Trump’s letter is that, in fact, the evidence at hand suggests that most Texans don’t have a lot of doubts about the accuracy of elections in Texas. When we asked in the August 2021 Texas Politics Project Poll how accurate they thought Texas election results were, Texans exhibited a lot of confidence, though Republicans were less confident than Democrats.
 
The rapid response of the Abbott administration, however, underlines the degree to which the combination of Trump supporters’ continuing but unfounded insistence that their candidate was the victim of election fraud, as well as years fanning distrust in the process by Republican leaders in Texas similarly unable to present verifiable evidence of widespread election fraud, have eroded Republicans’ trust in Texas elections. The more recent fallback on citing isolated examples of voting irregularity coupled with the argument that there should be zero-tolerance for fraud have a similar reinforcing effect, particularly when its drowned out by a steadier and louder drumbeat about national elections (where Republican attitudes are much more skeptical about results, thanks to the ongoing campaign by Trump and his supporters, and Republican voters' attachment to Trump).
This dynamic predates Trump, but he amplified its political charge, and the skepticism of the integrity of elections now central to his political ambitions was both exploited in, and further amplified by, the discussion of voting and elections during the 87th Legislature. If we compare responses to the question above to responses to the same question in the February 2021 UT/Texas Tribune Poll, we see that confidence in the accuracy of Texas election results was slightly higher than in last month’s poll. As the graphic of results broken down by party identification below illustrates, this was driven largely by increases in skepticism among Republicans: the share of GOP voters who responded that elections were “very accurate” decreased from 30% in February to 20% in August.
 
Before the Trump-Abbott dynamic grabbed so much attention, the Texas Legislature got underway again this week with redistricting finally formally on the agenda. I’m tempted to get into this a lot, but I’m writing this while listening to Senate hearings on the substitute map that redistricting chair Joan Huffman (R-Houston) released late Thursday, so I’m going to get out of this before I add hundreds of additional words on the politics simmering below the surface of the Senate map. There will be time, though I can’t help but direct attention to the action in Senate districts 10, 24, and 25, just as a starting salvo (to say nothing of changes in the panhandle and rural West Texas). Plus, we’re still waiting on House maps amidst a growing number of retirements and other vacancies in the ever-roiled lower chamber, which this week alone included exit announcements from Republican State Reps. Chris Paddie and Jim Murphy, as well Democrat Celia Israel. So we’ll come back to these goings-on soon.
I’m going to go watch the rest of this hearing, or at least some of it. Have a good weekend, and stay in touch.
Best,
JH
Jim Henson
Executive Director, The Texas Politics Project
College of Liberal Arts / Department of Government
The University of Texas at Austin
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