Texas Data Points from the Week in Politics - February 5, 2016

The Texas political world is all in a tizzy this week after Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucuses, using a combination of evangelical support, streamlined political science, crack campaign organization, and, of course, charm. Donald Trump wasn’t too impressed with Texas' Senator or with Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose surge in the polls leading up to caucus night actually meant something. Seems a sure thing that Rubio will make a play in Texas, and to this end he announced his “Texas Leadership Team,” which seems a term of art. Speaking of wanting to lead, aspiring Texas GOP-chair Jared Woodfill announced while on his day job that his client, the fake fetal tissue dealer David Daleiden of Planned-Parenthood-sting-gone-wrong fame, would not take a plea deal offered by the Harris County DA, presumably at least in part to use the trial as a forum to air his views on abortion (after all, he’s an activist). For those who really want the inside baseball on abortion politics, the Dallas Morning News took a good look at the competing anti-abortion groups in Texas, pegging the story of dueling defenders of all things life to their taking sides in the fight between Pro-Straus and anti-Straus forces in the GOP primary. Their struggle inspired us to include a bonus video.

(Remember, you can click on the legends in graphics below to toggle the bars on and off. Very fun.)

1. As you might have heard, Texas Senator Ted Cruz finished first in the Iowa Caucuses among the top three tightly clustered vote getters. After a very brief interlude on caucus night of seemingly stunned civility, Donald Trump snapped back to normal with an anti-Cruz carpet Tweeting offensive:

Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2016

The Cruz campaign stood accused of implementing a whisper campaign against Ben Carson, suggesting to caucus goers that a trip to Florida on the day of the caucuses to get some clean scrubs implied that Carson was dropping out. Cruz was also criticized by Trump and other opponents for launching a social pressure campaign torn from the riveting pages of political science research. For those of you who haven’t chosen dullness as a profession, this meant sending official-looking (but clearly labeled) campaign mailers assigning embarrassingly low grades to the participation rates of Iowa voters and their neighbors with the intent of getting them to show up on caucus night to avoid feeling bad and being vilified by those same neighbors for not voting. (If you're still interested but don't want to read the actual research, journalist Sasha Issenberg talked about it in an appearance at in the Texas Politics Speaker Series at UT-Austin a couple of years while promoting his book The Victory Lab.)  In addition (though less publicly discussed), it appears that the Cruz campaign actually made up the scores, as the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza reported. Aside from his ruthless and apparently feckless deployment of (drum roll please) Political Science, Cruz did very well among evangelicals, despite early exit polls suggesting that he might not be carrying them in their Western Iowa stronghold (John King was very worried). But it turned out that Evangelicals in Iowa saw the light emanating from Cruz, much as their Texas brethren seem to in our polling in the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

2. Marco Rubio announced his Texas Leadership Team, which, with all due respect, was noticeably short on marquee-value Republicans from any wing of the party, especially conservative standard bearers. We don’t have much to work with given that Rubio was supported by only 9 percent of potential Republican Primary voters in our November poll, but what we have reflects the fact that Rubio hadn’t made a lot of inroads with either very and extremely conservative Texas voters, nor with religious conservatives. Should Rubio become the favored candidate of national Republican elites – commonly referred to as either “the establishment” or the “anyone but Cruz or Trump, please oh please God” wing – he’ll likely need to break bread with some of the more conservative activists associated with the religious and extremely conservative voters that have flocked to Cruz and expressed at least a passing interest in Trump.

3. The anti-Abortion activists slapped with surprise indictments last week by a Houston Grand Jury investigating the activists videos of their attempts to buy fetal tissue from Planned Parenthood were back in the news. The apparent ringleader, activist David Daleiden, rejected a plea deal and communicated through his lawyer Jared Woodfill that he wants to go to trial. While there is no word on whether Daleiden’s associate (facing lesser charges) will take the no-jail deal, Daleiden’s choice of lawyer suggests a political tone to his decision to fight the charges: Woodfill is widely recognized as a conservative activist particularly interested in social issues, and recently announced his bid to again seek the chairmanship of the Republican Party of Texas in order to “take back the party.”

4. Speaking of abortion: do the splits in abortion endorsements by competing groups lining up in the Straus v. anti-Straus camps have any correspondence with public opinion? A Dallas Morning News story by Brittney Martin looked at patterns of support in the 2016 GOP primary election by The Texas Alliance for Life and Texas Right to Life. As in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, you have to distinguish between these groups, even if, by their own admission and as their similar names suggest, they largely agree on their policy preferences. The story does a good job of looking at how they compete for anti-abortion cred in the legislature while focusing on how one of them (Texas Alliance for Life) is supporting candidates allied with Speaker Straus, including key incumbents targeted by dissident conservative groups like Empower Texans, as the other (Texas Right to Life) supports those generally thought to be opposed to Straus’s speakership.  As is often the case, there’s not a lot of daylight between Tea Party identifiers and non-Tea Party Republicans on abortion related issues.  Tea Party attitudes are more intense, but there’s little difference in overall orientation on the issue -- making this look like yet another instance of GOP internal politics in which factional disputes among donors, political professionals, and other (broadly speaking) elite types are a lot more pronounced and nasty than are the distinctions among the attitudes of the voters they are trying to appeal to and/or mobilize.