Kamala Harris

• Second Reading Podcast: Politics in the Texas House after the resolution of the Speaker race

  January 23, 2025 | By: Texas Politics Project

  
  Jim Henson and Josh Blank consider the ascension of Dustin Burrows as Houses Speaker, and revisit UT/Texas Politics polling on Texans' attitudes toward the emerging Trump agenda as the president issues a flurry of executive orders.
   

• Second Reading Podcast: Public opinion in Texas and the Trump agenda

  January 16, 2025 | By: Texas Politics Project

  The UT/Texas Politics Project Poll Team discuss what their December polling in Texas tells us about public opinion and potential cross-currents buffeting the Trump administration & Congressional Republicans in 2025 - with James Henson, Daron Shaw, and Joshua Blank.

• Trends in Latino attitudes in Texas foreshadowed Trump’s gains in 2024

  January 13, 2025 | By: Jim Henson, Joshua Blank

  A review of extensive data on Latino attitudes in the Texas Politics Project polling archive in conjunction with election returns and exit polling suggests that the signs of Trump’s success in 2024 were hiding in plain sight, albeit amidst fluctuations in the data attributable to both methodological and empirical factors.

• Kamala Harris Favorability (December 2024)

  Respondents were asked, "Please tell us whether you have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, neither favorable nor unfavorable, somewhat unfavorable, or very unfavorable opinion of each of the following: Kamala Harris."

• Second Reading Podcast: In the Opaque Texas Speaker’s Race, we don’t know more than we know

  December 05, 2024 | By: Texas Politics Project

  In a podcast recording hours before strong indications that Dade Phelan is withdrawing from consideration, Jim Henson and Josh Blank join the ongoing speculation about whether Dade Phelan will remain Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives.

   

• Second Reading Podcast: Understanding Texas Latinos‘ swing to Trump in 2024

  November 21, 2024 | By: Texas Politics Project

   Jim Henson & Joshua Blank look at what UT/Texas Politics Project  polling data can (and can’t) tell us about the big Latino vote for Donald Trump in Texas.

• Second Reading Podcast: Early thoughts on how the GOP surge washed over Texas

  November 06, 2024 | By: Texas Politics Project

  Jim Henson and Joshua Blank take a morning-after look at the outcome of the 2024 election in Texas.

• The Republican emphasis on the border and immigration in the 2024 election is about more than migrant flows

  November 05, 2024 | By: Jim Henson, Joshua Blank

  Article after article covering the prominence of immigration and border security in the Republican campaigns for U.S. Senate and president in Texas have rightly noted the long-established salience of immigration and the border to Republican voters, and the central role of these issues in the “closing arguments” of GOP candidates at the top of the ballot in Texas, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. 

  But clear as this pattern is, it doesn’t explain why the issue maintains salience in the face of clear policy changes by the Biden administration, or the subsequent near-term decline in migrant traffic at the U.S.-Mexico border from historic highs in the last 11 months to the fewest encounters in the last four years. It can easily be made to seem like a puzzle: if the problem has been addressed and has abated, why is it still so important to Republican voters?

• Second Reading Podcast: A final pre-election look at Texas attitudes on key campaign issues

  November 01, 2024 | By: Texas Politics Project

  Jim Henson and Joshua Blank review Texas attitudes on the issues being promoted to attempted comparative advantage  by the presidential and U.S. Senate campaigns in Texas: immigration & the border, abortion, and transgender rights.

• The political center is having a moment in the U.S. Senate race in Texas, but it's not likely to last

  October 30, 2024 | By: Jim Henson, Joshua Blank

  In both the Presidential and U.S. Senate races, efforts by the candidates to portray their opponents as extremists while presenting themselves as comparatively moderate and bipartisan has had mixed effects. Overall, this messaging is resonating more with candidates’ partisans in the state than with their opponents’ base voters, making these tactics likely to be more successful at mobilizing partisans than at persuading the opposition's voters that their own candidate is too radical. Nor do the ostensible efforts to scare independents with claims of ideological extremism seem to be having the effects the campaigns desire. 

  A closer look at the University of Texas / Texas Politics illuminates how the efforts at contrasting moderation with extremism have fared – but also suggests that the surprising attraction of the middle in Texas politics is likely to be fleeting once the U.S. Senate race is settled and behind us.