Texas Attitudes on Spending as the 88th Legislature Considers Its Next Budget

March 06, 2023 | By: Joshua Blank, Jim Henson

With the Texas Legislature debating what should be done with the state's unprecented budget surplus, the February 2023 University of Texas/Texas Politics Project Poll included a large array of questions on government spending and policy priorities similar to a battery run at the beginning of the prior session. As we described last time, "The goal of the large battery on spending in our early session poll is to check in on Texans’ attitudes toward state spending in broad issue areas. It doesn’t assume the existence of specific spending proposals nor of well-informed or developed attitudes on the part of the respondents. Rather, these items provide something of a heat check on Texans’ dispositions toward areas of public policy that are contenders for finite resources in the process."

As we noted in the initial rollout of the latest results, Republicans and Democrats expressed different spending priorities, and broadly contrasting approaches to spending writ large. At least 70% of Democrats said the state was spending "too little" on 7 of the 12 issues we tested: Healthcare (78%), mental health services (77%), electric infrastructure (77%), environmental protection (74%), K-12 education (71%), water infrastructure (71%), and children in the state’s care (70%). Fewer than half of Democrats thought the state was spending too little in only two of the policy areas: prisons and the penal system (32%) and border security (20%).

In contrast, border security was the only item on the list in which a majority of Texas Republicans (63%) said the state was spending too little. The next highest “too little” response among Republicans was on mental health services (42%). As the graphics below illutrate, the only other policy area in which a plurality of Texas Republicans said the state was spending "too little" was "children in the state's care" (36%, which was very close to the 33% who said the state was spending "about the right amount").