Post Date: November 2024
Second Reading Podcast: Understanding Texas Latinos‘ swing to Trump in 2024
Jim Henson & Joshua Blank look at what UT/Texas Politics Project polling data can (and can’t) tell us about the big Latino vote for Donald Trump in Texas.
Second Reading Podcast: Early thoughts on how the GOP surge washed over Texas
Jim Henson and Joshua Blank take a morning-after look at the outcome of the 2024 election in Texas.
The Republican emphasis on the border and immigration in the 2024 election is about more than migrant flows
Article after article covering the prominence of immigration and border security in the Republican campaigns for U.S. Senate and president in Texas have rightly noted the long-established salience of immigration and the border to Republican voters, and the central role of these issues in the “closing arguments” of GOP candidates at the top of the ballot in Texas, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
But clear as this pattern is, it doesn’t explain why the issue maintains salience in the face of clear policy changes by the Biden administration, or the subsequent near-term decline in migrant traffic at the U.S.-Mexico border from historic highs in the last 11 months to the fewest encounters in the last four years. It can easily be made to seem like a puzzle: if the problem has been addressed and has abated, why is it still so important to Republican voters?
Second Reading Podcast: A final pre-election look at Texas attitudes on key campaign issues
Jim Henson and Joshua Blank review Texas attitudes on the issues being promoted to attempted comparative advantage by the presidential and U.S. Senate campaigns in Texas: immigration & the border, abortion, and transgender rights.