Texas Politics Project: Blogs: Jim Henson and Joshua Blank

A Public Opinion Cheat Sheet for the (First) Special Session of the 89th Texas Legislature

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 10:54:02 -0500

Legislators face the usual obstacles to holding the public's attention during the just-commenced special session – a loud news environment likely, as usual to crowd out state legislative happenings, and what has historically been a consistently low level of pubic attention to the legislature, even during times of crisis. But whether or not most Texans are attentive to what some of us find the best game in town, public opinion shapes the incentives, priorities, and strategies of the participants in the process. We have gathered relevant public opinion data from University of Texas/Texas Politics Project polling.

Lt. Gov. Patrick huffs and puffs, blows the House down on hemp bill

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Thu, 22 May 2025 16:59:26 -0500

The House’s passage of Senate Bill 3 may rightly be understood as yet another example of the current Lieutenant Governor’s historic power over the Senate, and how he has extended it into the affairs of the House.

Second Reading Podcast: Texas Public Opinion and Gov. Abbott's Emergency Items

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 11:22:55 -0600

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank talk over the public opinion context of Gov. Abbott's emergency items.

Second Reading Podcast: Texas Public Opinion as the #Txlege Agenda Develops

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 11:22:52 -0600

James Henson & Joshua Blank look at baseline attitudes on likely agenda items in the run-up to Gov. Abbott's State of the State address and Lt. Gov. Patrick's declaration of Senate priorities.

The plot thickens in the GOP race for the 2022 Attorney General Nomination

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 16:47:22 -0500

State Representative Matt Krause’s (R-Ft. Worth) entry into the 2022 primary contest seeking the Republican nomination for Attorney General adds yet another potential obstacle to incumbent AG Ken Paxton efforts to get reelected for a third term amidst an already crowded primary field. See some public opinion context for the race, including job approval numbers for the current AG among Republicans and conservatives.

Second Reading Podcast: The Texas Legislature will finally take up redistricting next week

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 16:47:38 -0500

With the Texas legislature set to return next week to formally take up redistricting, Jim Henson and Joshua Blank talk preview how demographics, geography, and lots of politics will shape the redistricting process in the Capitol.

The Second Reading Podcast: Some Political Implications of Texas Attitudes in the Texas Politics Project/UT Energy Institute Poll on the February Winter Storm

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 19:37:22 -0500

Second Reading Podcast: After UT/Texas Tribune Poll shows more than 80% of Texans wearing masks, Gov. Abbott rescinds mask requirement and lifts restrictions

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 21:21:24 -0600

In this week's Second Reading Podcast, Jim Henson and Josh Blank discuss the lifting of statewide COVID restrictions by Governor Greg Abbott, and the public opinion context for his moves revealed by the just-released February 2021 UT/Texas Tribune Poll.

Attitudes Toward Democracy are Underwater in Texas: Some Takeaways from Results on Voting and Expectations for the 2020 Election

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 14:48:25 -0500

The COVID-19 pandemic led to local elections and run-offs some local officials postponing elections in the spring and early summer. By emergency proclamation, Governor Greg Abbott expanded the period of early voting and loosened some of the rules regulating the in-person submission of mail-in ballots, even as he and the attorney general waged political and legal counter-offensives against efforts by local officials, voting rights groups, and Democrats in various configurations to ease access to the ballot box during the pandemic. As part of this political zig-zagging, the governor, in a subsequent proclamation, limited the number of in-person, mail-in ballot drop-off locations to one per county. Despite Abbott’s refusal to expand voting by mail, as many advocated during the height of the pandemic, the new Chairman of the state Republican Party, Allen West, joined efforts by Republicans to sue the governor over his expansion of the early voting period. Both parties also maneuvered to get their third party rivals removed from the ballot. This list isn’t even comprehensive, nor have we made mention of the widely chronicled and vehement aspersions Donald Trump continues to cast on the integrity of the election process as his national and state poll numbers erode.

With all of this as context (and great interest and high expectations that the results would be interesting), we designed a battery of questions for the October 2020 University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll probing Texans’ attitudes about the conduct of the elections in Texas and their expectations of the process in 2020. The results don’t disappoint in terms of their interest, but it’s appropriate that we greet them with Halloween on the horizon. They are grim and even scary.

Five Medium-Hot Takes from the First Wave of October 2020 UT/Texas Tribune Poll Results

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 17:25:18 -0500

The Texas Tribune rolled out three Ross Ramsey stories on the first wave of results from the October University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll early Friday morning. The release included results of the trial ballots in the presidential and U.S. Senate races, as well as job approval numbers for the candidates and several state elected officials. Here are five first-cut takeaways from the day one results – much more analysis to come, and many more results focused on matters such as race and policing, attitudes and behaviors related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and expectations of how smoothly the election and its afternmath will go coming next week. (Find a summary of day one results in pdf form here.) Below are some early impressions of the first group of results, with much more drilldown to come between now and Election Day.

Whatever their causes, Super Tuesday primary election problems poison already toxic public attitudes toward the electoral process in Texas

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 06:18:59 -0500

The long lines and cascading glitches in Texas’ primary contests on Super Tuesday raises yet again the issue of how politics shapes perceptions about the conduct of elections in Texas. While the multiple causes of the Super Tuesday breakdown in some of the state’s largest cities will continue to be dissected in the weeks and months ahead, we know one thing for sure: The public response to failures in the voting process will be viewed through darkly shaded partisan lenses. Polling within the last year reveals how much skepticism about the integrity of voting and elections in Texas pervades the electorate, though with completely different suspicions fueling the concerns of Democrats and Republicans.

Health care and its discontents loom over Texas Democrats in 2020

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 00:42:33 -0600

Democratic voters’ focus on health care keeps that issue at center stage in the presidential primary, with the spotlight shining most brightly on the politics of “Medicare for All” — the 2020 shorthand for universal government-provided health insurance.

National polling almost universally shows that Democrats rank health care as one of the most important election issues (as U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently reminded anyone who would listen), and that they overwhelmingly favor of providing the universal coverage promised by Medicare for everyone.

Yet public opinion polling in Texas reveals significant disagreement about the details of delivery, particularly whether government-provided health insurance should entirely replace existing private insurance, including plans provided in full or in part by employers.

Donald Trump's Job Approval Ratings Updated with February 2020 UT/Texas Tribune Poll Results

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 22:05:44 -0600

Donald Trump's presidential job approval ratings have shown remarkable strength acorss key demographic categories thorughout his presidency. We've updated our table with breakdowns of presidential job approval among key Republican subgroups with data from the February 2020 UT/Texas Tribune Poll.

Public Opinion and a Big #TxLege Agenda for Tuesday, March 7

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 07:58:51 -0600

It’s hard not to see the late-breaking addition of the Public Education Committee chair Dan Huberty’s just-filed HB 21 to the committee's agenda Tuesday as a bit of a chess move against both voucher advocates and the Senate, where the State Affairs Committee will be holding a high profile hearing on SB 6, the bathroom access bill championed by the Lt. Governor.

The Limits of Public Polling on Texas Bathroom Access

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 17:23:07 -0600

Advocates of proposed legislation that would constrain or reverse efforts by local governments to guarantee transgender people access to public facilities of their choice repeatedly have invoked public opinion polling as evidence of broad public support for the legislation. The currently available polling, however, provides only tentative information about public attitudes toward the highest profile legislation, Senate Bill 6. Because access to public facilities is a comparatively new issue on the public agenda, most people are still forming opinions about it, which makes attention to the intentions and uses of different kinds of polling critical to assessing how polling is used for advocacy on this and other issues.

Trump’s Left Behind Voters and GOP Politics in Texas

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 09:34:17 -0600

Nonetheless, pre-election polling in Texas reveals a group of conservative voters who do report feeling left behind by changes in the economy, while also holding attitudes that cohere with broader elements of Trump’s rhetoric-- and, crucially, with the appeals of the most conservative factions of the Texas GOP. The beginning of the Trump presidency will come 10 days after the opening gavel of the 85th Texas Legislature. While the internal dynamics of the state’s political system traditionally drive most policy and politics in the session, Trump’s ascension to the presidential bully pulpit, at the head of one-party rule in Washington, markedly changes the national context and its possible impact.

What the UT/TT Poll tells us about Texans' support for Donald Trump

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Fri, 04 Nov 2016 00:01:16 -0500

The picture painted by Texans' views of Donald Trump compared to Mitt Romney at this stage in the 2012 campaign clarifies why the presidential race has become much closer than anyone anticipated. The polling data also shed light on the nature of Trump's coalition and suggest that the attitudes sustaining Trump's candidacy in Texas will continue to play a role in GOP politics in Texas, regardless of the future of the candidate himself.

Assessing Attitudes in Trump's Texas Basket

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 12:38:19 -0500

Hillary Clinton’s riff in a speech to campaign contributors last week that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables....The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it,” has invited mostly negative responses.

Most Texas Voters Don’t Dislike BOTH Clinton and Trump

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 15:25:17 -0500

The fact that most Americans dislike both presidential candidates has a been a recurring observation in discussion of the 2016 campaign, one that has fed the sense that the public must be hankering for a third party, an independent candidate, or some other fantasy league alternative to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. A closer look has shown that this “fact” emerges from a misreading of the national data. Data from polling in Texas shows that it’s not true of Texas voters, either. Large shares of Texans have unfavorable views of one candidate or the other, but only a much smaller share have negative attitudes toward both candidates.

Katy Freeway: Texas Data Points from the Week in Politics

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Sun, 22 May 2016 11:09:27 -0500

A new national poll shined the light once again on the electoral role of non-college educated white folks, even as the spotlight turned to the appearance of a very educated Texas Justice on Donald Trump's short list of US Supreme Court nominees. The U.S. Census Bureau released data confirming what everyone in Texas already pretty much knew -- that the suburbs are growing fast and the Texas 'burbs among them are growing fastest. It's run off week in Texas, and the Governor -- himself not prone to such indignities -- is promoting his new book and getting some press for the effort, which he pretty much doesn't need but will take anyway.

The Geography of the Speaker Vote

Jim Henson and Joshua Blank — Fri, 08 Jan 2016 13:50:46 -0600

The outcome of the vote for Speaker of the House of Representatives for the 84th was never in doubt, leaving most analysis of the voters for Speaker Joe Straus (R-San Antonio) and Scott Turner (R-Frisco) to focus on the sources of division. As a first cut at that discussion, we put together a map of the votes by district.