Shadows and Absences: Governor Abbott’s State of the State Speech Also Says a Lot About the State of the Texas GOP
Greg Abbott’s “State of the State” speech, simultaneously an update to Texans and a notification of what he will convey as "emergency items" to the Texas Legislature, added one more instance to the many examples of the effects of Donald Trump’s continued possession of the Republican Party – with nary an exorcist in sight. The governor’s speech found him embracing a strategy that relies on holding close an activated Republican base who are willing to go along with downplaying the pandemic, particularly in the presence of other partisan specters, like the made-up theft of the presidential election or the threat to social order posed by ineffectual and largely overstated efforts to “defund the police.” On some issues, divisions among Republicans provide opportunities for Abbott to nudge the party away from the extremes of such fever dreams. But so far, Abbott has generally spent little effort doing so, and, as the GOP turns inward for the Legislative session and the business of governing the state moves front and center, the speech shows the governor remaining most attentive to those who are loudest and most disruptive.
Abbott presides over a restive party in which intense interests are more emboldened in their support of traditional conservative pet causes, and less constrained by democratic norms in the wake of the widespread and angry rejection of the results of the 2020 presidential election. As Abbott seeks ways to continue avoiding talking forthrightly about the two most important issues hovering over partisan politics in Texas and the U.S. – the actual responses to the pandemic and the dangerous fantasies that Trump won the election – parsing the governor’s report on the state of the state reveals a lot about how the Texas Republican Party defines itself at the beginning of the Biden presidency and the legislative session, and how we should understand Donald Trump’s indelible influence on the GOP even after losing the 2020 election. There were explicit signals in what Abbott said in the speech, but just as significant were his silences.
Within the coalition that makes up the Texas GOP, the far-right groups that have long had something of a managed, junior partner role now have more parity with the GOP’s more business-minded establishment in the party's public discoure. This doesn't mean these interests (and their ideological proponents), who have traditionally occupied the high ground in the brokering of coalitional politics within the Texas GOP, aren't there any more. But the evolutionary direction signaled by the rise of the Tea Party in the pre-Trump era – whose members emerged from groups that were more often seen by establishment Republicans as a fringy, only occasionally consequential presence in GOP primary elections – was accelerated by Trump’s mobilization of those comparatively unruly forces and the elevation of their frequently suppressed sentiments via sustained and combative broadsides against their more polite and business-minded coalition partners. The nature of Trump’s personality and his politics accelerated the incorporation of these elements into the GOP as an organization; but their continued elevation is not dependent on Trump’s presence in the White House, as Abbott's state of the state speech illustrates.
Trump is gone (for now), but his mobilization of these coalitional elements made them accustomed to their clamorings being echoed and encouraged from the highest levels of government. At the state level, instead of being managed within the party as something akin to an uncomfortable but unavoidable fact of life, these groups now are clearly shaping the behavior of Republican leaders in the state, just as they are at the national level. They are mobilized, which makes the agenda items that most animate many of these groups more present in both public discourse and the calculations of GOP elected officials that rely on them to stay in office.
And importantly, the now-elevated impulses of what previously were considered fringe elements of the GOP are frequently close enough ideologically to the worldviews of their coalition partners in a rather homogeneous Repulican Party that it’s more natural – and just easier – to rationalize accommodation than to denounce or part ways with them with the ties that bind them all are tested. In many cases, the problem is not disagreement in substance or even principle. For many in the Republican establishment, it’s more like they are muttering, “Um, you said that out loud...and pretty loudly.” So in addition to sheer self-interest in re-election, neither partisan interests nor ideology are sufficient drivers of a clear break from the Trump presidency, at least not by anyone with skin in the game (think Abbott, Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell, and a long list of others) or that hasn’t come up with an alternative brand and business model (like the scrappers at The Lincoln Project).
The practical result of these dynamics is that you’d never know from Abbott’s state of the state production — a roughly 30-minute televised address from a makeshift studio at a high tech firm in Lockhart rather than the House chamber — that the two years between this speech and the one delivered in January 2019 have been a time of unprecedented upheaval. The final act of the Trump presidency brought the largely botched handling of the COVID pandemic, the ensuing economic collapse, the sagging of the oil market, the greatest instance of reckoning over America’s racial history since the civil rights movement, and a metastasizing crisis in American democratic institutions seemingly destined to have permanently affected the DNA of the Republican Party.
It wasn't possible for the governor to ignore these crises, but they were kept largely kept offstage in the highly packaged speech. References to the pandemic were kept vague but laced with sympathetic affect, and functioned mainly to provide the governor with opportunities to hail Texans’ steadfastness and entrepreneurship in the face of adversity. One might be generous and say that these carefully selected anecdotes and images showed Abbott’s recognition of the painful difficulties that many Texans’ experienced over the last year.
But this generosity has to be balanced with the recognition that Abbott was straightforward about the central message of the speech: “Now, to say the pandemic is a challenge is an understatement,” Abbott declared, his delivery leaning on under to convey just how hard it’s been. But a beat later he followed with, “But to say that it has been a reversal of who we are as Texans is a misstatement,” trying hard to lean on the mis in order to reverse his set-up. This passage, in turn, was followed immediately by the suggestion that “who we are as Texans” is all about economic prosperity – about Texas persisting in its role as “the economic engine of America” as Texans return to work and school, signs that, as Abbott put it, “with each passing day of more vaccinations and increased immunity, normalcy is returning to Texas.”
All of this replays the governor’s demonstrated tendency to put a gloss on the grim situation that the pandemic had created in Texas, and the state’s at best uneven response. Texas has been adding jobs over the last few months, but (like the rest of the U.S.) employment has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels. The return of kids to classrooms is taking place unevenly, amidst fear and uncertainty. Vaccinations are increasing, but getting shots in Texans' arms is still fraught with supply and distribution problems – the share of Texans who have had at least one shot hovers in the lower middle of the pack according to state-level CDC data (regularly updated in a table maintained by The New York Times). (The governor frequently refers to the number of vaccines rather than this more telling measure, as in his January 14 press release headlined, "Texas First State To Administer 1 Million COVID-19 Vaccines." As of February 4, Texas was tied with Massachusetts, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania at 7.5%, below the overall national rate. Alaska tops the states and D.C. at 14%, nearly twice that of Texas; Missouri and Idaho (along with Puerto Rico) are worst, at 6.3%.)
Much of the rest of Abbott’s speech seemed familiar not only because once again he was animatedly applying lipstick on the COVID-response pig, but because it resonated with themes that are similar to many of the baseline appeals made by Abbott and other Republican state leaders in years past — before the deflation of oil prices, before the pandemic and its effects, and, perhaps most tellingly, long before Donald Trump appropriated the national Republican Party for his own ends.
Abbott spent most of the speech moving from one conservative touchpoint to the next in what looked like a Golden Oldies playlist for Texas Republican primary voters. In a medley of all those familiar tunes, Abbott hit conservative notes like abortion, gun rights (he wants to make Texas a “second amendment sanctuary state,” quite the crossover hit), and border security. He also hit on some more contemporary but very well known hits on police funding and “election integrity,” both of which were elevated to "emergency item" status.
It’s almost too easy for many of these familiar rhetorical set-asides to conservative interest groups to go in one ear and out the other, like a muzak version of a boomer standby playing in a department store. But Abbott assuring Texans he’s their bridge over troubled water as he delivers set-piece shoutouts to the hypermobilized, most ideologically-motivated corners of the Republican coalition signifies something a lot more significant in the context of a state seized by a pandemic, and the reorientation of the governor’s party toward the tone and agenda promoted by Trump. Playing to the ideological extremes, however well populated they are on some issues, signifies that the governor will stick with the strategy that emerged during the summer peak of the pandemic in response to the tone set by the Trump administration, and which Texas Republican leaders have stuck with ever since. The views that Trump and those around him cultivated about the pandemic (and much else) have become near orthodoxy in the Republican Party. His continuing sway was illustrated by events in Congress this week, from the House GOP closing ranks around Representative Marjorie Greene to Republican senators sticking with Trump himself in his coming impeachment trial. In Texas, this meant Abbott spending a lot of time reminding Republican base voters that he's more than willing to talk about tried and true red meat issues, while remaining oblique at best about the more fundamental crises persisting in the state.
Public opinion polling amply illustrates how Abbott’s seemingly rote choruses singing the praises of conservative pet causes can be expected to delight the choir, even as it also points to roads not taken by Abbott in leading on agenda items that might either address the state's most pressing problems more clearly, or provide a broader base of support for the party without alienating more traditionally-minded Republican voters.
The most telling choice can be fround on the trope of establishing Texas as a "Second Amendment sanctuary state," however meager the specifics. University of Texas/Texas Tribune Polling in February 2020 found that 67% of Republicans and 68% of conservatives, including 75%’s of those who identify as “extremely conservative”, hold the belief that if more people carried guns, the United States would be more safe, as opposed to less safe or having no impact. While only 24% of Republicans at the end of 2019 wanted gun control laws made less strict, the same share wanted them made more strict; the plurality, 43%, wanted Texas’s already permissive gun laws left alone.
On abortion, Abbott led with dramatic sweep, but again provided few specifics. “This session, we need a law that ensures that the life of every child will be spared from the ravages of abortion.” At the beginning of last session, 66% of Republicans said they wanted abortion laws made more strict, and by the end of last session, 68% of all Republicans supported banning access to abortion after 6 weeks of pregancy, while more recently, in April of last year, 74% favored the Governor’s decision to prohibit healthcare providers from performing abortions as a pandemic precaution. There are, however, limits: only 21% of Republicans, in June 2019, said they would ban abortion outright, as some have suggested the legislature should consider in response to the new, more conservative, composition of the U.S. Supreme Court.
On border security, Trumpish nativism hovered over Abbott’s nod even though the rhetoric made it sound as if the Trump administration never happened. “Because of the federal government’s open border policies,” Abbott said, “Texas must work to fortify our efforts to secure our border.” Here, too, UT/Texas Tribune polling suggests that the audience for this rhetoric is broad and enthusiastic among Texas conservatives. At the beginning of the 2019 Legislative Session, 61% of Republicans said that the state of Texas spends too little on border security, 76% supported the construction of Donald Trump’s border wall, while more recently, in April 2020, 75% expressed support for deporting all undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States immediately. Maybe most to the point, in October 2020 polling, while 13% of Republicans said that the coronavirus pandemic was the most important problem facing the state, the share who said either immigration or border security was 30%, the most of any issue among Republicans and a staple of Texas polling.
In what was arguably the most important part of Abbott’s address for the legislative process now underway — the emergency items — absences from Abbott's list signify his embrace of Trump-inflected Republican identity. Among his priorities designated “emergency items” to be granted priority in the legislative process, he cited the need for the legislature to assure “election integrity.” Yet beyond the helpful reminder that “the integrity of elections is so essential to our democracy,” there was no direct reference to the massive lies about the election that led several hundred people, including a handful of Texans now facing criminal charges, to break into the U.S. Capitol and disrupt the certification of the presidential election results called for by the U.S. Constitution.
Here, too, clear patterns in Republican public opinion also provide a political rationale of Abbott’s rhetoric. In October polling conducted just prior to the commencement of early voting in Texas, 61% of Texas Republicans either said that they would not (15%) or were unsure if they could (46%) trust the results of the presidential election regardless of who wins. Also found in that polling, 53% of Republicans believing that votes being counted inaccurately in the 2020 election would be an “extremely serious” problem, 55% saying the same thing about people voting multiple times, and 60% saying the same about people voting who aren’t eligible — it’s important to note that these attitudes all existed before Trump’s election loss and subsequent attempts to further inflame these dangerous attitudes. There is thus an audience for Abbott’s hailing of “election integrity,” but his audience has already made up their mind about threats to that integrity — and they don’t think threats are coming from the mob that broke into the Senate chamber after chasing the Senators out of the room as they were debating whether or not to certify Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump. More recently, Hobby School polling from the University of Houston found 83% of Republicans agreeing that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
The failure to reference the ongoing, systemic crisis of legitimacy expressed in the widespread lack of trust in elections generally, and the 2020 election in particular, underlines that either supporting Trump’s claim or, as in Abbott’s case, ignoring the most important political crisis of his lifetime, has become the Republican Party line. The governor's rhetorical approach amounted to, "who’s up for a little unity?" “One thing that all of us should agree on, whether you are a Republican, a Democrat, or an Independent,” Abbott mused, “is that we must have trust and confidence in the outcome of our elections.” That’s your cue, Chairman Cain.
So what else was left to declare an emergency, which enables the legislature to get an early start on the governor’s priorities? In the speech, the governor gave repackaging the long-negotiated efforts to improve the state’s privately owned and operated broadband infrastructure as a response to COVID-19 pride of place. While the governor resonably linked better broadband to the role of telemedicine during the pandemic, recall that the Governor’s Broadband Development Council was created by the Legislature in 2019, when the virus was presumably still only spreading in bats, to “study and identify ways to provide internet access to underserved areas of Texas.” It’s hard not to consider this an instance of not letting a good crisis go to waste by laying the final mile of cable for an issue that has been under discussion for several years, which is what it generally takes for legislation dealing with complicated infrastructure and resource issues to ripen. Good precedents are the landmark water and transportation legislation passed by the legislature during the previous decade.
The other “emergency” response Abbott pegged to the COVID crisis is to provide business with protection against litigation, which national Republicans have failed to deliver despite Senator John Cornyn’s attempted leadership on the issue, and which is a priority near and dear to the tort reformers in the GOP establishment still funding GOP candidates hand over fist. Of the other two emergency items, the conservative version of bail reform (i.e. measures to make sure courts don’t let dangerous criminals slip from their grasp, not the version that attempts to prevent jailing people who can’t make cash bail for minor offenses) and the declaration that “we must pass laws that prevent cities from defunding police” speak to the “support the blue” Zeitgeist of the Republican base in the wake of the summer of 2020, and Abbott’s efforts to exploit the “defund the police” message attached to the City of Austin’s efforts to reallocate law enforcement budgets and, to a lesser extent, cut some spending. It also pivots away from the Governor’s previous support for a “George Floyd Act” that would also address policing issues from the accountability side, a point made by Senator Royce West with put-a-pin-in-THAT diplomacy in the panel discussion broadcast statewide after the address. But as with the other elephants in the room with Abbott, the upheavals over racism went unaddressed in Abbott’s speech, too - yet another reflection of his target audience in the GOP.
The screaming silence on the continuing urgency of the pandemic and the centrality of the institutional crisis of democracy – combined with a passive response to the former and a seeming determination to worsen the latter – are telling. Abbott’s speech signifies that the once-fringe elements of the Republican Party of Texas, reside at its core. Their views of reality rules the party’s discourse at the highest level; if you’re not willing to say that Trump won an election he clearly lost, don’t say anything at all about what really poses a serious threat to the integrity of elections. And when you’re done talking about real stories of Texans’ conquering adversity in the face of the pandemic, don’t mention the limited efforts the state has made to help them do so, nor the roadblocks it’s put up to efforts in the state’s hardest hit communities to limit the spread, or that the virus is still raging across the country and the state. To maintain appearances and move forward in a legislative session hobbled by the reality of the virus you are downplaying, just repackage old initiatives for a new context – and throw in drinks to go.
So where to now? Any idea that this session would be a continuation in style from the last, in which most GOP elected officials appeared at least somewhat chastened by closer-than-expected elections in some top-of-the-ticket races and a closely divided house, has been undone by the widespread interpretation that expected Democratic electoral gains have stalled. After the legislature muddles through a COVID-truncated legislative agenda and a budget just tight enough to constrain new initiatives but not so tight as to force any very hard decisions, Republicans will have the opportunity to do what the Democrats did in 1990 and what the GOP did in 2011: Use their influence over the redistricting process to reset their advantages when they draw new maps that will maximize their partisan advantage, and delay or degrade expected gains in legislative and congressional representation for their oponents and their voters.
While this exploitation of advantage may also seem mundane to the seasoned and the cynical, in the current context it carries much more significant and darker portent for the political future of the Republican Party in Texas. Republican control of map drawing will only increase the leverage of ideological motivated GOP primary voters who have now walked through the fire with Trump. We recently wrote that, in summary, Texas Republicans were Trumpy before Trump. But Abbott’s speech signifies just how much Trump amplified the most reactionary elements in the GOP, and the extent to which Abbott and the Republican leadership are now defined by them.
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