Joshua Blank

It took a lethal pandemic that has killed more than 46,000 Texans to temporarily distract Texas Republicans from their persistent preoccupation with immigration and border security. But the most recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll shows that as yet another migrant crisis emerges on the Texas border with a Democratic President seeking to take action on U.S. immigration policy, the nativism that defined Republican politics for the last decade is again rising to the surface among the Republican base.

With the release of the February 2021 University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, the Texas Politics Project makes its fourth assessment of Texans’ attitudes about the coronavirus pandemic. The time series allows reporters, researchers, elected leaders, public health officials, and the public a view of how Texans’ concerns about COVID, behaviors during the pandemic, and evaluations of the official responses have changed throughout nearly a year of polling.

The Texas Tribune published the first batch of results from the February 2021 University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll today, which included job approval and favorability ratings for state and national leaders as well as snapshots of Texas attitudes toward the accuracy of elections.

After four years of most major Texas Republican elected officials kowtowing to Donald Trump out of a mixture of deference and fear, Texas Republicans now seek paths for moving forward in his turbulent wake. They are in a different position than their national counterparts vis-a-vis Trump’s exit and how the experience of his presidency is to be incorporated into both the party’s identity and Republican elected officials’ political strategies. Trump has left the national party bereft, having lost the White House and presided over the GOP relegation to minority status in both houses of Congress (albeit narrowly in the Senate). But Republicans still reign in Texas, and are in a better position to navigate post-Trump politics than their national counterparts.

The key to understanding Texas Republican political leaders advantage is the fact that many invoked the central elements of Trump’s appeal in their rhetoric and policies long before Trump was a presidential candidate. Texas Republican voters respond positively to these themes, and, based on what years of Texas public opinion data tell us about their attitudes, a good chunk of them can be expected to continue responding to them even if Trump is not the one doing the articulating. 

Even as unprecedented challenges to the Constiutional order unfold in national politics, the policial world in Texas was focused on the convening of the 87th Texas Legislature in Austin amidst a surging pandemic, a faltering economy, and shockwaves of Donald Trump's political imposion rippling through Republican Party politics at all levels. Here are five snapshots from the week the legislature came back to town.

After spending a dramatic interim mostly on the sidelines of the policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its ill effects on the economy and the lives of Texans, state legislators now have their chance to respond to the impact of the crises in Texas as the 87th Legislature convenes in Austin this week. While they are empowered to legislate, they do so in conditions not of their own choosing – and those conditions are at best difficult, at worst grim. Below we explore the most important factors forming the context of legislators' attempts to address the problems facing the state, from the big structural factors like the pandemic, the economy, and racism to more mundane political conditions like the images of the state's leadership among the public and the politics of federalism after the election.

Among the Texas Congressional delegation, Ted Cruz had the expressed support of 11 of the 24 Republican members of the Texas delegation for his efforts to overturn the Electoral College results. In a likely portent of politics to come in Texas, support in the Texas delegation for Cruz's efforts was actually higher than expected when the time came to take votes – which, tellingly, came after pro-Trump rioters who shared those members skepticism about the 2020 election stormed the Captiol and disrupted Congress's role in the orderly transfer of power. 

 Different Texas actors in the latest phase of the presidential election have different and even multiple motivations. A look at some of the contextual data helps illuminate why so many Texas Republicans in Congress seem determined to place more stress on a Constitutional system they otherwise seem intent on defending as exceptional and under siege from others who don’t respect it enough.

Based on a decade of polling data, we know that once the electorate, such as it is, elect their representatives, most of them don’t pay much attention to what they do during the actual session. In five University of Texas/Texas Tribune polls conducted at the end of the 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019 legislative sessions, no more than 13% of Texas voters admitted to following the legislative session “extremely closely” (2011), while no more than 45% have said that they followed the legislative session even “somewhat closely” (2015).

The reliance on widespread vaccination in the not-too-near future to stop the spread of the virus requires addressing the very real threat posed by widespread resistance to vaccination. Public opinion polling in Texas provides valuable information about how to go about attacking skepticism that is largely based on misinformation or exaggerated fears.