The Second Reading Podcast: COVID-19, Race, and Partisanship in the New UT/Texas Politics Project Poll (Recorded July 7, 2020)

For this week's Second Reading podcast, Jim Henson and Joshua Blank start what will be a mutli-episode discussion of some of the results of the recently released UT/Texas Politics Project poll. Today's show, recorded the morning of Tuesday, July 7, focuses on results related to the COVID-19 pandemic and ponders how to interpret the partisan patterns in attitudes around the pandemic. Henson and Blank also begin discussing some of the results of a battery of questions related to perceptions of discrimination in the U.S., and some of the partisan differences present in those attitudes.

A note about the Second Reading podcast. The podcast has been produced intermittently by the Texas Politics Project, with production support from UT's Liberal Arts Development Studio, since 2016, primarily as an instructional component for a course in Texas government and politics offered by the government department at UT Austin during summer semesters. These shows were generally hosted by Jim Henson, who designed the UT course, and usually featured Josh Blank, with intermittent in-studio guests. The podcasts have been publicly available via major podcast channels, but haven't been marketed to the public. The podcast is again part of the instructional design of GOV 312L: Politics and Government in Contemporary Texas during the Summer 2020 semester. The plan is to transistion from probably the longest soft-launch in the short but rich history of podcasting to a weekly public podcast in late summer/early fall of 2020. You can find past episodes and subscribe to the Second Reading podcast in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher.

Recorded July 7, 2020 using the Liberal Arts Development Studio's Remote Studio System. Jacob Weiss is the Lead Audio Producer for the show, and this episode was recorded by Max Edwards. Morgan Honaker mixed and mastered the episode.