Post Date: January 2018

Donald Trump's Standing in Texas Ahead of the State of the Union Address

| By: Joshua Blank and Jim Henson

Donald Trump will give his first official State of the Union Address tonight at 8 PM central time (his first speech to Congress upon being elected in 2017 isn't technically a State of the Union Address). Here are five quick observations about Donald Trump's standing in Texas to provide some context for tonight's address – to wit, he has been consistently popular among Texas Republicans, just as consistently intensely unpopular among Texas Democrats, and remains in better standing with his GOP base in Texas than the collective members of Congress he'll be addressing tonight.

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The Tea Party in Texas

| By: Joshua Blank

You may not be aware that the University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, as of this writing, has been measuring Tea Party identification since 2010, which means that we have collected (an astonishing, if I do say so myself) 24 surveys of registered voters in Texas that can examine Tea Party attitudes alone, in comparison to Republicans as a whole, non-Tea Party Republicans, Democrats, and, of course, the entire electorate.

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Maybe This Russia Case Should Be an X-File: Texas Data Points From the Week in Politics

| By: Jim Henson and Joshua Blank

Day-to-day breaking news on the various aspects of investigations of Russian tampering in the 2016 election and (increasingly) how the Trump White House has responded to the investigation dominated the national political news this week, with the early week looking bad for the FBI but the end of the week looking decidedly worse for the president. The big story from the previous week, the negotiations over immigration policy and the government shutdown, hovered ever so lightly over Dan Patrick’s first border-security and illegal immigration focused campaign video, in which the Lt. Governor signaled very strongly that he’s still behind the president. Yet within hours of the release of the governor’s video, the president was signaling his willingness to trade a path to citizenship for DACA recipients for border wall funding – which provided Senator Cruz the chance to raise his head above the hedge to shout his dissent. In two developments that remain secure from the ever-expanding storm of national politics, the special school finance commission met for the first time this week, and the first batch of legally grown marijuana in Texas made news. Continue on for Texas data on yet another week in politics that veered very unevenly between mystery and quirky humor.

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The Texas Public Opinion Context of the 2018 Government Shutdown

| By: Jim Henson

Without undertaking judgments about the various attempts to frame the shutdown with assignations of blame, we’ve rounded up a set of polling results from (mostly) recent University of Texas / Texas Tribune Polls to illuminate how the political rhetoric surrounding the 2018 shutdown of the federal government is landing among the Texas electorate. 

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Most Texans Unlikely to Fall in Step as General Sessions Marches on Marijuana

| By: Jim Henson and Joshua Blank

While Texas has ceded pioneer status to other states such as Colorado, Washington state, and, most recently, California (!) when it comes to legalizing the sale and use of marijuana, Texans’ attitudes toward decriminalization don’t lag far behind the national trend as much as inherited images of Texas’ cultural conservatism might suggest.

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Texas Republican Support for Trump Will Likely Survive Fire and Fury

| By: Jim Henson and Joshua Blank

Polling in Texas, at least, suggests two key points. First, as one might expect, there are stark partisan differences in Texans’ assessments of Trump’s traits, with Republicans’ rating him much more positively than Democrats. These differences are unsurprising, but still notable given their magnitude in the context of Trump’s outlier status in terms of his preparation for the office of the presidency and his unorthodox (and combative) style. Second, the widespread view of the president as a strong leader among Republicans appears likely to counterbalance somewhat less faith in his other qualities – qualities that one might expect to form a sound basis for judging presidents, at lease based on precedents.

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Keywords: Donald Trump