Blogs: January 2026

James Henson and Joshua Blank look at how the shooting deaths of protesters by federal immigration authorities in Minneapolis activate a complex interplay among attitudes on immigration, gun rights, and the First Amendment.

If the anxiety about winter weather is a more or less rational response to both a credible threat and widely shared experience of just how bad things can be during such weather events, many Texans’ fear of the impact of weather reflects post-Uri patterns in public opinion about the reliability of the Texas grid, expectations that state government should be acting to make the grid more reliant than it was in 2021, and a lack of confidence in what political leadership of the state had done to prepare for the next crisis.

In the latest Second Reading podcast, James Henson and Joshua Blank use Texas polling to compare and contrast the issues at play in the Republican and Democratic primaries in Texas. Plus, some brief discussion of the latest NYT/Sienna national poll and the coverage of polling conducted by campaigns.

James Henson and Joshua Blank look at the polling results on health care, immigration, and the 2026 U.S. Senate race in the final UT/Texas Politics Poll of 2025, and what those results portend for the 2026 election year.

The final University of Texas/Texas Politics Project Poll of 2025 found Texas voters' attention to high prices pivoting towards health care costs as the 2026 election moves to the center of state politics.