Prepare to navigate Texas’ election-year terrain with UT Tyler Political Scientist Ken Wink, as he dissects the seismic shifts from the March 2024 primary elections. Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton played a high-stakes political chess game that has set a new precedent. But how will this power play shape the Lone Star State’s electoral future? From the fall of school voucher opponent Travis Clardy to the eye-opening UT Tyler poll results, discover how Texans feel about their governor’s stance on economy and border policies, and see how these sentiments stack up against President Joe Biden’s approval ratings.
Wink scrutinizes the challenges ahead for Senator Ted Cruz as he squares off against the lesser-known U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, and how the dynamics shift when third-party candidates step into the ring. Wink also ponders the aftermath of Nikki Haley’s campaign departure and the ripples it sends through voter alignments. With election fairness in the spotlight and the role of independents more crucial than ever, this analysis offers a pulse-check on the public’s opinions leading into a potentially groundbreaking general election.
TRANSCRIPT
LANDESS:
The March primaries in Texas are in the history books, and a number of Republican incumbents who were targeted by the governor and the attorney general are either out or facing May runoffs. I’m Mike Landess. UT Tyler Radio Connects with an author of the UT Tyler Poll, Dr. Ken Wink. So political retribution for those who don’t tow the party line isn’t new in Texas or anywhere else, but on this scale?
WINK:
Right, it was a little bit of an unusual election, and I think what we see is sort of the Civil War that’s going on in the Republican Party nationwide and in the state of Texas. So you, literally, there were a number of cases, as a matter of fact, where Ken Paxton supported one candidate, and Gov. Abbott supported the other one. So they’re not united, that’s for sure.
LANDESS:
Well, those two certainly haven’t seen any number of things over the years. One of those races targeted was Nacogdoches attorney (and incumbent state representative) Travis Clardy, who served since 2013. He opposed vouchers, and Republican Joanne Shofner won after a brutal TV ad campaign that attacked Travis Clardy. I mean, they just ripped him up.
WINK:
Right. And that was a big win for the governor on that one. As you pointed out, I think, of the 21 who opposed the voucher program, what five did chose to retire rather than to run at all. Six lost this last week, and Clardy was one of those, and I think four face runoffs, and maybe six, or something like that, got through, and will face a Democratic opponent in the election, in the general election. Yeah, it’s very unusual for a governor to target, but I think the governor is trying to find leverage for the next legislative session, and he’s gotten rid of 11 out of 21 already.
LANDESS:
That is pretty amazing.
WINK:
Travis Clardy was one of them.
LANDESS:
Yeah, I was thinking well, certainly the role model would be, the role model might be Donald Trump who, even though he’s not in political office, has targeted certain races, and he’s had quite a bit of success. Now, this latest UT Tyler Poll of just less than 1,200 Texans centered primarily on national figures and issues. But in the past you’ve polled about school vouchers and most of those polled approved at the time. Now, I believe, the last one was, what May of last year?
WINK:
Right, we did do some polling in preparation for the legislative session. We did not ask questions about vouchers this time because we’re sort of looking for the national general election in November. But yeah, basically what we have found, depending on the question wording; there’s not a great deal of difference, but in those polls last year roughly 55% favored school choice or vouchers, and about 35% opposed. That held up pretty well for several months last year. So I think the governor sees it as a winning issue, and he is really driving that particular policy for sure.
LANDESS:
But the governor, after a number of special sessions, wasn’t able to convince the legislature to approve them. And then he targeted those Republicans who opposed him and had pretty good success. The ones he’s replaced those with, or is replacing those with, I wonder if he’ll have more success or call another special session.
WINK:
Yeah well, I think he’s playing the long game, and he may win in the long run. It is interesting. You don’t see this in recent Texas history, but it was a pretty common pattern in, you know, the 1990s, 1980s. It was not unusual for Democrats and moderate Republicans to agree on things, and so in this particular case, the Democrats are adamantly opposed to vouchers, but a number of rural district Republicans are opposed, too, because they just don’t think there’s going to be an explosion of private schools to offer options, and so they feel that the public schools are going to lose funding, and there may not be a private school in the entire county. So they were not really open to the governor’s overtures on that issue, and some of those have been replaced. So it’s going to be interesting. Again, I think the governor is trying to play the long game, and I don’t know if we’ll see a special session this year or not, but certainly I think it will come up in the next legislative session next year.
LANDESS:
How did those polled this time around feel about the aggressive way Gov. Abbott is dealing with, let’s say, the border issues and standing up to the federal government?
WINK:
Right, you know it’s very interesting because we were primarily polling about Biden. But we did ask questions about Gov. Abbott. How he’s doing his job as well, to sort of get an accurate reflection of the complexity of the issue and how people see the context. And we did ask questions about how one has been handling the economy and handling the border, and in both of those, Biden did not get high approval ratings and the governor did. So on the handling of the U.S. economy, 38% approved with how Biden is doing, and 56% disapproved. But when you ask about Abbott, the approval of Gov. Abbott in handling the Texas economy, 52% approved and 41% disapproved. So the governor is in the black, so to speak, in the positive, and the president is in the negative. Same thing about handling the border. We asked you know what about the U.S.-Mexico border and Biden’s handling of that? And as you can imagine, and by the way, this is a huge issue. This was the number one issue people pointed to when we asked them, “What is the most important issue for you?” Thirty-five percent said border security. And they give Biden 28% favorable, 61% unfavorable, with Abbott in his handling of the Mexico-Texas border a 51% approval, 43% disapproval. So there is a big difference in that.
LANDESS:
Let’s talk about Ted Cruz. For all the guff that he’s attracted in recent years, he still beat his primary opponent three to one, and his Democratic challenger Colin Allred won his primary, but your polling on him shows he’s still not very well known.
WINK:
Right, he’s not very well known. And we underestimated support for him. I think we had 37 to 22, with (State Sen. Roland) Gutierrez at 22 and Allred at 37. But we had a lot of undecideds and unsures. About a third of our respondents said that. So my sense was that Colin Allred would get over 50% and would avoid the runoff. But he even did a little bit stronger than our polling suggested. So a lot of those unsures and undecideds wound up with Allred in the end. And we’re still, you know, the early polling that we have on that race in November, that is to say the Senate race. Right now, we have Cruz and Allred tied at 41, but still with 12% or 14% something like that undecided. So, and I do think we can talk about the Beto (O’Rourke) race, since 6 years ago we were pretty close on that one, and I do think this is going to be a very close election again. I think Cruz will obviously, well, one of the things, let me step back, what we see in politics is when we don’t know a lot about somebody, we tend to give them the benefit of the doubt until we find out otherwise. So there’s been no advertising from the Cruz people or anything like that. I think Colin Powell said it best when people asked him to run for president and he said, “No way am I running for president.” And they said, “Well, everyone in the country loves you.” And he said, “Yeah, till I start talking political issues, and then 50% of the people are going to hate me.” And I think we project positive feelings on to people we don’t know, and I think Allred is benefiting from that. But certainly Cruz will try to portray him as a pro-Biden Democrat, and so we’ll see how it shakes out.
LANDESS:
Now in a Trump versus Biden matchup, you’re polling found, but I thought it was sort of an interesting nugget, 43% saying they had an unfavorable impression of Donald Trump. Twenty-five percent had a very favorable impression; 19% somewhat favorable. So that’s 44%. That’s a lot closer than I would have thought it would be.
WINK:
Right, and I do think there’s, I think the two dynamics this year is that I do sense that there is a little bit of Trump fatigue out there, but on the other hand, I think that the fact that Biden has not done very well on the two issues that are most important to Texans sort of offsets that, and so we go back to the slight advantage that Republicans have in any general election in Texas anyway. So we do have Trump up by four against Biden in a two-man or two-person race, and then when we expand that to the five-person race, including the options to vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornell West and Jill Stein, we still see Trump up by four, and that strikes me as being about right.
LANDESS:
And unfortunately your polling was done before Nikki Haley pulled out. That will be the big question: Now where do all those Nikki Haley supporters go?
WINK:
It is, and we don’t know. But I’ll tell you this, one of the — I haven’t rarely seen anything quite like this in all my years of observing politics — but when we did run a mythical Haley-Biden race, and we did it the two-person race and the five-person race. In the two-person race, we had Nikki Haley up by six over Biden, but in the five-person race, Biden defeated Haley by three. And you say, how in the world could that happen? Well, if Trump is the Republican nominee, we show RFK Jr. getting 13% of the Texas vote. If Nikki Haley had been the Republican nominee, we see RFK getting 20% of the vote. Where is that 7% coming from? It’s coming primarily from Trump Republicans who will not vote for Nikki Haley, and to a lesser extent, it’s coming from independents who favor Trump and who are not, who are going to vote for RFK over Nikki Haley. And we’re not going to see that scenario. But the reverse is also true. Are Nikki Haley people in turn going to support Trump or not? We don’t know.
LANDESS:
Another issue I would think is that the polarizing of the two parties, the Democrats and Republicans, and then the infighting in the Republican Party, leave a lot of independents. That’s a big block there that just they’re kind of sick of both of them. They’re going to be an important block for both of those sides to try and woo.
WINK:
They are, and you know, RFK could have some effect on the election in certain states and, as you know, Mike, it could come down to three, four, five or six states. I think this is going to be a close election. I think it’ll be as close as it was probably in 2020. I think it’s going to come down, but Trump right now, by the way, is pulling better in the swing states than he did in 2020. So, rather than coming down to six or seven or eight states this year, I think it really is going to come down to three or four. I think it’s going to be that close.
LANDESS:
Another question that you had I found very interesting was, would people feel that the elections will be run fairly?
WINK:
Right, right, and the polling on that was was generally favorable. When you break it down by party, and you give them options, of course Republicans think, well, you know, in Republican states, it’s gonna be great, and Democrats say in Democratic states it’s gonna be great. The independents are the most skeptical of all. They don’t trust either side. So there is, and one thing that I was heartened by is that people did generally think that elections in Texas were pretty fair. They tend to be more concerned about elections in other states, so I’m glad to see that the trust in our polling apparatus in Texas is generally positive.
LANDESS:
Any final observations to share on a political year in which many Republicans seem to be at war with each other, statewide and nationally, and the Democrats are trying to get some traction?
WINK:
Well, I just say, hold on to your seat belts — better buckle them up, because it’s gonna be a long year, and we will, by the way, be doing some additional polling, Mike. I think we’re gonna poll again in the summer, maybe in May or June, and then, of course, we’re gonna poll in late September or early October as we get closer to the general election. So certainly we’ll have more conversations and more things to share.
LANDESS:
Stay tuned.
WINK:
Stay tuned.
LANDESS:
Thanks for listening to UT Tyler Radio Connects with University Professor Dr. Ken Wink. For UT Tyler Radio News, I’m Mike Landess.
(Transcripts are automatically generated and may contain phonetic spellings and other spelling and punctuation errors. Grammar errors contained in the original recording are not typically corrected.)
