Blogs: Supreme Court

Among those anticipating President Donald Trump’s announcement of his nominee to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on the United States Supreme Court, Texas political candidates and even some voters will be watching to see how the president’s choice plays with Texas voters. Below are a few public opinion data points from the archives of the University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll that may help anticipate the public response.

Matters of intense partisan contention at the state and federal level – LGBTQ rights, voting rights, the President’s travel ban, and abortion – are getting attention from the judicial branch this week. Our polling in Texas has yielded a lot of data on the issue at hand that might be useful in thinking about how they made it onto the public agenda in the first place, how specific politics and laws that are now being contested in the courts came to be, and how actions taken by the courts will be interpreted by the broader public here in Texas

The Texas Supreme Court appears to have slowed down the progression in LGBTQ rights since the U.S. Supreme Court's 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision that ruled gay marriage constitutionally protected. Per Alexa Ura's coverage in the Texas Tribune, the Texas Supremes have remanded "a lower court ruling that said spouses of gay and lesbian public employees are entitled to government-subsidized same-sex marriage benefits" back down the chain in order to clarify whether and how much the state can limit benefits associated with marriage. The June 2017 University of Texas / Texas Tribune Poll included the latest version of our standard gay marriage question, as well as an item on whether religious beliefs should be a legal rationale for exemptions from anti-discrimination laws.

The United States Supreme Court's recent announcement that it will review the constitutionality of requiring states to recognize same-sex marriage invites another look at the attitudes toward same-sex marriage from the most recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll – which found attitudes largely divided along partisan lines.

Everybody is nervous about privacy, and most voters don't have a high level of confidence in many public and private institutions. But their level of trust has a lot to do with their political alignment, too.