Blogs: James Henson, PhD

Last week's incident in McKinney, TX involving a local police officer and a group of black teens has fed the ongoing national conversation about policing and race – a difficult topic made all the more challenging by the multiple dimensions involved in this instance, which include race, class, and views of law enforcement, to name just a few of the big ones.

With the 2016 GOP Presidential Primary likely to pit at least four candidates with Texas roots against one another (Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, and Rand Paul), we've using Google Trends data on each of these candidates to provide a proximate measure of how much attention the candidates are getting via Google searches. In a sense, this data highlights who is receiving the most interest from the public at a given point in time during the campaign. The graphics are dynamically updated to display data from today along with the previous 12-months.

Headlines and rhetoric out of the Texas Legislature this year suggest that the public is clamoring for tax relief. But the polling says otherwise.

For those assessing a Rick Perry presidential candidacy in the wake of his announcement of his announcement plans, here are some highlights of attitudes in Texas toward Perry and the 2016 GOP presidential nomination context.

Public opinion trends in Texas leading up to the defeat of HB 4105 make it seem likely that last night was probably the Texas Legislature's last substantial effort to ban same sex marriage rights with any hope of succeeding.

In a piece in The New York Times' Upshot blog, Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., notes a surprising degree of 'harmony' amongst the public when it comes to abortion attitudes. Attitudes in Texas largely reflect the attitudes Vavreck finds in the national data, though Texas attitudes evidence a higher degree of polarization between Democrats and Republicans on the issue.

On April 28, Governor Greg Abbott sent a widely publicized letter to the Commander of the Texas State Guard directing the force to monitor the US military training exercises to take place partially in Texas because "it is important that Texans know their safety, constitutional rights, private property rights and civil liberties will not be infringed," presumably by the training operation, dubbed Operation Jade Helm 15. The governor's hailing of the members of the US military even as he registers concern about potential threats to Texans rights and liberties seems to be waving toward two sets of attitudes among his conservative base that were evident in the most recent UT/Texas Tribune Poll.

With open carry legislation still working its way through the legislative process, here’s another brief look at data on gun attitudes from the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll, and a consideration of the logic applied to data (or the lack thereof) on gun ownership in the current debate.

How Texas lawmakers will cut taxes has emerged as the defining fight of this year's legislative session, highlighting the tension between the state's political culture and its rapid economic growth.