Joshua Blank

Attorney General Ken Paxton’s motion before the U.S. Supreme Court to dismiss the election results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia has put Paxton in the center ring of Donald Trump’s never ending circus of efforts to delegitimize the 2020 presidential election in the eyes of his followers. Trump’s motives in his seemingly Quixotic effort to undo the election as always are the subject of intense speculation, no doubt by design. As the national media reward both Trump and Paxton with a flurry of attention, however derisive, over Paxton’s legally dubious and baldly political effort before the court, it’s worth looking at the Texas context of Paxton's turn in the spotlight.

The public opinion data that has accumulated over the length of the pandemic makes clear that Republican executive branch leaders like the president and the governor bear heavier responsibilities, because it is their partisans who both most need to receive a different message and who are most likely to be responsive to that message coming from them. 

Donald Trump's failure to handle the COVID-19 pandemic may well have cost him re-election. Now that he's leaving, Greg Abbott - and Texas - have to deal with the GOP denial he's left behind.

In an effort to begin understanding the 2020 Election in Texas, the Texas Politics Project has collected unofficial election results from the 2020 Election as of November 6, 2020, and compared them to the results of recent Texas elections. These results are broken down by common conceptual (e.g. "The Big-6") and regional (e.g.

A dramatic increase in competition between the two parties amidst an early voting surge that has seen Texas leading the country in turnout so far has thrust the state closer to center stage in the fateful final days of the 2020 election. We thought it might be useful to flag some aspects of data from polling and historical voting records that prove useful context for reporting on the 2020 election in Texas. 

Over the past two weeks, Texas has experienced two surges, one in early voting and one in the rate of new coronavirus cases. The surge in early voting brought more than 9 million voters to the polls, surpassing total turnout for the entire 2016 election. The COVID-19 surge continues on, ungoverned by election laws or campaign schedules.

For those who focus on the historical arc of partisan competition in Texas politics, it’s hard not to cast independents as somewhere between the ultimate anti-heroes and a group of extras and bit players suddenly thrust into the spotlight in the drama of 2020. For the better part of the last two decades of Texas elections, political independents were, if not irrelevant, at least a pretty distant thought in handicapping election outcomes. The increased level of competition in races, both statewide, but especially down ballot in 2018, the consistently tight margins in polling on the presidential race in Texas, and the inherent unpredictability of independents as a group have suddenly made them the focus of both campaigns and those who prognosticate about them. That unpredictability makes it very tough to anticipate their impact on this, or any, election. But as polling shows a large group of them soured on Donald Trump, the preferences of independents now loom large over the 2020 contests in Texas.

After a week of rolling out results from the October 2020 University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll and two longer explorations of Texas attitudes toward the conduct of the election and the

The last three Texas public opinion polls the Texas Politics Project team worked on contained extensive questioning to understand Texans’ attitudes toward policies addressing the pandemic, their perceptions of its effects and seriousness, and their behaviors in response to policies and perceived threats related to COVID-19. The poll conducted in late September and early October in conjunction with The Texas Tribune enables us to begin looking at changes in attitudes over the duration of the pandemic given the timing of our polls (April, June, and September-October). Below are some first looks at how attitudes have moved since the panemic’s early days, through the beginning of the summer wave that saw it’s peaks in new daily cases of 10,791 on July 14 and 275 deaths on July 23 (based on state-compiled data), and into a fall season in which the virus has receded from its peak, but still persists at levels roughly equivalent to mid-June when measured in the level of daily new cases, as illustrated in the chart immediately below. 

M.J. Hegar will look to raise her profile tonight as she and incumbent U.S. Senator John Cornyn face off in a televised debate at 7 PM Central Standard Time. In many ways, Hegar is doing relatively well according to the most recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll in that she’s only trailing Cornyn among likely voters by 8 points.