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New UT/Texas Politics Project Poll: Republican focus on border security still dominates legislative priorities among voters


Hi All,

We just published the results of a new University of Texas/Texas Politics Project Poll designed to explore Texans' underlying attitudes in issue areas contending for attention in the Texas Legislature. The poll found voters likely to welcome property tax relief should it come their way, but assigning more urgency to other issues. We’ve posted a comprehensive overview of the results at the Texas Politics Project website. The new poll includes several approaches to public opinion related to the legislature, our usual trend assessments of leaders and conditions, and even a few nibbles at national politics – including another check-in on attitudes toward U.S. support for Ukraine and our first look at Texans’ views of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is scheduled to visit Texas this week. 

We’ve also recorded a Second Reading Podcast with the polling team – UT Government professor Daron Shaw, Texas Politics Project research director Josh Blank, and me. You’ll find a link to the podcast in the post; it's also available now via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and UT Austin's LAITS Podcasting.

Here are a few early thoughts on some themes in the results.

As state-level political actors compete for legislative and public attention in efforts to shape the agenda in the legislature, the public opinion environment is crowded, with strong (and interesting) cross-currents. Border security still dominates the legislative priorities of Republican voters in the wake of the massive increase in state spending for border security over the last biennium. Both houses have budgeted another increase in border security spending for the next biennium without much debate (so far). Asked an open-ended question about what the legislature's top priority should be, a plurality of Texans, 24%, said immigration and border security. Consistent with the last several years of Texas Politics Project polling, that share includes about half of Republicans (49%). None of the other policy areas raised in the open-ended responses broke single figures among the overall sample (or among Republicans). Among Democrats, gun-related policies are the leading priority, but with 13% mentioning it, that issue is much less salient among Democrats compared to the broader consensus among Republicans over the border. No other issue breaks into double figures among Democrats, either.
 
Meanwhile, reducing property tax bills, arguably the most high-profile priority among Republican elected officials, doesn’t move the needle much among voters when left to their own devices in the open-ended item. Only 7% of Republicans named property taxes as their top priority, and only 4% of Texans overall (3% of Democrats and 2% of independents). This isn't to imply that the issue is a loser for incumbents: when asked about the impact of property taxes compared to other non-federal taxes, a plurality, 47%, rated property taxes as having the greatest impact on their personal finances, including the majority of Republicans (59%) and a plurality of Democrats (40%). In other words, once they are offered property tax reductions, many Texas will gladly take it (if it’s enough to notice). But there’s little evidence of a major groundswell demanding such relief.

Republican voters project the fights over progressive identity politics (“woke ideology,” etc.) onto public education policy. The poll asked respondents to assess the importance of “potential priorities for the legislature to address in the K-12 public education system,” and then to pick what they thought should be the top priority. The three top priorities were “school safety” (29%), followed by “teacher pay/teacher retention” (21%) and “curriculum content (i.e. what students are taught)” (17%).

Republicans and Democrats were in broad agreement that school safety should be a top legislative priority, but there were sharp differences beyond that one point of consensus that reflect where Republican voters’ attention in the public education domain is focused. The top priorities among Republicans were curriculum content (25%) and school safety (24%), followed by “parental rights” (17%) and school choice options (“Vouchers, educational savings accounts (ESAs), or other “school choice” legislation”), the choice of 14%. The battle against so-called “woke education” has been joined by the Republican base. The question of whether this is sufficient to convince rural Republican legislators to give in to voucher/ESA proponents is one of the big questions hanging over the 88th Legislature. (In a separate question, 59% of Republicans supported “redirecting state tax revenue to help parents pay for some of the cost of sending their children to private or parochial schools," while 30% were opposed). 

Among Democrats, there was a broader consensus, with more than two-thirds naming either school safety (33%) or teacher pay (34%) as their top priority, followed at some distance by public school financing (9%) and improvements to school facilities and infrastructure (8%).

Texas’ sustained and rapid population growth continues to trigger decidedly mixed responses after years of advertising Texas as “open for business” and a refuge from other, less great states. About a third (34%) of voters said that the state’s population growth in recent years has been good for the state, while a slightly higher share said it had been bad (36%), with a nearly equal share saying they don’t have an opinion. Republicans were significantly more negative about the consequences of population growth than Democrats: nearly half of Republicans, 47%, were in the “bad” camp, and only 27% said growth has been good, while Democrats were the mirror image of Republicans (46% good / 22% bad). Speaking of a decline in the spirit of Texas boosterism, we also saw fairly grumpy responses to our “Texas model” item: 51% agreed that “the way state government runs in Texas serves as a good model for other states to follow,” while 40% disagreed. Not terrible, but a nine percentage point shift in the wrong direction since we asked the question a decade ago in February 2013, when the results were 60% agree / 31% disagree. 

While many of us are closely focused on state politics, Texas voters are paying more attention to national stories. National politics create still more cross-currents in the legislature – or, more directly, a reminder that not a lot of Texans follow state politics and especially the back-and-forth of the legislature very closely. Asked directly, 8% report following the legislature “extremely closely,” 33% somewhat closely, 40% not very closely, 19% not at all. 

Voters reported having heard much more about national issues than the kinds of issues that #Txlege watchers (and actors) are focused on. Large shares of Texans say they have heard “a lot” about inflation (63%), the war in Ukraine (53%), Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents (50%), and the number of migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border (48%). State issues are much less top of mind: Only about a third (32%) say they have heard “a lot” about the reliability of the state’s electric grid (“you mean you’re not watching those B&C hearings?”), with comparably low reports for issues including housing costs in Texas (26%), medical care for transgender children (22%), and the state budget (12%). It was a long battery (we broke it into two randomized segments) that doesn’t lend itself to graphics, but here is a screencap of a table of the complete results for these items from one of the internal notebooks our research director, Josh Blank, puts together for internal use. (The question: “How much have you heard in the news about each of the following?”) (And yes, the ChatGPT result is funny – just the way Skynet wants it.) 

2024 is next year. Partisans of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump remain lukewarm on the prospect of their party standard bearers carrying the flag again in 2024. Amidst a lot of recent press coverage about Democrats debating whether Biden should run for reelection (mostly centered on his age), 45% think he should run again and 38% say he should not, a slight improvement from our August 2022 poll, when 42% said he should run and 35% said he shouldn’t. More than half of Republicans, 56%, think Trump should run for president again, while a third think he should not, and 11% are unsure. But one of the interesting results in the poll finds Trump’s presumptive rival for the Republican nomination, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, strikingly well known and reasonably well-liked by Republicans in Texas. DeSantis is viewed favorably by 75% of Texas Republicans (50% are very favorable), and unfavorably by only 8%. Trump’s fav/unfav among Republicans are 79% / 8%. DeSantis has chosen to visit Texas this week rather than attend CPAC. 


There are a lot more results in the latest poll to explore, and we’ll get to those and drill down more into some of the themes discussed here in the coming weeks. The post on our website covers a lot of ground, including approval ratings of Texas elected officials, social media use, and more. Be sure to check it out, and to get a broader take in the Second Reading podcast where I’m joined this week by Josh Blank and Daron Shaw. As always, in addition to these resources, we have also posted thousands of graphic files free for downloading in multiple formats for your use in teaching, presentations, handouts, and social media. Please use them - that’s what they are there for.

Take care and keep in touch,

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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The Texas Politics Project
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