[LBJ Future Forum] A Preview of the Texas Primary

good evening i'm eric bustos and i'm a future forum board member on behalf of the future forum thank you all for joining us for a conversation previewing the march 1st texas primaries 2022 will be a significant election year with key statewide leadership positions on the ballot as well as every member of the texas legislature and members of congress this is also a significant year for the lbj future forum an organization that brings together individuals with different backgrounds experiences and points of view to discuss statewide local and national politics are topics that affect us today our goal is to create civil informed and bipartisan discussions this year we're celebrating our 20th anniversary and we hope you'll join us for more programs like the one today the future forums events are made possible by our incredible members and sponsors including the downtown austin alliance and carboc brewing there'll be an opportunity to answer your questions at the end of the conversation you're able to type questions into the q a box throughout the conversation and we'll address as many as we can at the end and now i'll turn it over to our moderator sanika nayak editor-in-chief of the daily texan and senior at the university of texas at austin to lead our discussion hi everyone i'm sonica i'll be the moderator today um i want to thank the future forum for having me and i'm really excited to have um some really interesting and engaging conversation today um so first of all i want to introduce our lovely panelists starting with james berrigan who is a politics reporter for the texas tribune and he focuses specifically on accountability reporting prior to joining the tribune he worked at other wonderful places like the dallas morning news foster american statesman and the los angeles times he is reported from the u.s supreme court the texas mexico border and houston during hurricane harvey and in 2021 he was a finalist for the toner prize for excellence in local reporting for his coverage of texas politics during coven 19. um so let's give a warm welcome to james um next up we have madeline meckleberg who is the chief politics reporter at austin american statesman where she covers the texas legislature elections and the intersex intersection of state and national politics previously she sorted fact from fiction for polyfact texas and covered state politics for the el paso times and the dallas morning news and last but certainly not least we have jasper sharer who covers texas politics for the houston chronicles austin bureau he previously reported on city hall and local politics at the chronicle and covered local government for the san antonio express news he graduated from northwestern university in 2017 with degrees in journalism and political science and has entered for the tampa bay times the washington post and fortune magazine so as you can tell we have some very accomplished panelists all of whom are reporters here with us tonight and without further ado we'll get the conversation going so um my first question for you all is what are the biggest political stories we should be watching for or big themes that you're expecting to come into play this election um and we can just go and order here james madeleine and then jasper okay great um well first of all thanks everyone for having us looking forward to this conversation i think it's a very important one as we really get close to early voting starting next week as far as biggest races i think the biggest race obviously is the governor's race uh with governor abbott facing some primary challengers and don huff fines and alan west there's a couple of other challengers in there but i think those are the main big ones i think for the moment right now it does look like abbott uh still has a pretty firm lead probably will get out of a um of having to do a runoff i think he could could probably clearly win that uh primary um but it would be surprising if he if he didn't um i think that would be a bit of a blow to him and it would really sort of affirm some of the or confirm some of the uh criticism that he's faced i think from the right wing of his party that he hasn't been conservative enough that he sort of caved on issues like a covid and and other issues like that um and then of course on the democratic side there's beto o'rourke um running for governor i think the the the position that people have wanted him to run for for a couple of years now um the question with him is you know has some of the shine wore off a little bit from that first run in 2018 it's a very different race that he's running he's uh in 2018 he was running against ted cruz who was highly unpopular you really either hate him or love him right um and there was a lot of uh dislike of him um and so then fast forward to 2020 he runs for president that sort of kind of crashes and burns and now he's here in 2022 running for governor and you know you can only run so many times and lose so many times uh before people start asking questions about your viability nonetheless i think he is a pretty strong candidate certainly the strongest candidate that democrats have up and down the ticket um and it just is a matter of you know how much money he's going to have which seems like it's not going to be a problem and are our voters still buying what he's selling which we'll we'll see in november um and then the other main race i think is the attorney general's race obviously ken paxton attorney general ken paxton has had a lot of issues in the last couple of years he still has the security security fraud indictment case from gosh seven years ago now i guess um and now he's got the fbi investigation happening and all kinds of other sort of investigations or legal questions surrounding him and he's got you know a a batch of challengers who are not nobodies you know congressman louie gohmert strong conservative george p bush big name recognition and eva guzman who is a strong lawyer in her own right so i think those are probably the the marquee matchups that i see uh up and down the ticket yeah i agree with james on the races that he identified i think looking more thematically at what kind of the big topics and issues are going to be during this election i think for one what democrats want this election to be is kind of a referendum on the past few years and how republicans in leadership positions handled a lot of really tenuous situations we had the pandemic we had the winter freeze where our grid shut down we had an endless legislative session which people have flouted as the most conservative on record so i think democrats are going to be wanting voters to go to the polls and ask themselves if their life is better than it is today and how they feel if they feel confident in how their leaders handled these different crises that faced the state and i think kind of on the counter to that republicans are going into this election feeling great they had from their perspective a great session they passed a lot of different legislation that really gets to the meat of what the republican party stands for and they also had redistricting and so we see a lot less competitive races going into this year they really made sure that they made more gop strongholds and less opportunities for democrats to try and wiggle in there and make inroads in different house and congressional races and so i think republicans are feeling really confident and so it's interesting to see those two dynamics going up against each other but i think for for both of those parties that's kind of the story that we're going to see for them through this election yeah i would agree with everything james and madeline said um just to tack on some other kind of thematic points i mean in a lot of cases these races will effectively decide the race just given how few competitive districts there are after lawmakers redrew all of the um you know the state's political maps there are just so few competitive districts left compared to what we might be used to from say 2018 and 2020 when there were tons of competitive primaries on the democratic and republican sides of the ballot now i think we're really seeing a lot more enthusiasm just based on the number of candidates running and the amount of fundraising much more enthusiasm on the republican side um there are a lot of open races to keep an eye on just with so many lawmakers retiring which is pretty typical after a redistricting cycle so you know i'm keeping an eye also on there are some kind of hard-line conservative groups that um have gotten involved in in races in the past that sort of um i think went a little bit dormant during you know 2018 2020 when um things were a little more narrow as the state was a little bit more in flux now that republicans are more firmly in control i think some of those um you know hardline um kind of the groups that try to play king maker in the republican primaries they're gonna they're getting more involved this time around and just kind of to wrap up too i think there are a lot of republican candidates openly saying that they believe the 2020 election was stolen questioning the legitimacy of biden's president joe biden's presidency and sort of listing some variation of voter integrity or fraud as a priority issue for them and you know standard disclaimer that there's no evidence of widespread voter fraud affecting 2020 presidency or any races in texas but it's just you know i was personally curious at the beginning of the primaries whether that would be there would be sort of a dividing line between republican candidates on that issue and it seems like um pretty overwhelmingly that's kind of an issue that a lot of them are focusing on this time yeah thank you all that was um a great great start to our conversation and um all of you sort of touched on the fact that one of the biggest races of course is the governor race um so we'll dive into that as a topic first so talking a little bit about greg abbott specifically he faces several challenges in the republican primary as james was talking about including don huppens and alan west so how do these politicians campaigns or images um differ from each other and do you expect you know their image or their campaign strategies uh to greatly affect the outcome of the race could jump on that one first i suppose um i think you know clearly don huffines and and alan west um kind of the two most prominent challengers are running you know significantly to abbott's right and are i think the issue that they've put the most attention on by far has been abbott's handling of the code 19 pandemic um and sort of framing his response to it as um you know overly draconian you know instituting measures they in hindsight believe were you know too extreme and um you know i think in more recent weeks we've seen them also focusing on some issues that um you know the the power grid i think that's another well-known issue but also some kind of um lesser-known issues that i know all three of us have done quite a bit of coverage on the governor's operation lone star border program that he's kind of excuse me he's been coming under a lot of pressure from west and huffines for not taking a conservative or a strong enough posture on the border and his response has been to mobilize kind of in this unprecedented way mobilizing state um troops troopers like dps troopers to go down and help border patrol handle the border and there have been quite a few issues that have arisen from that operationally that um western hub fines have focused on a lot so with all that said i think the as james was saying earlier the polling still looks pretty solid for for abbott and i think it's just um you know obviously a matter of whether he can get clear that 50 plus one vote threshold that he needs yeah i i agree with what jasper said i think you nailed that dynamic of huffines and west really trying to run to the right of abbott trying to push him further right on a lot of issues but i'll say i think that strategy was a lot more effective a couple of years ago i think we've seen abbott shift further and further to the right in his policies he's historically been the kind of person who's been maybe not moderate but more closer to the center than some of the republicans some of the louder voices in the republican party would like him to be on certain issues but we've definitely seen him kind of following the trump's departure from office president biden being elected we've seen him go further to the right on a lot of these issues and so i think that strategy while they're they're still really sticking to their guns and leaning in on that i think that's exactly why governor abbott has to be feeling really confident right now and i think that's why what's interesting to me in looking at this primary on both sides is that you have abbott and then you have beto on the democratic side of work who they're both running a general election campaign already i i think abbott is really doing a good job of ignoring huffines and west his campaign announcement was all about how liberals are trying to take over the state and take the state in the wrong direction and so i think abbott's feeling confident huffines and west are continuing to push their messaging but it's hard to say how effective that is at this point yeah i mean abbott being closer to the center i think it's really all on a spectrum really but i think that certainly during the last year i mean it's been more difficult for don huffines and alan west to um actually ding him on issues because he has adopted basically their platforms you know when he made the announcement about the texas state funded border wall in july of last year don huffines sort of sent out a mocking statement sort of and said well thank you for joining our campaign thank you for adopting our platform um and to the extent that you know especially for republican primary voters they say like well yeah he's just adopting don huff finds his or alan west platforms which he is um i mean how much does that matter to the average republican voter there's certainly a uh allowed a minority of the republican uh party that is to the right that is already supporting don huffines and alan west and so to a certain extent they're preaching to the choir there it's have they done enough to pull over other voters to that right and say hey greg abbott is is not conservative enough and i think over the last two years especially after we got that over that initial sort of hump of kovid i think it would be hard to say that uh greg abbott hasn't been uh strongly conservative uh because you know he was out in front of a lot of covet issues and lifted restrictions way earlier than other states of course there's always the comparison to ron desantis that the you know the right wing of the texas republican party wants to make um but you know that certainly countrywide nationwide governor abbott has been a pretty con conservative leader and so i'm just i mean to echo what uh jasper and madeline have said i'm not sure that the attraction is really gaining there at least not that we've seen in in the limited it has to be said limited polls that we've seen i know that some internal polls by the candidates have them way out in the head but that's like me saying like yes i you know i the texas tribune and james barrigan is the best reporter in the world you know then that's sort of like an internal poll and you know it's you would rather have something that's been peer reviewed yeah thank you all some great points there um especially concerning and characterizing abbott um so on the other side there we mentioned beto briefly but um you know we've seen beto generate significant traction during his senate run in 2018. um do you guys expect that same momentum to carry over into the government governor's race i'm happy to start on that one i think obviously that's what o'work is hoping for but i think based on what we've seen so far i don't know if that's fair to say we've seen him certainly come out of the gate with strong fundraising numbers but that's strong relative to governor abbott who has like 56 million i don't remember the latest number in his war chest and his campaign warchest already raised and while o'rourke is a as a prolific fundraiser his numbers are good for somebody who's just started the campaign but they're not nearing the level where he could really um put a dent in what abbott's raised so far i think one of the problems for a work has to be that he's a known entity now i think part of the reason that there was so much excitement and enthusiasm around him in 2018 is that he really came out of nowhere he was not known outside of his hometown of el paso even though he was a congressman at that point he really focused on a lot of local issues while he was in office and he didn't really have any statewide name recognition or impact but now we've heard from between work the voters in texas know exactly who he is his name id could not be higher his policy positions are also out there and so i think he's had to answer for some of the things that he said during both his senate campaign and his presidential campaign in 2020 and so i think he's running a different i i think the feeling of his race is similar or he's trying to recapture some of that you see him driving around in the car with just a couple people doing these selfie lines doing a lot of the same things that we saw of him in 2018 but i think the response is a little different there's still enthusiasm for him like people who are supporters of him and who are strong democrats are enthusiastic he's a celebrity it's exciting to see him but that does not really compare to the same shock and awe that there was in 2018 when he came onto the scene yeah i would i would agree with that and i would just say that like fedo o'rourke's biggest problem is 2020 pedo o'rourke um in the things that he said during that presidential campaign the famous line that how yes we're gonna take your ar-15s or whatever he said i mean those are policy positions that are not going to be popular in pockets of texas that he needs to at least you know uh minimize the damage in and you know once you've said that you can't even get your foot in the door um he's as as madland said he wasn't a known entity in 2018 so it was all the upside you know it was all you know none of the negatives all of the positives and again he was running against ted cruz who you know love him or hate him but you you have strong feelings about him and if you hate him you're going to vote for the other guy that is not necessarily the situation here and also governor abbott for at least the most of the last decade has been the most popular politician in texas politics according to surveys i'm sorry according to polling and you could say that's because he doesn't take policy issues you can say that's because he's following the political winds as it goes does not matter he's been the most popular politician in texas politics and so beto o'rourke has the challenge that he's made some policy commitments i think he has become a much better politician i'm sure my colleagues have seen him uh you know on the road on the campaign trail he's got a stump speech down which is something you could not get from him in 2018. he would just ramble it was it was infuriating as reporters because you could not get a good quote out of him because he would just ramble and go off on these long tangents now he's got a stump speech he's sticking to it he doesn't allow for going off on tangents which is where you get into mistakes as a politician if you're just riffing you're riffing you're riffing you're gonna get into you're gonna get into trouble and his team has really got him on that stump speech he's repeating the same points and he's backing away from some policy positions that he's he's said in the past um but just as an anecdotal note and you know us as reporters i know we hate anecdotes because we like tata but you know i had a good friend in north texas who like loved beto o'rourke in 2018 just thought the world of him and when he got into the race uh for governor i i didn't hear from him at all i used to hear from him like almost every day in 2018 hey how's that doing or you know what where the polls saying and it took like a week for it and i just i finally texted him and said hey man what's going on like your boy got in the race and you haven't even sent me a text message or anything as like the shine wore off on him and he said yeah man i think it's gonna be a lot more complicated just because of the policy positions that he took in 2020 and kind of flipping that around too i think so you're you've got the policy positions he took that could be problematic with republican voters kind of independents folks in rural areas um you know i think he was also kind of positioning himself as one of the more moderate candidates in the um you know in the democratic primary and in the grand scheme of things that you know might not be considered all that moderate overall but at least compared to the field um so you know i think that when he got in in um you know 2018 running against ted cruz he was just as madeline was saying just so much less defined he did not he hadn't taken these positions that might upset you know members of his own party it was um and i think you know now you've got abbott focusing pretty directly on o'rourke early on whereas in 2018 uh you know i think ted cruz went several months before he even mentioned betto's name um and you know i think you know abbott also rarely paid any attention that year to lupe valdez his opponent um so i think that speaks to the strength of you know iraq's candidacy and comparison but also you know clearly um you know it's he's at risk of having his negatives driven up even farther um and i think one last point to make on this is um you know it's it's gonna be really hard if the at this moment if the general election was held today you know i think it's pretty clear that better would be in trouble you know biden from the polls that we've seen is um significantly underwater in texas and you know he's not on the ballot this year but it's going to be really hard for any democrat in texas running statewide to overcome that um you know i think better probably needs some sort of big issue that to emerge between now and november that you know that he can seize on that sort of gives him an advantage in some way over abbot you know i think the power grid presented that um kind of potential but you know might not we might not see probably won't see the same type of storm that we saw last year um but at the same time it's you know we have a long way to go until november um big issues can emerge out of you know completely nowhere i think george floyd's um death in the summer of 2020 was a good example of you know that caught fire really quickly so um i think that's really the big thing to watch is just if there's any sort of big development that working kind of seize on to flip things around yeah thank you and sort of jumping off of that from beto to kind of the state of the democratic party in texas um and in light of texas democrats uh performance during the 2020 election um and you know taking into account redistricting all the things and sort of as madeline was saying as the gop stands very confidently right now um where do you guys feel the effort to turn texas blue stands has it plateaued in the last year so is it still on the rise um i'd love some insight into that well i would say um just off right off the bat compared to recent years it's um some variation of dormant or non-existent at the moment i mean it's there are still you know the democrats are feeling a full slate of of candidates and you know i think maybe non-existent is a little harsh but it's you know just if you look at the amount of energy that was um behind the you know movements to flip the texas house and you know the amount of attention that democratic presidential candidates were paying to texas which was you know just super unusual compared to recent cycles um you know i think there's just like i was saying earlier just so much more enthusiasm um or so much more activity i should say happening in the republican primaries um you know that's like i was just saying on the you know the last question that's not to say that there you know can't be some sort of um you know redefining event that happens between now and november but just especially with redistricting last year and just so many of these um these districts and for congress and the state senate and the state house and really everything up and down the ballot um that were in play in recent cycles that just you know it's not really the democrats uh the the candidates faults necessarily it's just that because of the way these districts have been drawn it's um you know you i think the saying is that you you can't outwork um redistricting or gerrymandering if you want to call it that it's um so i think that's really for this cycle and maybe you know the next few cycles that's going to be probably the biggest hurdle for democrats to overcome and you know just i think for the statewide races we talk about how those can affect the the down ballot races i think there's also a phenomenon maybe a lesser one of the down ballot races helping the people at the top of the ticket too and just the lack of activity there on the democratic side um again in comparison to 2018 2020 i think that's going to make it tough on folks like beto at least this cycle yeah i think jasper nailed that and i think part of the thing is for a while in texas the idea has been um perpetuated by democrats that demographics is destiny a little bit in the state as we're seeing the hispanic population increase a group of voters that traditionally vote with the democratic party and um redistricting has really messed with their their plans and their hopes and part of the problem we saw in 2020 was that at the beginning of the cycle they set expectations like up here they said we're gonna win back the house we're gonna flip some competitive u.s house seats and not only did they not reach that goal but they fell well short of that goal and a couple seats changed over the other direction and it was just a rough year for them and democrats like in recently they've been kind of doing postmortems on 2020 trying to understand what went wrong and they talk a lot about how nationally from the democratic party there was some messaging about how they shouldn't be doing campaign events in person because of the pandemic and they attributed a lot of their failures that year to that and their their inability to host events and be in person and so i think we're seeing that a little bit this year i think there are some candidates some races where they're maybe being feeling a little shy to go out or nervous to go out not wanting to host these events that bring a lot of folks together while we're still in the middle of a pandemic somehow but i think the political reality is just that this is not the year for texas i think democrats say that every year they like to try and move the ball a little bit closer but redistricting if they had gained any ground redistricting this year brought them right back to where they started yeah i think i mean the efforts are quite frankly i mean they're in the gutter i mean there's there's no there's no chance i mean there's honestly no chance that in 2022 it it turns blue or really anytime in the near future because of exactly what uh jasper and matlin have been talking about their best shot at this was in 2020 they for a plethora of reasons fell short but that's just how the cookie crumbles you know it's they fell short and then right after that they got into redistricting and that has set them back uh at least a couple of cycles before they can start being competitive now the problem is that they're in a chicken and egg situation now because as jasper was alluding to like the ticket is not a strong ticket right now outside of beto o'rourke and you can also quibble that whether beto o'rourke is a strong candidate but the ticket is not a strong ticket the reason for that is that you have to sort of have the infrastructure and you have to have people wanting to step up and take those shots i mean realistically the easiest shot that democrats had is that ken paxton he's indicted he's under fbi investigations he's got all sorts of legal problems that continue to come up with him and so what you needed is a qualified candidate hopefully who's had some type of state office at least some type of municipal office to run against him and go hard at him fund him strongly and just go at him that's your best shot you got to have a in the armor and they could not recruit anybody to run for that position that is a massive massive failure and their best shot is really what sort of republicans did in in the 80s and 90s is to start winning statewide elections and then you you start having that that sort of shift but at the current time like how can you do that who was your candidate to go run a statewide campaign when when your bench is for many reasons also unwilling to take that shot you know there's no infrastructure there's no money there's all this stuff you know you got to give up a lot of stuff personally and professionally to to go and try to run it's it's a difficult thing to do to run a political campaign especially when you know you're basically going up against goliath in the republican party of texas um but nonetheless that's where the democratic party is and so it has i think substantially been set back at least one two maybe three cycles before anything gets competitive really yeah thank you um as a reminder to our guests if you do have any questions that you want asked i'll be doing a little q a in about uh 15 minutes so please feel free to get your questions ready um and into the q a function um so switching gears a little bit um to the power grid power grid has become um a much more important issue than it has in past years especially in light of the freeze and things like that um so how do you guys think that the politics of the power grid are going to play out during this election yeah i think everybody kind of became experts on grid functionality overnight in texas we had no choice suddenly we know what ercot is like regular texans who would normally not be tuned into that um and i think um jasper was kind of talking about this earlier i think democrats really were hoping that this would be their issue not to say that they were hoping for another outage but february last year was terrible people died people were without power in their home for days it was rough on our state it was rough on morale people talked about it people are still talking about it and so we've seen in the meantime democrats have really criticized the policies and and changes that were put into place by state leaders saying that you know they didn't do enough to really prepare and prevent another outage in the future and so kind of like what i was talking about at the beginning this idea of a referendum i think democrats want this election to serve as an opportunity for voters to be sitting in the booth asking themselves do i think that they did enough to fix the grid and we've seen from governor abbott who is at times guaranteed that the grid is going to stay on and he's confident that the lights will stay on and then kind of he backtracked on that a little bit and said you know nobody can guarantee that you know of course there's going to be there's a possibility that there could be these outages um he so so he went from being really confident about these things in what republicans passed to to maybe trying to soften that and cushion that a little bit and so i think democrats were really hoping for this to be an opportunity but as we saw recently with the freezing weather in texas the grid continued to function i think it's we've seen experts say it wasn't really a full test of the the grid it wasn't to the levels and situation that we saw last time but it still stayed on and i think for republicans that if they can keep the lights on they're going to be feeling really great going into the voting booth i think it's um maybe small consolation for um democrats to make the point that you know this this storm was significantly less intense than the one a year ago and you know that's accurate and you know i think it's you know o'rourke has said something along the lines of this is not a legitimate test of of the power grid and i think there's some evidence to back that up um but you know that when you're talking about um you know how this is going to play at the ballot box especially you know several months from now um it's it's just hard to see um you know i mean i think voters have pretty short attention spans right we all even when we're not talking about voting just you know are not to get too deep on you you know but you know it's our society is you know we have pretty short attention spans right and i think it's just hard to imagine that especially given how much democrats are talking about this issue right now that they can continue making such a you know focusing so intently on it for the intervening several months leading up to november so um you know i think big you know bottom line takeaway is that um it might not necessarily have um maybe i'll put this way it didn't it didn't really hurt republicans i'm not sure it necessarily helps them as much that the um you know that the lights stayed on and there weren't any sort of comparable situations to last year but um i think it certainly is you know a blow in a lot of ways to democrats chances um heading into november yeah yeah jasper uh ross ramsey wrote a column and he basically put it in like it wasn't a huge win but it was hey no news is good news right the lights are still on and there's no massive like uh grid failure so hey you take that and you move on and you know we wrote about this like in in december how and you all i think were catching on to this as well it was a work it was my colleague everybody everybody on the democratic side was latching on to hey the grid the grid it's getting cold like let's let's talk about the grid um and you know they talked about how important of an issue it was for voters people talking to them about it and it is an important issue not to minimize it but in the polling that we've seen when you ask people what is the most important issue to you the grid is not near the top it's just it's just not it's it's not one of those issues that gets people super fired up and it's not one of those issues that's going to get you to uh to the to to the polls um and so i think that while it is an important issue it i don't think unless some major infrastructure failure happened i don't think it was going to last for them all the way to november and so they have to sort of figure out like what else is there to offer um because you can't keep going on the grid now that we've passed this you know what seems to be at least so far the major like winter event that we've had this winter and everything was okay and the republicans that are going to keep hammering on that message and hammering on that message and so when the democrats keep talking about the issues with the grid republicans are going to have their uh their response ready hey the lights stayed on just like we said they would and so you know to a certain extent i think it's sort of um neutralized the impact that that could have had and i do question like the overall impact that it could have had in general they've got to move on to other issues they've gotta uh have i think to jasper's point like what is the issue that is going to galvanize voters and democrats you know with the exception maybe of 2018 texas democrats have not been very good at that over the last two decades yeah thank you all some really good insights there especially concerning you know the events of last week and how they tie in um to the ballot box um so now turning our attention a little bit to um the attorney general race you're talking about ken paxton a little before as well um but he's facing three gop challengers um how do you all expect to see this race play out and do you think that you know his malfeasance is going to have any effect on the outcome well i would say um just kind of set the stage i think you know clearly we're watching to see a whether paxton is forcing a runoff and then b if he is which of his three challengers ends up going up against him and i think you know paxton from what i've you know we've seen i think he would probably prefer to go up against george p bush in a runoff you know louis gomer the congressman from east texas who's also running against him is kind of i think the most um kind of directly in paxton's um lane ideologically they share a lot of um you know similar views and i think you know gomer's main pitch is basically that he is the replacement option for voters who want someone like ken paxton but one who's not you know as tied down by his legal scandals and um you know we've seen paxton starting a little bit you know even as recently as today sort of shifting some of his messaging a little he's focused a lot on gomer as i think james mentioned but he is you know taking a few more shots at bush now so i think um you know it's it's hard to say how how uh you know how significantly passion could be hurt by all those allegations um on march 1st but some of the pulling that we have seen and it has been pretty sparse um but the it doesn't seem like at first glance that that that those scandals are actually hurting his uh stature among republican voters to the point that he really needs to be worried about that on march 1st as far as you know november election goes the you know paxton's opponents are making the case that if he's the nominee that gives the democrats the best chance to flip that seat um and you know that's another argument to keep an eye on like how um how persuasive is that among voters but i think um you know there is one question that was asked in a recent i think was the university of houston poll that came out maybe a week ago where the researchers asked i mean this was a statewide poll um you know which of these of these four attorney general candidates would you um consider voting for them or you know not you know ever consider voting for them under any circumstances and paxson's numbers were um it was pretty striking i think he was in like the 70s 70 percentile um you know people would consider voting for him and it was like 15 17 would not consider voting for him the negatives were quite a bit higher for george p bush and i think that maybe points to why paxton is hoping to go up against him in the in the runoff well to just put a finer point on that i think uh i think jasper you were getting at this but um i think to the extent that the legal problems have hurt paxton it's in that he has drawn so many opponents already right like could he eventually win in november if he gets there i think that's certainly that's certainly a possibility i mean he's one with a securities fraud case looming over his head before um so i mean that has not stopped them in the past what what the more recent legal problems have done is to create a path for opponents to say you know what i think i i can get a shot at this guy i think i can beat him um and you know three is a crowd really so four is even more of a problem for an incumbent right once you start getting more than three people it's really hard to win a race outright i think uh without a runoff so i think the expectation as of now would be a runoff i know general paxton has said that his internal polling shows that he he probably could get out without a runoff but i think if that were to happen that would say more about the republican primary voting base uh than than anything really that they're willing to stick with with general paxton despite all the legal troubles despite all the legal problems um and so that that'll be really really interesting because it is extremely difficult to get out of a a four-way race and avoid a runoff especially with all those legal problems hanging over your head yeah i don't know that i have much more to add i feel like you guys covered it so thoroughly it is i think probably the most interesting republican primary in march i don't know that there's any other statewide ones that compare and i think just the caliber of candidates exactly as you all were speaking about there's a lot of people who file and run for statewide office who don't have a lot of name recognition statewide don't have a lot of experience running in state government but these are three challengers to paxton that have a resume to back up kind of their campaigns and and really pose a serious threat to him and to the extent that i i don't know how much it will impact voters at the polls when they say this idea of you know elect us to make sure that a democrat couldn't get in but i think james was talking about this earlier of like maybe a little frustration that the democrats for not putting a stronger candidate here i think to take on that challenge i think was a real missed opportunity because certainly the republicans are taking it that threat very seriously by putting all of these really strong contenders there but i agree with the characterization like whatever happens in this primary is really going to signal kind of the direction of the texas gop where their priorities lie and what we can expect from them moving forward yeah thank you all um i'm gonna move it to questions from the audience now just so we have enough time to get through those so um to our guests if you have any questions feel free to add them to the q a function now and our first question is from kevin and they ask will the influx of people moving to texas since last statewide elections have any material impact on these key state races well just to kind of um look at this from a houston and a harris county perspective um maybe we can get more into statewide stuff you know going forward but i just remember leading into the 2020 election um reporting a story about how sort of looking at where the growth in both population and registered voters have been taking place in the houston area and i think this is happening all over the state you know a lot of it is in the suburbs like the city of houston has actually slightly decreased in population in recent years harris county overall has continued to grow kind of in the unincorporated areas um in a lot of the areas where that growth is happening um long term we are seeing you know i think some some sort of blue shift you know i mean it clearly depends on the area but just looking at you know some of these counties like um you know hayes county i think is probably the fastest growing county in texas and you know you've got places in the dfw area like denton county those are becoming more competitive you know shifting dramatically but in the short term you know i think sometimes the case is overstated a bit if you look at you know going back to my earlier point about harris county the areas that we're seeing a lot of growth were actually ended up being a lot of those house districts that madeline was mentioning earlier that you know the democrats made this big push to flip the state house and kind of fell on their faces and a lot of the areas where that growth was happening um the republicans ended up holding on by you know two or three points and now they've shored up a lot of those districts to be um you know to ensure they're not not competitive for you know at least this cycle probably a few going forward so um that's all to say for the down ballot races i think it's you know clearly a wait-and-see approach and um even statewide even with the rapid growth you know i think it's um it's not all democrats that are they're coming into the states so i think that's kind of an obvious but you know important point yeah i would say it's it's maybe too early or to say i don't know if we have the data yet on who is moving here how it's going to impact some of those statewide races but an immediate impact speaking from the austin perspective is and and i think it's in houston as well we've got two new congressional districts um and in austin that's district 37 because of population growth texas got two additional ones and so um congressman lloyd doggett who's represented the same 35th congressional district for a decade is now moving over to run in the 37th and has created an opening for some candidates in east austin down to san antonio and his kind of wonky district so i think to the extent that population uh plays a factor that's i think a really big one is just the establishment of these two new districts i'll just say that the the one thing that jasper said to me and i haven't done as much research as it sounds like jasper you have done but uh i mean i would say that it's kind of hard to say uh because overall um not everyone that is moving here has more democratic or liberal or progressive or blue tendencies whatever you want to call it there's some people who move to texas because of the uh voting history and the culture and the politics that they like that and that's why they move here um and then secondly that overall no matter how many people you have coming per day like we have here in austin you know some of those are actually going to like the policies that are in place in texas and even beyond that you know you still got a whole state of 30 million people that have been operating this way for many many years two decades at least under republican rule and it's it's hard to make that shift uh with just people coming in from out of state yeah thank you um our next question is from victoria who asks um if we can talk a little bit more about campaign strategy um ad buys ground game press outreach messaging master masks or no masks in literature what are campaigns doing right and what are they doing wrong and maybe if one or two you want to give some insight that would be great so we can get to everyone's questions i think this this time around as uh madeline was saying people are getting out there people people don't want to make the repeat the mistakes of 2020 and people being democrats democrats want to get out there they don't want to repeat the mistakes of 2020 they want to make sure to door knock they want to make sure to have that contact and they obviously need it a lot of these candidates don't have the name recognition that other people have one thing that my colleague patrick svitek noticed is that democrats um including uh beto o'rourke are being very careful about them asking policies and saying like hey i think they have signs up there at their campaign events saying like hey you know i can't remember if they have them they have some type of masking policy but sort of being very aware that there are people who are still very concerned about it but hey the show must go on right and you've gotta you've gotta you know still get out there and campaign um i think ad buys are gonna be super important um for for example in the i think texas a g race i'm sorry the republican ag race a lot of those folks have a lot of money and they've got to get their name recognition up and up and up so um you know i think that's going to be super important not as important for democrats because they just just don't have the money to do it all right great um sandy in the chat um is asking a little bit about changes in voting policies so what effect do you think the changes in confusion regarding mail-in ballots um will have i guess like along with that some of the other um things that have been changed i think like drive-in and things like that as well i think the the full effect of the um kind of the confusion we've seen recently on the mail-in ballots it's still um early enough that we don't really know how widespread or how significant that's going to be i mean i think it's any any effect is is you know notable but it's as far as you know affecting a massive percentage of the ma the mainland voting population hard to say at this point but i think one of the the biggest changes that um maybe will have the biggest one of the biggest impacts is the uh banning of election officials sending out unsolicited mail ballot applications to all registered voters which um we saw harris county attempt to do in 2020 and they um ultimately that got struck down by the state supreme court but i think that was uh you know a pretty effective way of you know spurring turnout um especially in 2020 during a pandemic just kind of going forward and i think it's fair to say that there were other large counties especially that probably would have adopted that sort of policy going forward if the state legislature had not passed the giant omnibus election bill that um outlawed that practice going forward so i think that's you know obviously we you know want to keep an eye on the effect of the confusion with the mail-in ballot applications but kind of as more of like a global far-reaching effect i think that's that's a big one um okay great um and then we have someone asking how do we put faith in polls based on the poor performance the last two election cycles that's a great question um i can tackle this one uh i think uh an important thing is to know when you're talking about polls you there are estimates right like i think part of the problem is maybe how we talk about polls how we think about polls and what polls we're turning to to get our information i think that certainly there are credible groups in texas doing great work but even they were wrong in 2020 i think there were several that predicted um that trump would uh would win by a lot smaller margin than he did and and my experience is pretty limited to texas i don't have a lot of experience writing or exploring national polls but i think i always encourage people to really look and understand what the poll is that they're looking at who funded that poll james was talking about his insane internal polling that said he's the best journalist um which conflicts with my internal polling because i'm the best like you have to know who's asking for that polling who's putting the money behind that who are they talking to what's the margin of error and you can never take one poll as law like it's an estimate they don't know the future even if it's a really credible group that's been doing this work for a long time it's hard it's hard work it's a moving target but i think um so i guess maybe it depends on what your definition of trust is what you're hoping to get out of these polls but i think you know always looking for a credible group considering multiple polls at once and not looking at them in a tunnel like they don't exist sorry my cat is on the table they don't exist in isolation they're part of this larger conversation that's happening part of other polls so you always have to look at a lot of different factors when you're considering them and they should only be kind of a small part of the conversation just to add on to oh sorry sorry no just add on to that i think what madeline said and as as a former politifact person obviously she was gonna nail that one but like you have to look at the aggregate of the polls like you can't just look at one and you can't say like well look at that poll that was done a week ago and now it's moved like to this week so that means like it's it's not like a a a race you know it's not like oh now he's catching up and it's like it's an aggregate of polls and like you have to look at the at the whole thing you know um the problem for us in state politics is that their polls cost a lot of money and people don't have the money to put into for example the democratic ag race the democratic lieutenant governor race you know um and so there's not like realistic polling that you're gonna get for these races so we are sort of at a loss really i mean people are polling obviously the governor's race people are pulling the republican attorney general's race because those are the hot and sexy races right but who's polling like the agriculture commissioner race you know who's pulling these these less um high the less the lesser profile races so there just is not a really great way of knowing and so you do have to be uh you do have to be cautious of that stuff because obviously the campaign is going to tell you well my our internal polling shows that we're looking good because otherwise they they wouldn't be telling us it's like no duh and those investments were wrong they were wrong in 2020. that's why we don't trust them that's why we don't trust internal polls james i made an excellent point he kind of stole my point so i'm gonna sorry jasper um thank you all for those insights um thank you to madeline's cat for making a surprise ex appearance as well um okay i think we have time for one last question um someone asked can you name some potential democratic candidates for the ag race uh that you think would be competitive on the level of the republican challengers in the primary i i wrote that i wrote i wrote a story on this so uh i i can just chime in i think people like rafael and chia you know the castro brothers would have been good i think that people had thrown around gina and hosa austin state representative gina nojosa um those were some of the names that that i that i had heard sort of being thrown around um so you know those are people who have experience in state and federal politics um they're also accomplished lawyers in their own right and i think those are the kinds of people that you want taking a realistic uh shot they're also you know it has to be that they're people of color so they appeal to a younger uh uh more diverse populous in the state of texas and i think would have been uh the kind of candidate that you would have wanted to see from the democrats if they were going to take a real shot at it real quick just to jump in i think you know for the the current field um you know not to say any one democratic candidate has a better chance than the others but i think there is some kind of mobilization or coalescing of support among you know some democratic circles behind rochelle garza the former aclu attorney who's running and she you know again just kind of um obviously he's a candidate of color has um previously run in um the in the valley and kind of has you know connections and maybe some you know amount of name id there that you know just given the amount of focus that we haven't talked about that that much today but just sort of the amount of focus that um south texas is going to you know have in november especially i think that um you know democrats are probably um will take all the the candidates they can get from from that area who have any sort of built-in advantage for for south texas well thank you all for this wonderful conversation um and thank you to our audience for tuning in um and thank you to the future forum for including me in this um i will hand it back to eric to close this off since we're hitting 7 30. all right well thank you so much sunika for moderating the panel and to the panelists and to tofu as well for sharing your time and insights with us this evening uh for those watching if you're not yet a member of the future forum i encourage you to sign up on our website at lbjfutureforum.org members enjoy first access to events happy hours networking opportunities and benefits at the lbj presidential library coming up next on february 23rd at noon we'll host a conversation on criminal justice and policing with assistant police chief jerry bazan chris harris from the austin justice coalition mark levin of the council on criminal justice uh the president of the texas civil rights project mimi marziani and tony poleski of the statesman in cavia more details are available at lbjfutureforum.org thank you all uh tonight for joining us and hope to see you again soon

Channel: TheLBJLibrary

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Id: 4dsi0ILHHBQ

Length: 58min 35sec (3515 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 11 2022