Special Session agenda inflames intraparty GOP voucher conflict, while tapping into broad Republican consensus on border, immigration, COVID, and vaccines

Gov. Greg Abbott’s much-anticipated agenda for the third Special session of the 88th Legislature delivered the expected calls for action on vouchers and items related to immigration and border security, with the addition of another nod to the concerns of the right wing of his party, legislation prohibiting COVID-19 vaccines by private employers. 

Confronting the voucher issue yet again – unavoidable as a result of campaign promises, elite politics with the Texas GOP (especially involving the governor and lieutenant governor), and the deep pockets of a small but persistent group of large donors – promises to stoke the already-raging internecine conflicts among Republicans in the legislature. The remaining items – focused on immigration and border security issues and the retro-feeling COVID vaccine item – will intentionally remind Republicans that there are plenty of things that unite the mostly extreme-right activists who are most fired up about vouchers (and the injustices meted out to Attorney General Paxton) and the less activated Republican voters (and elected officials, for that matter) who are less attentive to, let alone motivated by, either vouchers or the Paxton imbroglio. 

The discussion that follows contains the verbatim items in Gov. Abbott’s special session proclamation, with discussion of data points that provide public opinion context for each item. We’ll have more synthesis and analysis as the session unfolds.

"Legislation providing education savings accounts for all Texas schoolchildren.” 

In a recent post on the Texas Politics Project website, Josh Blank and I looked closely at the public opinion dynamics of what Gov. Abbott’s press release announcing the special session agenda called “empowering parents to choose the best education option for their child.”  See the post for an extensive array of graphics and specific data points, but here are the overall takeaways from that post, with some graphics of highlights: 

• We commonly find majority or plurality support for the broad idea of vouchers or “school choice,” but the degree of support is influenced by question wording, as Blank and I discussed in depth in another recent post.
• Attitudes toward school choice are strongly conditioned by partisanship, with support for broadly-presented voucher policies, and perceptions of their salience, consistently stronger among Republicans than among Democrats. 
• However, placing voucher-related attitudes in broader contexts suggests that most voters don’t assign priority to the issue, compared either to other issues in the state or within the more specific ambit of public education policies.

• Attitudes toward the public education system in the state are more positive among Democrats than among Republicans. Among the latter, three polls in the past 14 months found more Republicans viewed the public education system unfavorably than viewed it favorably.

• Both support for vouchers and views of its importance are strongest among groups likely to be active in Republican primaries, particularly those voters who identify as most intensely conservative. Their views of public school are also most likely to be unfavorable, and most intensely so.

“Legislation to do more to reduce illegal immigration by creating a criminal offense for illegal entry into this state from a foreign nation and authorizing all licensed peace officers to remove illegal immigrants from Texas.”

“Legislation to impede illegal entry into Texas by increasing the penalties for certain criminal conduct involving the smuggling of persons or the operation of a stash house.”

In the aftermath of the Texas Senate’s vote against removing Attorney General Ken Paxton from office, a Texas Politics Project post noted the public opinion roots of Texas Republicans’ familiar recourse to invoking the border and immigration as a unifying issue during upticks in public displays of factional conflict. The wording of the first immigration item on the governor’s proclamation taps directly into Texas Republicans’ punitive impulses toward illegal immigration.  In the most recent UT/Texas Politics Project Poll in August, 83% of Texas Republicans agreed with the statement that “Undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States should be deported immediately” – 56% agreed “strongly,” while 15% disagreed (4% strongly). Slightly more than a quarter of Democrats agreed with the statement (27%), while 63% disagreed. (Overall, 54% agreed and 38% disagreed.

Efforts to characterize Republican attitudes and policies as the result of a focus on legality rather than cultural politics or, more specifically, nativist ideology, are at odds with accompanying views of legal immigration among Republicans: in the same August UT/TxPP Poll in August, nearly three quarters of Republican voters (72%) said the “the United States allows too many people to immigrate here from other countries. This was a familiar result compared to responses over the past five years of polling. 

The results also illustrate the lack of consensus among Texas Democrats, which is another reason returning to the issue makes for good politics for Republicans. A plurality of Democrats (47%) say the U.S. allows “about the right amount” of legal immigrants into the country, while a little less than a third (31%) say “too few” are admitted and about a fifth (21%) say “too many.”

Consistent with a theme of the governor’s special session agenda, opposition to legal immigration is strongest among the most conservative voters.

The lion’s share of Republicans also support the deployment of police and military resources to the border region, suggesting support for Abbott’s call for “authorizing all licensed peace officers to remove illegal immigrants from Texas” (particularly in the context of their more general attitudes toward illegal immigration above). Again, Democratic opposition is nowhere near as lopsided as Republican support, which is nearly unanimous and very intense, as the graphic of another polling result from our August poll illustrates: 74% of Republicans “strongly support” deploying additional state police and military resources to the border, while 40% of Democrats strongly oppose. Support is, again, most intense among the most conservative voters.

“Legislation to impede illegal entry into Texas by providing more funding for the construction, operation, and maintenance of border barrier infrastructure.”

“Legislation concerning public safety, security, environmental quality, and property ownership in areas like the Colony Ridge development in Liberty County, Texas.”

The sustained public appetite for more state funding for the border security efforts packaged for the public as “Operation Lone Star” is one of the most striking aspects of Republican public opinion as state appropriations increased over the last decade from about $510 million in the 2014-2015 biennium to $5.1 billion for 2024-25 – so far. 

In the August poll, 61% of Texas Republican voters said the state spent too little on border security, while only 8% said too much and about a quarter (24%) said the right amount.

Looking back to the February 2019 UT/Texas Tribune Poll, in the midst of a biennium in which the state spent $694 million (about 13% of the 24-25 budget for border security), Republican attitudes were remarkably similar: 61% said the state was spending too little, 6% too much, and 18%, the right amount.

The specifics of the situation in the Colony Ridge development are still a matter of some dispute. But whether the accuracy, or lack thereof, of reports that originated in conservative media outlets of rampant crime, trafficking, marketing to undocumented immigrants, and other alleged malfeasance, the sudden emergence of the subject and Abbott’s elevation of it reflect the salience of immigration and border security issues among Texas Republicans, and the attitudes toward immigrants, legal and illegal, already discussed above.

“Legislation prohibiting COVID-19 vaccine mandates by private employers."

The addition of legislation pertaining to COVID-19 vaccination probably wasn’t on very many objective observers’ list of probable special session items. Attention to COVID has increased slightly with reported increases in COVID cases in the state and the country in the late summer and early fall, and the availability of an updated booster, which together have raised the profile of vaccination as a matter of public health. 

Neither the case increase nor the booster rollout has raised the profile of either pandemic policies or vaccine skepticism to the heights reached during more acute phases of the pandemic. But rhetoric on government COVID policies and vaccine requirements of any kind by anybody also tap into areas of broad Republican consensus. Long after the COVID vaccine was judged safe and effective by the preponderance of medical experts amidst an avalanche of available data, requiring vaccines remained anathema to a large share of Republicans: in February 2022 polling, 70% of Republicans opposed “allowing businesses to require employees to provide proof of vaccination or submit to frequent COVID testing.”

And as with other items on the call, attitudes likely to favor attention to vaccine mandates are strongest among the most conservative voters, who are much more likely to “strongly oppose” employer vaccine requirements than less conservative voters.

While the days of cultural combat over the pandemic may have faded from most memories, the governor’s resurrection of those conflicts invites remembering that from the earliest days of the pandemic, Texas Republicans took COVID-19 less seriously than either Democrats or independents. As a graphic of trend data from 14 Texas Politics Project polls between April 2020 (the first full month of COVID spreading in the U.S.) and December 2022, the share of Republicans who considered the coronavirus “a significant crisis” dropped from a high of 48% at the pandemic’s outset to 5% in December of 2022. Among Texans overall, about two-thirds (66%) thought it was a significant crisis at the beginning of the time series, stabilizing at between 22% and 24% from April to December of 2022. 

As of May 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 81.4% of the U.S. population had received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine, 69.5% had completed a primary series, and about 17% had received a booster. By comparison, all of Texas’ rates were lower than the U.S. overall: 77% had received at least one dose, 63.5% had completed a primary series, and 11.4% had received an updated booster. 

The National Center for Health Statistics (under the Centers for Disease Control) report that in 2020, there were 30,840 COVID-related deaths in Texas, which had the ninth highest death rate (151.4 per 100,000) among the 50 states; in 2021, overall deaths increased to 44,516 deaths, with Texas backsliding to the third highest death rate among the states ( just behind Oklahoma and Alabama, but worse than #4 Mississippi and #5 West Virginia). 

For extensive data on partisan differences in Texas attitudes toward the pandemic and related issues, see a compilation of trends in our extensive COVID-related polling, and browse through hundreds of COVID and vaccination related data points in our polling archive.