Joshua Blank, PhD

If Biden's rationale for entering the primary is to win the nomination, his only real chance (without guarantee of success) is for one of the most durable political figures of the last two-plus decades of American politics to be forced out of the race by circumstances. This is closer to the presidency than virtually anyone in America ever gets – but far from a sure thing for Biden.

Voting is still months away, but a Donald Trump vs. Ted Cruz showdown in the Texas GOP primary next year is a distinct possibility. Based on polling, Trump's campaign rhetoric is likely finding a receptive audience in Texas - but one already very supportive of Ted Cruz.

While proposals to repeal birthright citizenship have not been widely or consistently discussed proposals in the mainstream, University of Texas/Texas Tribune polling has included an item on this proposal as part of a battery of questions that explored different attitudes toward a range of immigration policy proposals in the February 2011.

The news of the Rick Perry campaign's problems meeting payroll is feeding expectations that the former Texas governor's second bid for the presidential nomination is nearing its end. Their messaging notwithstanding, it's fair to consider the possible implications of a Perry exit by looking at who the Texas Perry supporters said would be their second choice among the remaining candidates in the June 2015 UT/Texas Tribune Poll.

With a new slate of statewide leaders in charge, key questions about the tenor of Texas politics loomed large as the legislative session unfolded. New polling provides some preliminary answers.

Last week's incident in McKinney, TX involving a local police officer and a group of black teens has fed the ongoing national conversation about policing and race – a difficult topic made all the more challenging by the multiple dimensions involved in this instance, which include race, class, and views of law enforcement, to name just a few of the big ones.

With the 2016 GOP Presidential Primary likely to pit at least four candidates with Texas roots against one another (Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, and Rand Paul), we've using Google Trends data on each of these candidates to provide a proximate measure of how much attention the candidates are getting via Google searches. In a sense, this data highlights who is receiving the most interest from the public at a given point in time during the campaign. The graphics are dynamically updated to display data from today along with the previous 12-months. 

Headlines and rhetoric out of the Texas Legislature this year suggest that the public is clamoring for tax relief. But the polling says otherwise.

Public opinion trends in Texas leading up to the defeat of HB 4105 make it seem likely that last night was probably the Texas Legislature's last substantial effort to ban same sex marriage rights with any hope of succeeding.  

In a piece in The New York Times' Upshot blog, Lynn Vavreck, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., notes a surprising degree of 'harmony' amongst the public when it comes to abortion attitudes. Attitudes in Texas largely reflect the attitudes Vavreck finds in the national data, though Texas attitudes evidence  a higher degree of polarization between Democrats and Republicans on the issue.