Growth, Diversity & One Party Politics? These Not So United States (TX Part 3)

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March 15, 2022 | James Henson of The Texas Politics Project on polling Texans, and More in Common’s Stephen Hawkins and Paul Oshinski on the seven “threads” of Texan identity

Is democracy still democracy when one party wins all the elections? 

That’s a question we’ll be asking around the country on our state level-identity and polarization series, since 37 state “trifectas,” or one-party governments, are now in office and in complete control. And as a result it’s a major point of discussion with Dr. James Henson, Director of The Texas Politics Project, in our third episode on the biggest, proudest and so often loudest of the Republican trifectas: Texas.    

“The Democrats have gone from being the disadvantaged party to a structurally hobbled party, “ observes Henson, who’s been analyzing and polling on Texas politics for over 15 years at UT Austin. “ You get in a position where you're just so structurally disadvantaged that it almost changes the fundamental nature of political competition.”

Not much electoral competition in Texas during two decades running of Republican monopoly, except for the primaries. And Henson credits primary competition from the right for the most recent rack of “red meat” legislation served up in Texas: restriction of abortion access to as early as six weeks, limitation on the voting access that expanded in recent elections, but unlimited - as in unlicensed - open carry of firearms throughout the Lone Star State. 

“This is legislation that is promoted by Republican legislators who do not want primary challenges from the right and are not afraid of the general election,” observes Henson. 

Which might cause one to believe that political identity in Texas is as uniformly red as this legislation. But according to The Texas Politics Project and other polling groups, that is not the case. In fact, a majority of  Texans oppose most of this recent legislation. And according to a major recent research project by the group More In Common, there is far more diversity of viewpoint in Texas, even among those with strong Texas identities than would be expected from its politics.

In this episode, TPP speaks with Global Research Director Stephen Hawkins about the origin of More in Common’s first state-level identity project and with the report’s co-author, Paul Oshinski, on the finding of seven distinct social “Threads of Texas,” from far left “Lone Star Progressives” to far right “Heritage Defenders,” with five interesting gradations somewhere in between. 

Think Texas is a ruby red state? Well, yes, if you look only at election results and legislative output. But not if you look beyond, to the rapidly growing, changing and diversifying society beneath one-party rule.  Tune in for this fuller audio view of vast, varied and ever-evolving Texas, the state that was once a nation and will rarely let you forget it. 

Original music by Ryan Adair Rooney

SHOW NOTES

Our Guests

James Henson, Director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin

Stephen Hawkins, Global Director of Research at More in Common

Paul Oshinski, Research Fellow at More in Common and co-author of the Threads of Texas report


More in Common and Hidden Tribes US on Twitter

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Transcript

Dr. James Henson

The Democrats have gone from being the disadvantaged party to a structurally hobbled party in a way that is having structural effects on the political system. 

Robert Pease (host) 

Dr. James Henson is Director of the Texas Politics Project at UT Austin. He’s one of  three special guests today dishing out a deeper understanding of this  hugely important state.

A lot of diversity on the ground in Texas, but not much in government, as Texas has been under increasingly populisist Republican rule for two decades now without much change in sight. 

Dr. James Henson

And so you know, you get in a position where you're just so structurally disadvantaged that it almost changes the fundamental nature of political competition.

Robert Pease (host) 

I’m Robert Pease and this is The Purple Principle now in our third season and exploring the perils of  state level polarization. Texas recently passed the most restrictive abortion access and least restrictive gun access laws in the country. Is that a case of Texas asserting its own identity?  Or is it just another case of a political party seizing control and playing to their base, as is happening throughout our polarized nation? A big question on a big place. The research group More in Common interviewed thousands of Texans in compiling their recent report, Threads of Texas. We’ll be speaking with Global Research Director Stephen Hawkins about this project.

Stephen Hawkins

Texas is a huge state, you know, it's as big as many European countries are. But Texas identity is also a very significant one. Not every state has people in it that strongly identify and are very proud of being from that state. So it was a great place for us to kind of initiate this local level analysis.

Robert Pease (host) 

This More in Common report finds far more diversity of viewpoint in Texas society than Texas politics.  We’ll discuss that with Stephen Hawkins and Texas-based co-author Paul Oshinski, who will break down seven distinct Texas identities for us.

A lot to learn about the Lone Star State in this episode and throughout our Texas mini-series. Starting with Dr. James Henson on the mission of the Texas Politics Project. In addition to polling within and about Texas, they’ve instructed tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of Texas college students in civics and government over the past fifteen years. 

[Enter Interview]


Dr. James Henson

Yeah, I mean, we started really, at the intersection of education and public affairs. The very first piece of the Texas politics project was an online text for freshman Government. One of the interesting things about Texas is that there is a provision in the Texas Constitution that anybody with a degree from a public institution of higher education in the state, shall take formal coursework in the Texas Constitution and the U.S. Constitution. 

Robert Pease (host) 

We're very intrigued by the way you poll, because you have, in our view, at least, a broader, less zero-sum definition of the political game, you have independents in there. You have degrees of strength in party identification and ideology. So tell us how you came upon that, you know, more exhaustive and it must also be a very challenging methodology.

Dr. James Henson

The origin of the polling process was really shaped by academic training, which tends to look for more if you, but it simply, you know, splitting rather than lumping. And so in all of the nuanced kind of measures that you're talking about, relying on say a seven point Party ID and, and ideological identification scale, rather than a three point scale. Being interested in more exhaustive demographic and sociological characteristics on the what we think of as the back end of the poll. All of those things, I think, come from this being a poll that is for public consumption, but was put together and kind of conceived in an academic setting in which those kinds of approaches are more fundamental.

Robert Pease (host) 

Yeah, well, you've been tracking an increase in negative partisanship in Texas, which I think mirrors a trend around, uh, the country. And we're wondering, does that in some way, erode the Texas identity, which is so strong historically?

Dr. James Henson

You know, on one hand, I think there is no doubt that the nationalization of politics writ large, and the way that national politics are playing such a large role in state level politics and state level political discourse in the interlude that we're in now, has probably had some corrosive effect on the durability of this Texas identity and its ability to bind people together, in a sense. Or to, you know, create a social identity apart from partisanship.  That said, I mean, the notion of a Texan identity has always been kind of contested here and continues to be contested and it’s almost, I mean I think that contestation is almost part of the identity here.

Robert Pease (host) 

Well, let's get into some of the details then of some of your recent polls.  So 40% overall felt democracy in Texas was “working poorly to some degree,” or in another poll that the majority of Texas feel “the state is on the wrong track.”

Dr. James Henson

Well, I mean, I think there are a few things going on here. Now, one is partisanship: that for a long time, if you looked at the party breakdowns of these “right track, wrong track” numbers, they are influenced— they're not totally determined but they're influenced—by party identity vis-a-vis the party in power. And so on the “right track, wrong track” number, even when the economy was going great, the periods of real hot economic growth here and prosperity, Republican “right track” numbers tended to be higher than Democratic “right track” numbers, because of this partisan influence on people's responses. In terms of the big turn towards “wrong track”. I mean, I think it has a couple of different determinants here. One is simply the impact of the pandemic and to some degree the level of turmoil, both political and social, that the pandemic has brought. But I think the other piece of thinking about the impact of the pandemic on people's general assessments of the mood and of political figures is, part of the difficulty of people's experience of the pandemic has also been the political intertwining of the deeply different partisan frames of the pandemic. People are not only experiencing different levels of hardship and discomfort and increased pessimism because of the pandemic, they're also having those feelings about the politicized response to the pandemic.

Robert Pease (host) 

Yeah. Well, I believe you've had a trifecta now for about 20 years… 

[Archival audio - News reports of Texas Republicans winning elections]

Robert Pease (host) 

…and at a certain point, when a party's been out of power that long, do people get sort of used to one party government? And does it become just very difficult for the opposition party to get media attention, to raise money, to attract volunteers, that kind of thing?

Dr. James Henson

Yeah, absolutely. And I, and I think, you know, uh, that's a good, that's a good summation of what I'm saying, I mean, you don't have to believe that politics are driven entirely by patronage to note that incumbency has its advantages in cultivating party resources. And when you've been out of government that long, it just dries up a critical area of resources.

[Exit Interview]


Robert Pease (host) 

We’re speaking with Dr. James Henson, Director of the Texas Politics Project. He’s making an important point about one party rule at the state level, often called a trifecta, where one party holds the governor’s seat and both chambers of the legislature. There’s currently 37 trifectas in the U.S. And that’s largely the result of partisan gerrymandering, which we learned about from two previous “Texperts” in this series. Most recently, Texas Monthly Editor-in-Chief Dan Goodgame:

[Look back audio to Dan Goodgame]

Dan Goodgame

We’ve taken gerrymandering to a whole new level here.

Robert Pease (host) 

And Jason Wheeler, co-host of the podcast Y’all-itics, in our first Texas episode: 

[Look back audio to Jason Wheeler]

Jason Wheeler

If I can add one more thing there, Robert, I'll bring up the ‘G word’, because I think that's a big part of this in Texas and everywhere else. And that's gerrymandering.

Robert Pease (host) 

Partisan gerrymandering creates more safe seats for the party drawing the maps. That helps create one party rule within a state, sometimes for decades at time, as in Texas. But this also has implications for political affiliation. Upcoming guest Dr. Henry Cisneros is a former Four term  Mayor of San Antonio and  long time observer of business and politics in Texas. 

[Look ahead audio to Dr. Henry Cisneros]


Dr. Henry Cisneros

If you were a young Hispanic in business and you wanted to progress in your community, you're gonna relate to the people who are in power. And if all the appointments at the state level to serve on boards and commissions, if all of the invitations to you, as a member of a Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, are to be with like-minded business people and they're all Republicans, then at some point you say to yourself, ‘well, maybe that's where I should be if I want to advance.’ 

Robert Pease (host) 

Something to think about as we move onto our next two guests, Stephen Hawkins and Paul Oshinski. They’ve helped create the most complete study of identity in Texas in recent time.  That’s the More in Common report “Threads of Texas,” available for download at threadsoftexas.us. Have you heard the phrase “the exhausted majority?” That was popularized by their 2018 report, “Hidden Tribes of America.” They’ve now applied a similar approach to Texas.  First up, Stephen Hawkins, Global Research Director, on the origin of this project: 

[Enter Interview]


Stephen Hawkins

So we're still definitely doing national segmentations. But one of the insights that we're finding as we do research, not just in the U.S. but across Europe, is that people identify closely with their local region or their local state.

Now, Texas is a huge state, you know, it's as big as many European countries are. But Texas identity is also a very significant one. Not every state has people in it that strongly identify and are very proud of being from that state. You know I believe from memory, the data here shows that most Texans care about being from Texas equivalently to how much they care about being American. 

Robert Pease (host)

Yeah, well, we're, uh, probably not coincidentally doing  a series on state identity and how polarization is affecting that. So we're wondering, Paul, as you've worked on this report, as you've been studying political science in Texas there, do you see some of that collapse occurring? Some of that national polarization creeping down and eroding the identity in Texas?

Paul Oshinski

Yeah, absolutely. And part of what you see with this is, it being by design. So at the core of this study, “Threads of Texas”, is a way to understand Texans beyond these traditional groupings. Where we think of the nation is divided amongst liberals and conservatives, urban, rural, newcomers and old timers, things like that. 

Robert Pease (host)

Yeah. Well, let's, let's then take a look at the seven different threads or types of Texas citizens or voters just very quickly moving from the far left of the political spectrum through the center to the far right. So let's start with Lone Star Progressives, 14% of the population feel like they don't belong in Texas. Are they different from progressives elsewhere in any way?

Paul Oshinski

Sure. So that's a really good question. I think one of the important variables there is that Texas, at least in the past 20 or so years, has been known as a deeply red and conservative state. And so Lone Star Progressives have this sentiment of alienation in Texas. They don't identify with the more patriotic, liberty-centric Texas identities. And they do have high levels of political engagement, as well as educational credentials and socioeconomic status.

Robert Pease (host)

Yeah. Well then let's look at Civic Pragmatists, 22%. I thought it was interesting that they're more likely to get news from mainstream media than say from cable news. 

Paul Oshinski

Sure….a group that's pragmatic, optimistic, but interested in compromise. Close to the political center, politically diverse, engaged, and racially diverse. 

Robert Pease (host)

And now Rising Mavericks, 12% of Texans in this report, and only half as likely to vote. 

Paul Oshinski

A lot of them have really strong Texan pride, but also can be critical of Texas's past so they can hold seemingly contradictory, but on its head just more balanced views on Texas's history.

Robert Pease (host)

Alright then,  the next group in the very center, I suppose, if we can simplify it that way, are Apolitical Providers, or Nonpolitical Providers.

Paul Oshinski

This group of all the other segments in Texas are least likely to engage in political activities, they're just less interested in politics. They're also most likely to worry about being left behind. 

Robert Pease (host)

And moving now to the right of center, Diehard Texans, with just over half likely to be Hispanic.

Paul Oshinski

Sure, yeah. And I mean, if you get out of the Austin area to some of the more rural areas of Texas, you'll probably see a lot more Texan flags, and those might be some Diehard Texans. They also just have a strong protectiveness around a pure Texan identity. 

Robert Pease (host)

Great, and now Reverent Texans, based primarily on religious beliefs.

Paul Oshinski

One of the other characteristics of this group is that they are really optimistic and, similar to Diehard Texans, almost a hundred percent—which is a, you know, a rare site in any survey research—almost a hundred percent believe that America would be better if more states were like Texas.

Robert Pease (host)

And finally, I believe towards the far right, Heritage Defenders, 9% of Texans. Would you say they’re pretty much on the same wavelength as far-right populists throughout the country?

 Paul Oshinski

Yeah, I think that is fair to say. I think there's a lot of similarities. They’re a lot less optimistic, especially if you compare them to those conservative Reverent Texans or Diehard Texan groups. But one of their key components, which does kind of map onto groups in our national segmentation, is their strong undercurrent of skepticism of the government. They're less trusting.

Robert Pease (host)

That’s great Paul, give us a much better sense of all the viewpoints involved here. But let’s dig into the deep freeze, the grid outage a year ago, that affected a huge number of Texans. We'd like to play a clip from Jason Wheeler, co-host of “Y’all-itics” and news anchor at WFAA in Dallas.

[Look back audio to Jason Wheeler]

Jason Wheeler

Some parts of this state were below freezing for 205 consecutive hours. I’ll do the math, that’s eight and a half days. And so homes were freezing on the inside. You had people pulling the artwork off their walls, throwing it into the fireplace to stay warm and to cook, because they have been without power for so long. This affected, I think the power disruption affected 69% of Texans in some form or another. Some of them for days and days and days.

Paul Oshinski

Yeah, sure. And I count myself as one of those 69% of people that lost power and water, and had to migrate over to someone else's house where we housed five other people. Long lines at grocery stores for hours, freezing cold weather. But what we found in our research, we were able to field our survey of 1000 Texans, just a month after the winter storm in 2021.

So we found support, across the board, for Texas to strengthen its energy grid. We found that Texans, um, agreed with this sort of commonality statement that said, this weather and power crisis reminded us that no matter what our political beliefs were, just as Texans we have to rely on each other and work together. And that's something that I know I said earlier, but I saw in the Austin area, is people providing for each other, opening up their houses to others, feeding each other, things like that…

[Archival audio - News report of Texans helping each other after 2021 winter storm]

Robert Pease (host)

Yeah. Well, I'm gonna ask a question of Steven here, if I may. Looking back at your original report, 2018 Hidden Tribes, I believe it was the groups in the center of that report that formed the exhausted majority that were most turned off by hyper partisanship and polarization. But it seems from the Threads of Texas study it's the groups on the wings that are most exhausted by polarization. So were you surprised by that different finding in Texas?

Stephen Hawkins

When we talk about the exhausted majority, it's not just one quality that we're looking at, which could be fatigue or exhaustion in the political space. It's whether people feel that they're reflected in the political conversation, it’s whether people  are flexible in their ideology. But we refer to them as the exhausted majority because they felt as if there's bigger something than just the Democrat versus Republican political fight in the country that they cared about, and that they would be willing to compromise and want their political leaders to compromise in order to meet those bigger goals, in order to help diffuse conflict in the country and have a more constructive political conversation. And I don't think that's different in Texas. 

[Exit Interview]


Robert Pease (host)

We’ve just heard from Stephen Hawkins, Global Research Director of More in Common and before him Paul Oshinski, Research Fellow. We highly recommend their report, Threads of Texas, for a richer understanding of what is commonly but also superficially called a red state. In fact there are many threads of blue, purple and red throughout Texas. 

For example, according to a majority of polls, a majority of Texans do not support the major bills recently passed recently by the Texas legislature, including those severe restrictions on abortion access, limitations on voting access and, at the same time, unlicensed open carry of fire arms. 

Shouldn’t that trigger an electoral backlash? I asked Dr. James Henson of the Texas Politics Project that obvious, but it turns out, kind of naive question… 

[Enter Interview]


Dr. James Henson

You know, the question you ask in the overall sense of essentially, was the Republican agenda that was passed and signed by the governor in 2021 a bridge too far for a general election in 2022? 

[Archival audio - news reports of Republican-passed bills]

Dr. James Henson

This is legislation that is promoted by Republican legislators who do not want primary challengers from the right and are not afraid of the general election electorate, or, you know, at the very least are willing to face that problem when they have to. I mean, I think as we look at polling and we look at the electoral environment, I don't expect that this is going to work to Democrats' advantage extensively. 

Robert Pease (host)

Yeah, well, I guess from an outsider perspective, we see, you know, the party in power passing, you know, very red meat legislation, primarily for the support of Republican primary voters. We see an opposition party, the Democrats, that is structurally weak. Does that not open up some opportunities in the center for some more independent, centrist, moderate, maverick type of politicians? Like, are there any Ross Perots or Ron Pauls, you know, in the making out there?

Dr. James Henson

You know, the pickings are pretty thin, frankly, right now. You know, we had sort of an outbreak if you will, of independent candidates in the middle of the decade before last. You know, in Rick Perry's reelection campaign, in 2006, there were two independent candidates, Kinky Friedman, and a woman named Carol Rylander who had been kind of a centrist Republican, but had been a Republican that had moved back and forth. Since then, there's just not been much stirring  in the independent sector in the state.

Robert Pease (host)

Well Texas is certainly not alone in that. We’d like to get your comment on a previous guest, the political geographer at Harvard Ryan Enos, originally from California as you are. He’s talking about the movement of Californians to Texas, and that most of those people may be conservative. But within Texas, there's a concern that more liberals are coming in. Is there any good research on any polling on this? And are people in Texas just playing politics with Californians in particular?

Dr. James Henson

Well to answer the second question first, yes, people are playing politics with this. What research has shown is that people tend to not move for reasons of political identity. They tend to change states for economic reasons predominantly. And that's meant that most of the people that have moved to Texas have moved to areas that are somewhat politically mixed, but that's where the economic dynamism is. 

So, you know, I don't think that this is a political exodus per se. And I would also, you know, add to that, that there's clearly a political payoff. As long as Texas is a state that is predominantly Republican and California is a state that is predominantly Democratic, you're gonna see the kind of rhetoric that you're seeing from Governor Abbott and that we saw from Governor Perry, but both of them will hedge on that. On a non-analytical, personal anecdote, I was in a small event for an educational group with Governor Perry years ago. And I was in the front row, and I had met the governor before, and he knew I was from California, you know, and he singled me out as an example of somebody who probably came to Texas for, you know, higher education and freedom. So, you know, this is a very flexible construct. And it gets used flexibly. 

And I think you have to compare…Yes, there are a lot of people coming to Texas from California. It's a big issue. You know, it's an issue here where I am in Austin, a very liberal city, but where people complain about, you know, people coming in and working in high tech from California. And it's not so much a political as it is a social complaint that they come and they have money and they drive up real estate and they're turning, you know, Austin into a real estate market like San Francisco. It's a very different kind of complaint. 

Robert Pease (host)

Yeah. Well, so far we've been kind of asking fairly pointed questions based on our review of your polling, but we wanted to ask you, what jumps out at you from your recent polling as something you didn't expect and is worth watching closely?

Dr. James Henson

I think, you know, this is not good news, but the thing that we're most interested in right now, frankly, and that we're watching is, and I'm still trying to figure out what the right concept for this is, but the decay in Democratic norms in the state. Now, this is a national problem, but it's one that I think is showing up in our state level polling. And this maybe is a way of connecting to our notion of, you know, what makes Texans Texan, or things that have made Texas distinct in the past. It used to be, you could find when you ask questions about the nature of politics or, you know, the health of the political system, or, you know, your optimism, et cetera, that Texans judged what was going on in the state, you know, much more positively than the way they judge things in the nation.

And if anything, that was a big part of Texas identity, Texans' reflexive sense that, well, you know, we kind of are doing better. And I think in terms of people's view of how democracy is working, their faith in the political system, their faith in political leaders, we're seeing a real decay in that here.

Robert Pease (host)

Yeah. Well, it's certainly a huge concern everywhere. The last question is a little more of a personal one. We ask all our guests to show a bit of purple. We've talked about negative partisanship, the growth in that, the loss of confidence in Democratic norms. Is there one Texas Democrat living or dead, one Texas Republican living or dead, who might be able to transcend that partisanship and restore a little bit of faith in democracy and governance?

Dr. James Henson

Sure. I mean, I think on the Republican side, somebody who is alive and served recently, I would say the former Republican Speaker of the House, a guy named Joe Straus served as the longest sitting speaker between roughly 2009 and about 2018. You know, kind of an old school Republican, but believed in public service, believed in not letting party drive what he thought was the right thing. Great public servant, a guy who's out there, but, you know, in talking to him, you know, wonders what's happened to his party. And I think by extension, what's happened to the political system along the lines of the things we were just talking about.

On the Democratic side, I'm gonna dip into history here and say former Congresswoman, but well known figure, Barbara Jordan. She was clearly a Democrat and nobody would confuse her otherwise, but had a real focus on the integrity of institutions as, you know, some of her most well known speeches and moments in the spotlight illustrated, a real regard for the constitution, for constitutional process and for civil political discourse. And I think, you know, Barbara Jordan was somebody who really embodied that in a lot of ways.

[Archival audio - Barbara Jordan]

[Exit Interview]

Robert Pease (host) 

Two interesting bits of purple there from Dr. James Henson of the Texas Politics Project. That last voice is unmistakable to anyone who’s watched the Watergate impeachment hearings. Barbara Jordan was the first African American female elected to congress from a southern state, back in 1972.

Thanks to Dr. Henson for his insights into the structural foundations of the rightward shift in Texas politics. Again, that shift has as much to do with the power of gerrymandering and of incumbency as it does with any real shift in voter attitudes. And, speaking of Texas voters and citizens, thanks to Paul Oshinski and Stephen Hawkins of More in Common for giving us a much more complete sense of Texans at this polarizing time in our national and state politics.

A lot more about Texas identity in our next episode with featured guest Dr. Henry Cisneros, former four term Democratic mayor of San Antonio and Clinton cabinet Secretary. He has some candid observations on his own party’s lack of success in Texas and in more culturally conservative parts of the country.

[Look ahead audio to Dr. Henry Cisneros] 

Dr. Henry Cisneros

So, I think that progressives, people to the left, Democrats generally, would do well to try to put yourself in other people's shoes who are striving to create a better life for their families. Who want the best possible education for their children in basic ways, and in traditional ways, with respect to views about the country and patriotism, for example, and who want to create the best working environment possible, and make an income, and buy a home. And that's still where the majority of America is. 

Robert Pease (host)

We hope you’ll join us then, support us on Patreon or Apple subscriptions, and reach out with your feedback, comments, and suggestions, as Jasmine did through the voice option on our website. We thank Jasmine for reaffirming that we are sensible, which is always the goal here, along with thoroughly researched and fact-checked. A special shout out to Associate Producer Michael Falero, fact checker for these Texas episodes. And special thanks to Texas influenced composer Ryan Adair Rooney for the original scoring. Please stay with us for episodes with bona fide Lone Star Texperts Will B. Hurd, Lawrence Wright, and Stephen Harrigan. The Purple Principle is a Fluent Knowledge production.

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