The House’s passage of the de facto ban on THC derivative products in Senate Bill 3, which abandons the House’s more mild regulatory approach and supports the prohibitionist approach championed loudly by Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, may rightly be understood as yet another example of the current Lieutenant Governor’s historic power over the Senate, and how he has extended it into the affairs of the House.

In addition to these institutional and political takeaways, the legislature’s convergence on Patrick’s more restrictive approach also provides a new example of the Republican leadership’s willingness (and ability) to proceed in policy directions that enjoy at best scant overall public support, even from corners of the partisan universe that might be expected to be more receptive to the more restrictive approach. 

The politics of the THC legislation are familiar by now. Lt. Gov. Patrick made some big waves a few weeks back when he threatened to induce a special session over two of his priorities that were stalled in the bowels of the House Committee process at the time: increasing bail restrictions and banning low-THC products. With bail restrictions, also a priority item for Gov. Greg Abbott, passed by the House on Monday, Patrick recommitted to the further criminalization of THC. (There is already much second-guessing about whether the House leadership misplayed their handling of the school choice and public education financing bills, essentially increasing Patrick’s leverage on other priorities that lacked strong support in the House, like the THC bill. Scott Braddock plausibly argues as such on the Quorum Report site.) 

But the relative lack of public interest in completely rolling back the recreational THC market that was created (for some, clearly inadvertently, it seems) by 2019 legislation has been widely noted, and is substantiated by trends in public opinion evident in University of Texas/Texas Politics Project polling. While the poll didn’t ask about support for age restrictions and other measures aimed at preventing minor consumption, the most common rationale for revisiting the markets created in 2019, it’s a pretty safe bet that these narrower restrictions would enjoy more public support than is evident for the much broader prohibition now on the brink of becoming law. (As Jasper Scherer notes in his coverage of the SB 3’s passage by the House, Gov. Abbott has not taken a clear position on the legislation, which was not included in his priorities at the outset of the session. “An Abbott spokesperson declined to reveal the governor’s plans for signing the THC bill,” Scherer reports, “saying only that he “will thoughtfully review any legislation sent to his desk.”)

But while the long-running shift toward more relaxed attitudes about marijuana availability and use among the public have shown some slight signs of erosion in more recent polling, overall, there is broad sentiment in Texas, as elsewhere, for at least decriminalization of marijuana – and a continuing acceptance of medical use as something of a middle ground. These relatively permissive (or at least tolerant) views of limited but decriminalized restrictions on cannabis likely extend to the much less potent hemp-derived products at issue in SB 3.

The April poll found one-third of voters who believe that marijuana should be available for medical purposes only — while the majority of voters, 51%, said they supported the legal availability of either small (35%) or any amount (16%) of marijuana for recreational purposes. Only 15% of Texans said that marijuana should not be legal under any circumstances. 

This tracks with historical polling. The share of Texans who say that marijuana possession should never be legal has declined from 27% in 2010, to 20% in 2019, and hasn’t exceeded 17% since then, dropping as low as 13% in 2021 polling.

Asked more specifically about the intention of the current legislation, the poll found a bare majority of voters, 50%, opposed to “outlawing the production and sale of cannabis-derived products in Texas, including consumable, hemp-based products,” with 34% expressing support. The share who said they were strongly opposed, 35%, was slightly more than double those who said they are strongly supportive of the measure (17%).

 

Beyond the clear opposition among the voting public to creating additional restrictions related to THC, voters’ more general attitudes indicate that this is not a priority for them. April polling found a majority of Texans, 61%, saying that the state’s marijauna laws should either be left alone (18%), or made less strict (43%). Not surprisingly then, when asked how important it is for the legislature to “place more limits on the availability of cannabis-derived products,” only 18% of Texans offered that this was “extremely important” — 15th out of 17 issues tested.

While it’s clear from the data that there is neither a clamoring, desire, or even much support for the types of prohibitions the Lieutenant Governor is demanding, this doesn’t mean that he is not responding to some electoral currents. While it is true that the share of Republicans in favor of a complete prohibition on marijauna has declined, from 39% in 2010 to 21% today, it’s still the view of 1 in 5 GOP voters. Combined with the 39% who say that marijuana should only be available for medical purposes and the result is a clear majority (60%) who take one of those two positions.

All of these results suggest why the GOP electorate is largely ambivalent about new prohibitions like the one the House has now embraced. Republican voters expressed a slight preference for more restrictions, with 40% in favor of making the laws generally more strict, 32% in favor of making them less strict, and 23% in favor of leaving the state’s marijuana laws alone. They were even more ambivalent about the more comprehensive prohibition being pursued, with near equal shares, 46% and 42%, supporting and opposing the banning of all cannabis-derived products in the state.

While Republican attitudes alone don’t provide a clear rationale for the political capital being burned, the state’s most conservative voters, with their disproportionate influence on GOP primaries, do provide a somewhat clearer set of attitudes. 

Among the strongest conservative identifiers: 

• 72% think marijuana should either be completely illegal (31%) or only be available for medicinal purposes (41%);
• 61% support a complete prohibition on the production and sale of cannabis derived products in the state (but notably, 28% are opposed).
• 57% say it it extremely (35%) or very important (23%) for the legislature to place more limits on the availability of cannabis-derived products 

While these numbers are not overwhelmingly supportive of some of the efforts being expended here, they do provide some rationale for why the exposure of doing something broadly unpopular, but that also splits opinion within one’s party, might be somewhat mitigated by the fact that most, if not all, of most Republican legislators’ electoral competition takes place in GOP primaries where these conservative voters hold greater sway.

It should be acknowledged as well, that when the Legislature approved the 2019 bill, most lawmakers were not doing so with the intention of creating a marketplace for THC and THC adjacent products in Texas. While that should have made what started in this case as some “legislative clean-up” less contentious, the reality of marijuana laws and attitudes in the state is that they have been liberalizing — and this latest legislative action represents a reversal – or at the very least, oversteering. 

Texans, like Americans, have become less punitive in their views of marijuana – but within limits. While attitudes have clearly liberalized, this does not mean that trend lines will forever run off into the sunset, and the very issues before the legislature is a reflection of the fact that the context has changed. In this particular instance, it’s easy to imagine that people might support reining in the proliferation of THC/CBD shops in all corners of the state, while also thinking that someone shouldn’t be arrested and charged with a serious crime in a case where they’re caught with a small amount of marijuana (or Delta-9). 

The House, to some extent, has found itself caught up in this shifting narrative. After a decade or so of a left-right coalition of activists encouraging policymakers to flirt with the goals of depopulating prisons of people caught up in low-level pot charges on the grounds of fiscal sanity and some degree of personal liberty, the House has now followed the Lt. Governor in putting more limits on bail and further criminalizing marijuana. The politics of the former are much simpler given the politics of crime post-COVID and of the post Black Lives Matter backlash. Democrats don’t want to get caught going into 2026 with a “defund the police” level albatross around their necks with a vote to “keep violent criminals on the streets,” or some such.

Given these patterns in public opinion and the House’s assumed desire to preserve the prerogatives of the House in the policy process, earlier in the session it seemed that creating greater restrictions, and penalties, in order to rein in the substantial THC/CBD industry in Texas that has popped up since 2019, was going to be a heavier lift in the House than in the Patrick-led Senate. Looked at solely through the lense of public opinion, one can argue that there is just enough Republican ambivalence to make the issue a low priority for Republican elected officials, despite the concentrated skepticism evident among the most conservative GOP voters. 

But Patrick’s ability to get the House to dance to his tune on SB 3 illustrates that while elected officials might be expected to look to public opinion for guidance, there are limits to the extent they can be expected to be beholden to the public writ large. This is especially true in the context of a one-party state like Texas, where the small subset of the public that votes in GOP primary elections has a powerful influence on the political agenda and the resulting policy making process. The House withering under pressure from Patrick at a time when “legislative hostage taking” is the operative figure of speech also provides an illustration of the willingness of the Lt. Governor not just to meet his market, but to use his assiduously nurtured political stature among the state’s most conservative voters to prod relevant public opinion in the direction he desires – and to bring other Republican elected officials, even those in the Lower Chamber, with him.