Some resources for the 2022 elections
Hi All,
Belated Happy New Year to everyone after an extended holiday hiatus from our mailings. For now, I want to play catch up with some of the data we’ve compiled on the Texas Politics Project website with the 2022 elections in mind. There will be much more on this front in coming weeks, including, of course, new polling. Keep an eye out.
We’ve set up a new tracker for public polling of the probable match-up between Gov. Greg Abbott and former congressman Beto O’Rourke in the election to be the state's next governor. We recognize that this match-up is speculative, pending the outcome of party primary elections in which both candidates have several registered opponents. We’re also adults, and in the event the nearly universal expectations in primary races are not met, will create a new tracker after the primary. In the meantime, we'll keep this tracker updated as new public polling is released.
Thanks to some digging and table-building by Josh Blank, we’ve also created some tables that compare the Trump and Biden voter shares in the newly-drawn Texas house, senate, and congressional districts with their old district lines. There are of course many ways to do this, and some shared spreadsheets floating around out there. It seems to us that the shift in the 2020 Trump vote in these districts is one of the best first-cut fundamentals in these districts. If we can manage the time (and website formatting), we may try to update these tables with another column or two (e.g. maybe incumbent party?) in the future. Email me with suggestions if you have them, but keep in mind the real estate in these tables is limited, and there are already comprehensive spreadsheets in circulation out there (some behind paywalls, some not).
We also published a couple of short posts you might have missed in the extended bubble around the holiday break.
In another useful exercise in data mining, Josh also updated some of our existing graphics and created some new graphics on turnover in the Texas Legislature since the 71st legislature. One interesting point here, given the attention people are seeming to pay to the number of txlege exits so far: While the number of members we know to be serving their last term in the legislature may feel high (currently at 29 by our count), it doesn’t stick out in the time series so far. The number will be higher after the election, of course, as some incumbents will be forced to exit unexpectedly (to be polite about it); but we’d have to see 16 or 17 incumbents lose or otherwise vacate their seats between now and January 2023 to hit the highs seen in the 72nd (after the 1992 election) and the 82nd (after the 2010 election). We’ll update these graphics as the election season unfolds.
*Does not include those Members who will not be returning due to primary or general election defeats.
We also looked at some broad indications that changes to the state's voting and election laws during the last legislative session had, at best, a negligible impact on Texan’s trust in state election results, which was already pretty high after the 2020 election and prior to SB 1 being passed. The data, as Josh and I wrote, “provide no evidence either that Texans’ trust in the state’s system required emergency maintenance, nor that the state leadership’s actions had a positive impact on the partisans most focused on the issue (albeit from very different perspectives). If anything, the data provide signs that they were unsuccessful in insulating Texans’ attitudes about state elections from the overall decline in trust in elections evidenced in national data” (in recent national polls).
 
(Note that the scales on the y-axes in these figures are different due to the application we use to render graphics.)
I hope you are all starting 2022 in good cheer and good health, though I know it’s difficult to sustain both under current circumstances. Present conditions notwithstanding, we have big plans for the upcoming election year, including new directions in polling and in other Texas Politics Project enterprises. Stay tuned, and keep in touch.
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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