<Music> Welcome to Party Politics, where we prepare you for your next political conversation.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina, a political science professor at the University of.

Houston, and I'm Brandon Rottinghaus, also a political science professor here at the University of Houston.

Thanks for hanging out with us and getting prepped for your big weekend of politics.

You know, people are talking about it.

We want to make sure that you know what's going on from a nonpartizan, unbiased perspective.

And there's a lot to cover this week.

So let's start at the very top.

Let's talk about voter registration.

The state is booming.

We've talked about this many times before, but it has now surpassed 18.6 million new registered votes.

The change has been massive since 2002, 2016, the state has added about 3.5 million new registered voters.

So really then I think the question is sort of how does this change the dynamic of Texas?

There's a lot of talk in the state and nationally as we'll talk about Vice President Harris coming here in just a minute, that Texas is in play.

Does this new set of registrations mean that we're going to see a new political Texas?

Yes and no.

Yeah.

At the same time.

Okay, great.

Let's get an academic answer of you.

Yes.

Thank you very much.

One paragraph of yes and one paragraph.

Exactly.

So on the one hand, we have let's look back at the numbers.

In 2020, President Trump won the election by around 5.6 percentage points, which is translating to a 631,000 votes.

So if you add up 3.5, new voters, 3.5 million new voters to the voting roll, then things can get a little bit more complicated for both candidates.

That's one thing.

The other thing is that elections are becoming more and more and more and more competitive.

So, for example, in Harris County added 200,000 new voters.

So those 200,000 new voters, it's outpacing the number of voters that they're going to be that, that rural areas are going to be adding or added during this time.

So that becomes more complicated.

At the end, I would say my no part, okay, ese, because it doesn't really matter if you add up 11,000 billion new voters.

The question is if those 11,000 new billion voters go out and vote one, if they vote in a cohesive way, that is that all new voters are going to support one party versus the other.

Yeah.

And obviously that they have the same political preferences sound about.

Yeah.

So there is a lot of things that are within that caveat that can, you know, have a significant impact or not significant impact at all.

It's a great question, and we don't really know the character of the new voters, but we know that there are new to Texas, some from, you know, other states, some from the country's summer young who have kind of grown up in Texas and are now eligible to vote.

So it's not clear kind of who they are, but we do know where they are, right?

And we know that in the big counties typically is where they're located.

But a lot of the increases have also been in kind of exurban counties.

Places like Kaufman County, which is just east of Dallas, has seen a tremendous growth.

Willacy County, Cameron County, these are places where you've got kind of like suburban or exurban areas that are really booming.

And the question for Democrats is, can they win in those places?

Because you know better than anybody that geography largely dictates the political preferences.

And so we're seeing I think that really map on to Texas pretty clearly.

So that's really good.

And I think you're right that this is going to change the dynamic of Texas, and no one's really quite sure exactly how.

But one thing's for sure, it's going to make it much more expensive in the sort of treatment of the of these campaigns.

It got to be able to spend more money because now you've got new voters who aren't tuned to the same kind of process.

It also means I think you're going to have much more nationalized campaign.

So not surprisingly, right.

You can trigger people on these big national issues like Republicans want to talk about these big hot button social issues like transgender rights, and Democrats want to talk about reproductive freedom.

So this is definitely a national campaign in a state that for a long time had very distinctive kind of middle of the road politics.

But I think that's a thing of the past.

So running a kind of national campaign is a bit easier.

But we actually have a little bit of turnout to talk about.

No, it's only a couple of days.

We're recording this after two days of early voting, so we don't have kind of final numbers.

But what are your impressions about what turnout looks like in Harris County especially, but also across the state?

Well, I think it's very similar to what we have seen in past, especially in 2020.

And there is there's going to be fluctuations.

We're going to see some areas, going out at a higher rate in comparison to other areas, which is completely normal.

Which is dictated by competitiveness.

Right, exactly.

For a handful of these races we've talked about and we'll talk about later.

That's one issue in terms of that.

And it's also in terms of, you know, how the voter demographic characteristics of particular places also affect that.

So, for example, if you have people that tend to be or higher percentage of, you know, retirees or, stay at home workers or whatnot, you're going to see that fluctuation being reflected in, in the, in the, in the, in voting turnout figures.

If you have other types of other places of the city that commute or have different patterns, and we have all that data before, people say that we're making ecological, policies and whatnot.

That's what everyone was thinking.

You're making an ecological fallacy.

I'm sure that they were doing that just to be safe.

That that creates a different.

So every place is going to be different.

Every place is going to have a different context.

And that context is going to make them more or less likely.

But at the end, after early voting ends, we're going to see a very, regular pattern from what we have seen before.

It's a.

Great point.

Yeah.

We've seen the state shift significantly in terms of early voting.

It used to be you'd see about half the people early vote and then about two thirds.

And now it's probably gonna be like three fourths of.

The electoral.

Vote early.

The lines that you're probably seeing reported all across the state, like, definitely dictate that.

And I think the numbers kind of bear this out, right?

Statewide you've got, turnout up by about 100,000 over 2020, which was a big turnout.

Yeah.

So that's pretty impressive.

But it's still kind of like what I would call turnout light diet turnout.

The numbers aren't booming from where they were.

So all these new voters, maybe they're voting.

Maybe they're not voting.

We'll have to sort of sort this out after the fact.

But I don't think you're seeing kind of like all of them vote, because if you did, you'd see those numbers increase.

You also see mail ballots sort of down from where things were from 2020.

But it makes sense.

Remember, if you will, if you dare.

2020 was not a great year like health wise for our nation.

So yeah, a lot of people were voting by mail.

Those numbers have gone down, but I think they've gone down too, because Republicans look at this and say that like that's where fraud lives.

Yeah.

Trump made that very clear.

So I think you're seeing those numbers fall.

Top 15 counties turnout's up.

But just a little bit.

So I think that's also another issue.

I won't talk about Harris County after, but I want to mention a couple of places that make it an interesting race.

We're seeing turnout in traditionally big urban Democratic areas flat or down Dallas County, El Paso County, Travis County is up by 1% now.

Again, this is compared to 2020.

So like we know that that's already pretty high.

So the numbers to go up from there would have to be substantial.

But they're not.

But I also looked at like those are the big urban counties because those are the ones what Democrats are concerned about and where frankly, most voters are.

But even if you look down ballot at some of the more Republican counties, Potter County or Amarillo is is down just a little bit, orange County is down just a little bit.

San Patricio County outside of Corpus Christi is up just a little bit.

So turnout is kind of flat in the, in the rural areas compared to 2020 again.

So I don't think any party really kind of is in a particular position right now to be successful.

But we know from talking before that, like you've got to have big turnout if you're a Democrat from these urban areas.

And so far we don't really see it.

But let's talk Harris early on.

Harris numbers were kind of flat to about 125,000 people voted the first day of early voting.

The comparison point, is about 128,000 from 2020.

So what do you make of Harris County in that score?

Well, I think it depends.

And again, I think that at the end we're going to see these patterns develop and these fluctuations going up and down.

We have had, a couple of days of early voting.

So I think that we still don't have enough data.

Let's see what happens after the first couple of days.

First five, six, seven days and see if there's any significant changes.

Because as you said, overall, we're going to see that a vast majority are going to do early voting.

Yeah.

But also there's some demographics that like to vote on Election Day and perhaps they're not participating at a higher rate.

So I think that overall turnout in Harris, I would venture to say, that is going to go up a little bit in comparison to, to 2020.

That's my hunch, too.

Yeah, yeah.

You'll see it increase a little bit, but not a lot.

Just because the numbers are so big in 2020.

But let's talk about Harris County in particular, because the county and the city will have very special visitor next week.

Vice President Kamala Harris has announced that she is going to come do a big rally on abortion and reproductive freedoms.

This is pretty rare, Jeronimo.

It's about 30 years since we've had a presidential candidate who has come to Texas this late.

And, it's a rare visit for a place that seems like it's politically in transition.

I look this up to see when the last time we had a kind of real dignitary of the Democrats come.

It looks age.

And Tim Kaine, who was the vice presidential nominee, came in 2016, but he came in August, which is like centuries away from Election Day.

So this is a big deal.

Yeah.

Not to mention, of course, the fact that Democrats would love to see bigger turnout from Harris.

What do you think this means in terms of where the Harris campaign is and where Texas is as a kind of political entity?

Two things.

One, I think that the National Democratic Committee sees Texas and especially, the Senate race as achievable.

Yeah.

They believe, because of the kind of money that they have been putting into our race campaign, that they can flip that switch, in comparison with other states where they might lose, the Senate is.

Well, we kind of lost this one.

Let's see if we can salvage or.

Montana's, like, not looking so good.

Yeah.

So let's look, you know, let's go to Texas and see what happens.

So that's one issue.

The other issue I think it has to do with turnout and eating.

Checked in in one of the biggest counties in Texas where you have a huge Democratic stronghold to get the base rallied up.

Yeah, to get them out there and see if there's going to be an effect.

I'm going to be very curious after, Vice President Harris Eve, we're going to see, an increase in early voting.

Yeah.

And I think we're going to see it.

So we're going to keep a look, on that in the next, program.

But what's interesting here is, is that, they're going to focus on reproductive rights.

Yes, that is extremely important.

And that's going to get especially, women very riled up.

And as we saw in 2022, women, especially in the suburbs, play a significant, very important role.

So it's get out to vote.

And I think it's a right moment for the Democrats to do this thing and get the base riled up.

I think you're right.

And, you know, health care in general is a motivator.

We saw that in 2018, the last time there was a really competitive race.

So that's for sure going to happen.

Look, I think this is either going to be, genius political play where Harris sees Texas flipped blue and she's part of the reason, or it's going to be an epic disaster like Hillary doesn't visit Wisconsin level mistake where, she could have spent time in Pennsylvania, or she could have spent time in, you know, in Ohio.

I don't know what will come of it, but I think you're exactly right that the Democrats are hopeful that this could be the difference maker.

And clearly, the Harris campaign sees an opportunity.

I think the way they see the opportunity is really interesting.

I think that Texas has been ground zero for so many of these conservative policies, especially on abortion.

Yep.

The Allred campaign has pitched the idea of this abortion ban in Texas as being basically something that will happen nationally if Republicans win.

Exactly.

It's a great way for them to say, like, you know, this is a problem and you need to solve this, and here's how you do it.

So her coming here to basically kind of square up right with the Republicans is basically like her coming to like ground zero.

So I think that works as an issue.

Is that Texas campaign for a proxy national message?

Exactly.

Yeah.

And I think that can really work.

And, you know, it does put Texas kind of in the crosshairs of this, but they really sort of have that in lots of ways.

But now it's fully on.

Yeah.

The other issue is that the Harris campaign likes this kind of counterprogramming right there on the Fox News last week.

Right.

Vice the vice president candidate, Tim Waltz, is in, Kentucky.

Kentucky voters, remember, tried to codify abortion rights in with a referendum last cycle, and they were successful at doing so.

So like, they're primed for it.

The second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, is delivering remarks in Florida, where there's a statewide referendum on abortion.

So this is a moment.

This is an issue.

And this is the kind of pitch that I think will be successful, especially to, as you say, kind of these women.

The last thing I'll say on this is that Harris County in particular, as you say, needs to be really big in terms of turnout.

If Democrats are going to win the turnout like I just said, is sort of flat.

Yeah, that's a problem generally.

But the more specific problem is that the split in terms of polling only has Allred up by 13 points, which sounds like a great thing.

But when you're looking at the statewide race and you need big numbers from Harris, it's not going that right.

Just for comparison, in 17, or sorry, in 18, O'Rourke had a 17 point gap.

So there's sort of a sense that Allred's underperforming and that's a problem because they need big numbers from Harris.

So Vice President Harris coming here is going to potentially change that.

So we'll see how it plays out.

But yeah this is pretty I think useful as a tool for Democrats.

But not to be outdone, Ted Cruz announced the endorsement of one Donald J. Trump.

What do you think this is going to do?

Like they've had their friction, right?

Yeah, they've had their battles.

I think that they've kind of made amends.

So do you think this is going to make any kind of tangible difference for Cruz, or for Trump, for that matter?

I don't think he's going to have a significant impact, but he was the necessary endorsement.

It was something that Cruz needed because now, the Cruz campaign can use it.

And again, the whole strategy here is to rally up the base.

If you have the Trump, endorsement officially, then you can use that to your advantage, targeting your base.

Obviously, having the Trump, endorsement might herd Cruz with some parts of the Republican electorate.

However, those probably if they don't like President Trump, they're not going to like Ted Cruz either.

It's a great point.

So it may have an impact, but it may be very, very, very, very small.

So it's important and also it shows that, you know, former President Trump, can forgive, but he never forgets.

That's a good point.

And that's when, Ted Cruz, basically, waited to support, the nomination and endorsement of, of, of, former President Trump.

So maybe it's like, well, you know, you waited.

I'm going to.

Wait.

They forgive and forget.

And I think that's a good way to put it, because obviously, you know, this is an important relationship to Cruz needs big turnout, especially among these rural components, to be able to make this happen.

But I actually think this could backfire.

I'm not to say the people weren't clear that there was a connection between the two, right.

Because there has been.

And Trump in his kind of awkward, like endorsement of Cruz, said, you know, we've done this kind of non-verbally, kind of technically, but this is sort of specifically doing this now.

And so I think, though the tying Cruz to Trump could be a real problem.

Just looking at some of the polling, you can, I think, see the way that this could backfire for those people who say that Trump is a strong leader.

Not surprisingly, Republicans say yes, 93% of Republicans say yes, but 52% of independents say no.

For people who asked whether Trump has the temperament to be president, 85% of Republicans say yes, 90% of Democrats say no.

So they dislike him more than Republicans like him.

And 63% of independents say no.

One last one question about whether Trump cares about people like you.

51% of men say yes, 53% of females say no.

So the coalition that Allred wants the kind of independent voters, kind of, you know, gender gap, that he's hoping for are probably exacerbated by Trump being involved in this.

So actually, this hurts him as much as it helps Cruz.

However.

Yes, but you already have that fact that Senator Cruz is very polarizing.

So, is it going to I mean, what's the magnitude of the effect?

I don't know, yeah, but it might or might not help.

Yeah.

We'll see.

It is definitely interesting.

I mean, it's not that people weren't aware of this because there's definitely, you know, Republican Republican connection.

And this is a nationalized campaign.

Right?

I think Harris coming here and Trump endorsing means that this is a really a national race.

So we're likely to see this come down to the wire, which is pretty interesting.

But let's talk about more controversy, a slightly different perspective.

This is a state issue over a criminal justice matter, over a literal life and death issue.

Over the last week, the state institutions have fought over the execution of a Robert Robertson, just a kind of summary of this.

The Texas Supreme Court granted him a temporary reprieve, thanks in large part to an unexpected bipartisan effort from the legislature to slow this down.

This kind of back and forth has become really engaging and definitely speaks to the questions about the separation of powers.

So a little summary.

Robertson was condemned in 2020.

Sorry in 2002 for the death of his two year old daughter, in the East Texas city of Palestine.

The conviction was tied to a diagnosis that a lot of people now consider to be junk science, the kind of so-called shaken baby, effect.

This was a law that the legislature put into place where you could overturn these convictions.

If it was the case that your conviction was based upon science that's no longer considered accurate.

That is junk science.

He's been on death row since that point, and legislature had fought to kind of keep him off of death row and to try to get him commuted.

Greg Abbott didn't bite.

And he has the power to say that we can commute you or we can, you know, sort of end your sentence.

The Supreme Court in Texas, which deals with civil matters, not criminal matters, said that the Texas criminal courts in this case were wrong and should allow for there to be, stay.

The Supreme Court asked Abbott to do the same.

Abbott didn't do anything for a while and eventually said, well, the way the legislature's doing is wrong.

So we have a kind of standoff here, right?

All these institutions who normally don't weigh in on these matters are doing so.

And we are effectively kind of at a bit of a stalemate.

The legislature had a big hearing and they were going to invite him virtually.

Maybe they were going to have him in person.

That didn't materialize because the attorney general is fighting this like everyone is fighting on this.

It's a long summary, but the log and story, short is basically that this is really a question about life and death, but it's also a story about the sort of differences between institutions and what they're supposed to do.

So give me your take on kind of what this all means for how the branches are going to get together, and whether or not this will actually end up in an execution.

Well, I mean, it's a it's a very complicated case because on the one hand, you have this law about junk science that was passed in 2013 and it's, well, why are we not following the law?

Yeah.

Why are we why did these institutions went the other route?

Lawyers have filed petitions and, in terms of this is based on junk science.

You cannot convict them a person based on bad science.

So that's my first question.

That was the legislature's argument.

They said that we wouldn't have gotten involved, except that we think you're misinterpreting the statute.

So that's a pretty bold move for the legislature.

Absolutely, absolutely.

So that's one issue.

The other issue is whether or not the governor intervened or not.

And we have seen in, for example, in the case of Daniel Perry versus Garrett Foster, Daniel Perry, shoot and kill, Garrett Foster in a 2020 protest, in Austin.

And Governor Abbott immediately after, the convention, he asked for an investigation to see if he could firing him.

And eventually, when the verdict was, turned down, he immediately pardoned, Daniel Perry.

Just like that?

Yeah.

And he had a very sketchy history.

Perry did?

Oh, yeah.

Abbott still pardoned him.

Yes.

Yeah.

So it's okay.

Why not commune in this case and revise the case and see if you know what they can do or not do or whatnot.

Why do you think he didn't?

Well, I think it, we're in the elections.

Yeah.

Obviously, being soft on crime is something that is not very popular.

Yeah.

Especially if you want to have a kind of future in the Republican Party nationally.

Right.

You can't have these high profile cases sort of define you.

And this might right, depending on sort of how it gets spun.

So Abbott has gone full Partizan warrior on this.

Right.

He didn't speak.

Oh yeah 24 hours after this all went down.

Eventually calming down to say like the legislature overstepped its boundaries.

The exact quote that he used was, that they stepped out of line, which feels very kind of, overbearing from the governor's office to say, like the legislature collectively, in a bipartisan way, wants to do one thing.

And Abbott says you stepped out of line, is this kind of a return to the Abbott who's willing to kind of throw his weight around, kind of push the left because he's done this before, right?

He literally vetoed the entire funding for that branch.

So it's not out of the question that he would say, you're wrong.

This is what I'm doing.

And I don't care what you say.

Absolutely.

And that has very important implications, because if we're going to be serious about balance of powers and separation of powers.

Yeah, well, let's be serious about it.

If you want to say, well, I want to make my will to be, impose on everyone, then.

Yeah.

Why are we doing.

It's great.

Where is the rule of law that we always talk about the rule of law, right.

But yes, it's a rule of law.

When.

Yeah.

When politics are not involved.

Exactly.

In this case, they very much are.

Yeah.

Like it's interest to me that this is, to me a constitutional opportunity, not a constitutional crisis.

Right.

It's a chance for the system to be able to see where every player is and understand what they all want.

Right?

Legislature wants this statute to be interpreted faithfully.

They want their suggestions to be taken seriously.

The courts want to have clear guidance about what to do, and they want to be able to do it in the way that they are prescribed to do it right.

Not to have kind of a different court, because we have two courts in Texas, two courts in Texas.

You don't want one court overruling the other court.

That's not the way this is supposed to work.

So it's a chance for the system to see how criminal justice functions on this really important issue.

But it's odd because we think of Texas as a kind of hang them high kind of state, but we don't execute people as much as we used to.

And honestly, the state's really made significant death penalty reforms last 20 years.

They've allowed for a life sentence with no parole.

They've allowed for kind of post-conviction DNA evidence.

There's a lot of reforms that make it much more kind of palatable to to kind of have this criminal justice sort of platform in Texas.

So I think that this is a chance for the system to kind of really look at, generally speaking, how these things flow, how it's going to work for, you know, for Robertson, I don't know.

Right.

They're still kind of figuring this out.

Yeah.

There's a time recording this, but it's certainly going to be the case that this highlights some real complications and institutional problems that the system has.

Well, absolutely.

And especially when you have the state legislature, from a bipartisan, point of view, rare.

Yeah.

Very weird, having them saying like, well, there's something going on and, and as you say, even the balance of power is even within our democratic system, within the state of Texas.

I think that all the players should have in these type of instances, some sort of, I would say sane, because the ones that create the law, that is the state legislature and the state legislature is the one that knows the intention of the state legislature.

The other branches don't know that.

Right.

And, you know, is it possible to have something to say?

Interesting.

We'll see.

Last thing quickly, Mayor John Whitmire, this we kind of went to war with the comptroller of the city, Chris Hollins.

He initiated an ethics investigation into a decision to solicit sponsorships for a financial conference that the comptroller's office hosted.

The mayor says this is pay to play.

It's not uncommon for these kinds of things to happen.

Obviously, there's a conflict of interest when you say this warfare between the institutions.

Whitmire has picked fights with people like the county judge right now with the comptroller's office, with members of council.

What is.

Up?

On the other hand, Chris Hollins asked for another investigation, asking the same thing.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah, here we go against you.

So I think it's important to keep transparency, whether one side or the other.

It's important to be, open about these things and how these monies are used to see that's good for the city and for the democratic process.

But that's going to be something that we're going to see what happens in the next couple weeks.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina.

And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus, the conversation keeps up next week <Music>