The effects of two decades of call-and-response between Texas Republican voters and their elected leaders on "election integrity"

A new round of interventions in the voting process by Texas state officials coincides with the reemergence of widespread doubts about elections and voting among Republican voters in the most recent statewide polling by the Texas Politics Project. The latest actions of state officials and new evidence of the persistence of doubts about the conduct of elections among Republican voters emerge from the rhetoric and policy of elected officials that have shaped public attitudes since the turn of the 21st century. These latest manifestations of declining trust in the electoral process, inflamed by Donald Trump's insistent propagation of the fiction that elections are being corrupted by the votes of undocumented immigrants, suggest that Texans are approaching the Rubicon in terms of their ability to maintain shared trust in the state's deployment of democracy.

The August University of Texas/Texas Politics Poll found 65% of Republicans saying that the state’s voting laws, repeatedly and significantly tightened over the last two decades of Republican rule, should be made more strict than existing law. This represented an 11-point increase in the share of Republicans (54%) who said the same in February of 2023  (when the question was last asked) — already a majority of GOP voters even before the latest increase.

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CategoryDemocratIndependentRepublican
More strict21%36%65%
Left as they are now31%43%25%
Less strict42%15%7%
Don't know/No opinion6%6%3%

The recent resurgence in state activity aimed at voting and elections has included a mixture of legal and political gestures, including:

Both the actions by state officials and the opinions of Texas Republicans align with a national political environment in which the discussion of voting and elections has been inflamed by Donald Trump’s relentless cultivation of the belief that the electoral system is corrupt and rigged against him. As recently as his September 10 debate with Kamala Harris, the former president reiterated his belief that the 2020 election was stolen when questioned about recent statements he made acknowledging his loss (along with the adjacent and similarly ungrounded claims of widespread voting by “illegal immigrants” and the corruption of the judicial system that threw out his lawsuits to that effect).

Amidst Trump’s bombast and Republican opinion leaders’ reticence to opine otherwise, most Republican voters in Texas have adopted the former president’s belief that the 2020 election was rigged. Many were even willing to storm the U.S. Capitol based on this belief. These attitudes about 2020 inevitably provide a toxic backdrop for the recent efforts by Texas elected officials to aggressively police voting and elections, starting with the registration process. But the widespread skepticism among Republican voters about the security of the electoral system and, more broadly, the legitimacy of elections, has deep roots in the last two decades of Texas politics, long before Trump’s inability to accept the apparently humiliating reality of his 2020 loss to Joe Biden.

Given the long history of politicizing the writing and enforcement of election laws in Texas and the more recent cultivation of distrust in electoral institutions and practices by former President Trump and his allies, the latest high-profile maneuvers in Texas are following public opinion as much or more than they’re leading it.

The widespread support for still stiffer voting laws aligns with a lack of confidence that Americans will trust the result of the 2024 election: only 7% of Republicans were “very confident” that Americans will trust the results of the upcoming presidential election, significantly less than even the 18% who said the same at the end of the last presidential campaign in October 2020 polling prior to the alleged theft.

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CategoryDemocratIndependentRepublican
Very confident26%7%7%
Somewhat confident46%36%33%
Not very confident17%22%34%
Not at all confident5%21%17%
Don't know/No opinion6%14%9%

While the more recent efforts in Texas, and the expected public support from Republican voters, echo Trump’s cultivation of voters’ distrust, the latest resurgence of aggressive GOP tactics also follows two decades of efforts by Republican state leaders to condition the public to view the security and integrity of elections in Texas as something requiring constant vigilance against ever-present threats to the integrity of the system (despite those same state leaders’ dominance of elections and control over making the laws governing those elections).

Texans’ views of the validity of the 2020 presidential election provide an eye-opening starting point for looking at the mutually reinforcing effects of Texas Republican leaders’ framing of election threats, and Texas Republican voters’ beliefs about voting and elections in the state as we enter the final weeks of the presidential campaign. Trump’s insistence that he was robbed in 2020 has been embraced by a large share of Texans – primarily Republicans. The August 2024 UT/TxPP Poll asked Texas voters, "Regardless of whom you supported, do you think Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 presidential election?” Fifty-eight percent believed President Biden was the legitimate winner, including 95% of Democrats.

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categoryTotal
Yes58%
No32%
Not sure10%

But nearly a third (32%) of voters thought Biden’s victory was illegitimate, including a majority, 58%, of Republicans and slightly less than a third of independents (30%). Only a quarter of Republicans (25%) recognized Biden’s victory as legitimate.

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CategoryDemocratIndependentRepublican
Yes95%59%25%
No3%30%58%
Not sure2%10%17%

The share of Texas voters who conceded the legitimacy of Biden’s election in August (nearly four years after the fact) was actually the highest it’s been across 14 Texas Politics Project polls since 2021 – but only slightly.

And while the share of Republicans who reject the legitimacy of the 2020 election has gradually decreased from its high point of 69% in two 2023 surveys, the view has consistently been embraced by a broad majority of Texas’ GOP voters throughout the same period.

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YesNoNot sure
Feb. 202222%67%11%
June 202220%66%14%
Aug. 202220%66%14%
Oct. 202220%64%16%
Dec. 202224%61%16%
Feb. 202317%69%14%
Apr. 202322%64%14%
Aug. 202321%69%11%
Oct. 202321%63%17%
Dec. 202319%62%18%
Feb. 202423%59%18%
Apr. 202423%61%17%
June 202422%60%18%
Aug. 202425%58%17%
Oct. 202424%55%20%

While Texas Republicans’ attitudes about the legitimacy of the 2020 election are certainly attributable to Trump’s position as the most influential figure in the Republican Party for most of the last decade, it’s also the case that Trump didn’t invent concerns about elections and the politics they foment, especially in Texas. Nor is he the first one to stoke them for political benefit.

It’s been almost 14 years since then-Gov. Rick Perry in 2011 submitted a voter ID requirement as an emergency matter to the 82nd legislature, five years and several failed attempts after a similar bill was first proposed. The legislature famously succeeded in sending Perry a voter ID bill in 2011 in the wake of pitched partisan battles in both chambers. After several years of court battles, major provisions of the law were declared unconstitutional, and a modified version of the bill was passed in 2017.

As one press account quoted Perry in 2012, responding on Fox News to the Justice Department’s early efforts to block implementation of the law: 

“During the testimony that was in front of the Texas legislature this last session, we had multiple cases where voter fraud was in various places across the state….I think any person who does not want to see fraud believes in having good, open, honest elections. One of the best ways to do that is to have an identification so that you prove who you are and you keep those elections fraud-free.”

Rhetoric combining commonsense-sounding appeals to “good, open, honest elections” with intimations about the threat of fraud hovering over the voting process would become boilerplate in Texas in the ensuing years. In the meantime, Republicans embraced voter ID requirements. Democratic support, perhaps surprisingly high in early years, ebbed as partisan views of the issue became more entrenched – though remained higher than signaling from elected Democrats might suggest.

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categoryDemocratIndependentRepublican
Very favorable19%51%37%
Somewhat favorable16%10%29%
Neither favorable nor unfavorable11%18%10%
Somewhat unfavorable11%6%8%
Very unfavorable38%14%3%
Don't know/No opinion4%1%13%

Both the rhetoric and the patterns in public opinion that emerged from the multi-year voter ID debate reflected the strategy of Republican elected officials to strengthen and maintain their hardfought electoral dominance in the face of ongoing demographic changes expected to erode that advantage. At the outset of the voter ID push in 2005, the Republican era in Texas state politics was in its early years. Republicans completed their run of the table by winning a majority of the Texas House in 2002 and quickly engaged in attempts to raise the bar for casting a vote. This was one of several tactical maneuvers by Republican elected officials to use their relatively newfound control of state government to fashion laws and institutional practices that worked to their advantage after generations of elected Democrats used their control of the same institutions to maintain their own electoral advantages, including as their control of state government began to decay after the passage of the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960’s.

The era of Democratic decline saw an increasingly liberal party follow the national push for the expansion of voting rights (albeit with something of a lag in Texas). While justifiable in ethical terms, liberal Democrats’ embrace of voting rights also brought them the political benefit of expanding the base of black and Latino voters who continue to form a crucial part of the Democratic base, even though (as LBJ famously is said to have observed) it cost Democrats in the states of the former confederacy. By the time of the voting rights fights in Texas in the 2000’s, it was those voters that out-of-power Democrats (and several federal judges) said that ascendant Republicans were trying to keep away from the voting booth by using voter ID laws to place new burdens on their ability to vote — along with younger voters, less experienced at navigating the election process, and more transient voters.

The political and legal fights over the means of preserving what has come to be called “election integrity” have continued on many fronts, most of which have helped keep Democrats in a permanently defensive position during the Republican era in Texas. A limited list of these contentious fronts includes: the difficulty in legally (and, to be fair, empirically) demonstrating Democratic claims of voter suppression amidst the weakening of the Voting Rights Act by the U.S. Supreme Court; redistricting after the 2000, 2010 and 2020 censuses; the impact of discussions about and/or the criminalization of routine voting errors; and SB1, the state’s omnibus voting legislation passed in 2021, to name several but by no means all available examples.

The intertwining of racial and partisan politics that have largely defined fights over voting and elections over the last twenty years have become coded into partisan patterns in public opinion about elections, voting, and, in the Trump era, fundamental expectations about the functioning of democracy. The particulars of these political fights have changed since the transition in partisan power helped set the current political dynamics in motion. Attention has largely shifted to focusing on the conduct of elections in urban, Democratic strongholds, none more so than fractious Harris County.

The racial-cultural undertones of these fights have been supercharged by Republican opinion leaders’ and elected officials’ association of voter fraud with immigrants, a linkage that is as persistent as it is sparsely supported by evidence of anything more than incidental, and seemingly accidental, instances of voter fraud by ineligible voters. This rhetoric coincides with a well-documented preoccupation with immigration and border security among Texas Republicans, both elected officials and voters.

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categoryDemocratsIndependentsRepublicans
Feb. 201514%33%59%
June 201514%25%59%
Oct. 201512%32%57%
Feb. 201617%28%54%
June 20168%29%52%
Oct. 20167%32%56%
Feb. 20178%21%51%
June 20177%36%51%
Oct. 201712%30%44%
Feb. 201812%32%48%
June 20188%24%53%
Oct. 20189%29%62%
Feb. 201911%29%62%
June 201911%35%59%
Oct. 201912%28%57%
Feb. 202010%32%52%
Apr. 20201%8%28%
June 20203%14%29%
Oct. 20203%11%30%
Feb. 20212%23%46%
Mar. 20218%35%61%
Apr. 20216%35%65%
June 20216%35%59%
Aug. 20212%29%64%
Oct. 20212%26%68%
Feb. 20223%28%58%
Apr. 20224%31%61%
June 20222%19%45%
Aug. 20224%38%54%
Oct. 20224%35%61%
Dec. 20223%27%60%
Feb. 20235%32%59%
Apr. 20235%19%57%
June 20237%39%59%
Aug. 20235%38%59%
Oct. 20239%43%60%
Dec. 20237%32%61%
Feb. 202414%44%68%
Apr. 202413%40%63%
June 20249%34%61%
Aug. 20247%25%53%
Oct. 20247%27%53%

For over a decade, Texas Politics Project Polling has explored the fundamental differences in partisan views of voting practices in Texas. In several polls, two questions were used to capture these differences. One question probed beliefs about the seriousness of and extent to which eligible voters are being prevented from voting (what we might loosely and provocatively call, voter suppression); while the other items looked at beliefs about the seriousness of and extent to which people were voting who are not eligible to vote (what we might loosely and provocatively call, voter fraud).

In several deployments of these paired questions over 8 years, including in the recently released August 2024 poll, a clear partisan pattern emerged. Asked about the frequency or seriousness of ineligible people casting ballots in Texas elections, Republican voters have consistently expressed their concerns about voter fraud despite widespread, repeated, and loudly touted efforts by statewide officials to stamp out fraud, or, more recently, to preserve “integrity” over the course of multiple legislative sessions.

In October 2016 polling, on the eve of that election, 70% of Texas’ Republican voters (and 15% of Democrats) said that people voting who are not eligible would be an “extremely serious” problem in the upcoming election. 

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categoryDemocratIndependentRepublican
Extremely serious15%58%70%
Somewhat serious8%11%19%
Not too serious20%16%4%
Not serious at all55%14%5%
Don't know2%1%2%

In August 2024, after years of efforts to shore up the process, 57% of Republicans still say that ineligible voting will be an extremely serious problem – a 13-point decline, but by no means a restoration of confidence in the system (Democratic views remained statistically unchanged at 16%). The share of Republicans saying that ineligible voting would be an extremely serious problem remains unchanged from the share who said so on the eve of the 2022 election.

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CategoryDemocratIndependentRepublican
Extremely serious17%36%60%
Somewhat serious13%16%21%
Not too serious19%15%9%
Not at all serious47%19%6%
Don't know4%14%3%

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CategoryDemocratIndependentRepublican
Extremely serious17%23%56%
Somewhat serious15%16%27%
Not too serious21%24%11%
Not serious at all40%24%3%
Don't know6%13%2%

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CategoryDemocratIndependentRepublican
Extremely serious16%33%57%
Somewhat serious15%13%24%
Not too serious20%27%12%
Not at all serious45%18%4%
Don't know4%9%3%

These views reflect partisan differences in beliefs about the frequency of illegal voting. As recently as June 2024, 24% of Republicans said that ineligible voters vote in Texas elections “frequently,” along with another 39% who said this happens “sometimes” (compared to 6% and 15% of Democrats, respectively). Once again, these attitudes remain largely unchanged from June 2021, when the legislature was roiled in debate over the “election integrity” bill that eventually passed – when 31% of GOP voters said that ineligible voters were voting “frequently” in Texas elections. Another indication that despite much touted efforts by Republican elected officials, the “policy problem” — such as it is — remains unresolved in the minds of Republican voters, and ripe for further attention from GOP elected officials.

While the share of Democratic views about the frequency of "voter suppression' is historically similar to the share of Republican views about the frequency of fraud, Democrats view the frequency of vote suppression with less intensity compared to the intensity of Republican beliefs about the incidence of fraud. As recently as June 2024, 18% of Democrats said that eligible voters were prevented from voting in Texas “frequently,” which actually represented a notable decline in the share who said the same in August 2021 (36%), June 2021 (37%), June 2019 (31%), and February 2019 (31%) — when Democratic views about the frequency of voter suppression were more in line with Republican views about frequency of fraud.

Similarly, In August of this year, 44% of Democrats said that eligible voters being prevented from voting would be an “extremely serious” problem in Texas in the upcoming elections, similar, though slightly down from the 52% who said the same in October 2022, and the 56% who said the same in October 2020.

These partisan differences in the intensity of Republicans' and Democrats' core concerns about elections help explain why Republican elected officials keep calling into question the sanctity of elections in Texas, even as Democratic efforts to mobilize around voter suppression have largely fallen flat. Democratic voters' concerns about “voter suppression” never reach the same intensity and audience as Republican voters' concerns about "voter fraud." Nor are they so consistently and readily activated, particularly considering the power of the reinforcing association with so far unfounded claims of voting by undocumented immigrants.

(This should make some logical sense: If a “voter” is registered and can or does vote, they are more likely to see the system as functioning properly for eligible voters than a voter who is concerned about illegal voting by unknown actors whose very presence can plausibly be argued to dilute the value of their own vote — among other salient concerns. If a voter votes, they haven’t been suppressed, while if the same voter believes that anyone voting illegally “cancels” or "dilutes" their own vote, that same voter can feel that their own rights have been impacted, albeit indirectly.)

Whatever the internal logic employed by voters, this partisan pattern is hardly surprising to anyone who pays attention to politics in the state. It echoes the messaging of elites in both parties, and reflects the running battles over the last decade about the nitty gritty of voting in Texas elections – voter ID, but also proposed and implemented rules related to voting, from the laborious voter registration requirements in the state to, more currently, the various accommodations introduced or expanded during the pandemic, such as absentee and mail-in voting, voter assistance, registration assistance, early voting rules and requirements, the delivery of county level voter registration inquiries to the AG’s office, and on, and on. Having now triggered Republican voters’ suspicions about the voting system and benefited politically, the incentives remain for Republican elected officials to find new targets – even if the legitimacy of the system is collateral damage.

The two questions about the seriousness of voter suppression and voter fraud were embedded in a larger battery of questions in the same August 2024 poll. The larger battery asked respondents to respond to a wider range of issues that have emerged in the discussion of elections in the state. Here, we find that despite all the attention paid to allegations about the potential registration of ineligible voters and the implied consequences, the top concern in Texas is the spread of misinformation on social media, cited as a very serious problem by 57% of Texas voters. This concern is much more prevalent overall than concerns about votes being counted inaccurately and people voting who are not eligible, cited by 39% and 37%, respectively, as their top concern.

Yet within these results, partisanship again asserts a powerful influence that dilutes the seemingly shared concerns about misinformation – particularly among Republicans, though also, to a lesser degree, among Democrats. The top Republican concern remains people voting who are not eligible (57%), while the top Democratic concern after misinformation (65%) is eligible voters being prevented from voting (44%). While these differences may appear slight, the partisan differences in these responses are reflected in expectations about the soundness of the upcoming election expressed in the same poll. Only 59% of Texas voters say they will trust the results of the 2024 presidential election, including a near consensus among Democrats (85%), but only 38% of Republicans (unchanged from the 39% who said the same in October 2020) and half of independents (50%).

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CategoryDemocratIndependentRepublican
Yes85%50%38%
No5%10%16%
Don't know/Unsure11%39%46%

In some senses, the patterns in attitudes about elections and voting reflect familiar partisan struggles to win elections in order to control governing institutions. But they also reflect how the tactics used over the last two decades – in conjunction with political polarization and negative partisanship, declining trust in political institutions, and (as many Texans seem to recognize) fundamental shifts in the market for political information – have resulted in GOP voters developing a reflexively suspicious distrust of elections and the electoral process. These attitudes are part of a recursive feedback loop linked to support for policies that respond to this distrust while at the same time deepening it. In Texas, this has manifested in support among a majority of Texas Republican voters for still more stringent laws, even after the passage of the most punitive laws in the contemporary history of the state, and continuing suspicions about voter fraud, based not on evidence but on the dark intimations of social influencers and Republican elected officials.

These attitudes cement incentives for the embrace of policies and practices in the domain of electoral institutions that previously were normatively off-limits in the aftermath of the dramatic expansion of the electorate in the U.S. during most of the 20th century, and the hard fought, if in some places fragile, support for increasing voter participation that accompanied the expansion of the eligible electorate. For example, current events suggest that the historically widespread bipartisan practice of encouraging registration based on the more or less shared normative goal of expanding voter participation appears headed for the dustbin of history.

The long history of political fights over voting and election laws in Texas that stretches from the civil war to the present has long provided grist for the pragmatic, somewhat academic observation that election and voting rules inherently advantage some groups and disadvantage others, and thus are always bound to be political in both intent and consequence. To be sure, the observation that we should expect voting rules to be inherently political can underplay both the ethical stakes of such politics and the longterm institutional consequences. It can also seem blithe to the viciousness of fights over attempted expansions and contractions of voting rights in the 19th and 20th centuries – those struggles over voting rights weren’t games of beanbag.

The currently apparent patterns in the dynamics of partisan politics and public opinion suggest that the driving mechanism of the observation that election rules are always political – the relentless partisan pursuit of electoral advantage – has devolved into something much more corrosive to Texas’ political institutions than what has traditionally been viewed as "politics as usual." Whether or not it was the intent of those who started feeding the present dynamic in Texas at the turn of the century, public opinion data clearly illustrates that what may have begun as hard headed but familiar partisan politics has metastasized into a much graver threat to Texans’ views of the legitimacy of elections – and to the functioning of the political system that depends on that legitimacy.

The latest attempts by Texas’ Republican leadership to use state power to thwart the registration and mobilization of voters in the midst of election season are signs of the accelerating decay of the overarching normative standards that long served as boundaries for the public politics of voting and election rules. Longstanding norms encouraging broad political participation as a shared, non-partisan goal, however fuzzy at times, have largely been abandoned by some of the most prominent public officials in Texas. Those norms have been replaced by rhetoric and policies that both exploit and exacerbate declining trust in electoral institutions, and that deepen partisan differences not just about politics, but about the fundamental legitimacy and efficacy of political institutions. Should they disappear entirely, those old boundaries will likely be hard to reestablish.

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