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February 27th, 2021:

Biden starts with decent approval numbers in Texas

Feb 27th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
27 comments

Keep it up.

President Joe Biden

President Joe Biden, who today is making his first visit to Texas since his January inauguration, starts his term with about the same numbers of voters giving him good and bad marks for job performance, according to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

Among registered Texas voters, 45% approve of the job he’s doing and 44% disapprove. Those results include 30% who said they strongly approve of his performance and 39% who strongly disapprove. The partisan lines are strong: 80% of Republicans disapprove, while 89% of Democrats approve.

“Election season always hardens partisan attitudes. That didn’t end with the election,” said James Henson, co-director of the poll and head of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. “I don’t know that we ever got out of election mode.”

Biden’s grades for responding to COVID-19 are better, with 49% approving what he’s doing and 36% saying they disapprove. That’s an improvement over his predecessor: In the October 2020 UT/TT Poll, 45% of voters approved Donald Trump’s coronavirus response, while 48% did not — including 43% who disapproved strongly.

“He’s starting out, in a Republican state, with fairly respectable numbers,” Daron Shaw, a government professor at UT-Austin and co-director of the poll, said of Biden.

The assessment of Gov. Greg Abbott’s COVID-19 response has improved a bit since October. In both polls, 44% said the governor is doing a good job, and the number who giving him bad marks has fallen 5 percentage points, to 41% from 46%. Public approval for Abbott’s handling of the pandemic peaked at the beginning; in the April 2020 UT/TT Poll, 56% of Texas voters approved of his responses and 29% disapproved.

[…]

The governor’s numbers held steady, with 46% of Texas voters giving him an approving job review and 39% giving him a disapproving one. In October, his results were 47% – 40% — virtually the same.

The same was true for [Sen. Ted] Cruz: 45% positive and 43% negative in this poll, compared to 46% – 42% in October.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn got positive marks from 32% of voters, and negative marks from 42% — a more negative showing than either Cruz or Abbott. In October, right before he was reelected, Cornyn’s job performance was rated positively by 39% and negatively by the same percentage.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s job review was flat: 37% of voters say he’s doing a good job and 36% saying they disapprove of his work. The state’s newest legislative leader, House Speaker Dade Phelan, a Beaumont Republican, elevated to that post by his peers just a few weeks ago, still hasn’t made an impression on most Texas voters; 60% said either that they have a neutral or no assessment of how he’s doing his job, while 22% gave him positive grades and 18% were negative.

As the story notes, the poll was in the field during the freeze week, almost entirely before Ted Cruz’s excellent adventure in Cancun. It’s likely his numbers would have dipped if the poll had been done a week later. It’s possible the same is true for Abbott, though that’s harder to say for sure. Even a modest decline for him would still be decent, and this is where I remind you again that his UH Hobby School poll numbers were not in fact bad.

There is one person of interest whose numbers are not noted, but we do have them in this story.

Texas voters are almost evenly split on the question of whether Donald Trump should be allowed to mount a comeback, according to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

Asked whether “Trump took actions as president that justify preventing him from holding future elected office,” 45% said he did and 48% said he did not. Not surprisingly, 84% of voters who identified themselves as Democrats say he did, and 81% of Republican voters say he didn’t. Among independent voters, 38% said barring Trump would be justified, and 47% said it would not be justified.

“Almost all of the Democrats say he should be barred, along with 13% of Republicans,” said Daron Shaw, co-director of the poll and a government professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

[…]

Trump is viewed about as favorably now in the state as he was in the UT/TT Poll in October 2020, right before the election: 46% of Texas voters view him favorably and 46% have an unfavorable opinion of the former president. In October, his favorable/unfavorable numbers were 49%-46%. And Trump remains in better light than he did right before his election four years ago. In an October 2016 UT/TT Poll, 31% of Texans had a positive opinion of him while 58% had a negative one.

“He has completely consolidated his Republican base in Texas,” Shaw said.

Well, he lost three points of favorability while his unfavorable rating remained the same. He’s a net zero, while Biden is a net plus one on his approval ratings. It could be worse, that’s all I can say. Note that we’re comparing “favorable/unfavorable” to “approve/disapprove” here, which isn’t quite the same thing but will have to do for these purposes.

Who watches the utility overseers?

Feb 27th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
3 comments

Apparently, nobody. At least, not anymore.

Late last year, as winter approached and power companies prepared for cold weather, Gov. Greg Abbott’s hand-picked utility regulators decided they no longer wanted to work with a nonprofit organization they had hired to monitor and help Texas enforce the state’s electric reliability standards.

The multiyear contract between the Public Utility Commission and the obscure monitoring organization, the Texas Reliability Entity, was trashed. Over the next months, right up until the crippling storm that plunged millions of Texans into the dark and cold, the state agency overseeing the power industry operated without an independent monitor to make sure energy companies followed state protocols, which include weatherization guidelines.

The Public Utility Commission’s decision in November to end its contract with the Texas Reliability Entity didn’t cause the historic grid failures that this week transformed Texas into an undeveloped country, leaving large swaths of the state without power or water as temperatures dropped and stayed below freezing. A PUC spokesman said the agency still had ample protections to ensure energy companies followed state rules and guidelines.

On Thursday, Abbott called for a state law requiring power plants to be better weatherized. Yet over the past quarter-century, state leaders have refused to require the companies to prepare for severe weather, even as once-in-a-lifetime storms have arrived with increasing frequency.

Critics say the utility commission’s move to strip away a regulatory layer, especially with potentially severe weather approaching, was just the latest example of the consistently light touch Texas politicians have used to oversee the complex industry that generates and distributes power.

“It’s astonishing to me that the PUC would get rid of the independent reliability entity with no plan to replace it,” said state Rep. Rafael Anchía, D-Dallas, who sits on the Texas House Energy Resources Committee. “No staff, no oversight on reliability.”

Anchía said he would demand answers from PUC brass on the independent monitor function next week when House members will hold a hearing to investigate the factors that led to the Texas blackout.

I will admit, I had never heard of the Texas Reliability Entity before reading this story. There’s a lot of nuance in this story – it’s not clear that the Texas RE was doing an adequate job, but it’s also not clear that the mandate they had amounted to much – so read the whole thing. The main takeaway for me is that the state as a whole has basically taken the reliability of the power grid for granted, partly because of the belief that we don’t have sufficiently bad weather (non-hurricane division) to worry about, partly because we believe in the exceptionalism of our lightly-regulated system, and partly because I think we’ve just never thought about it. We’re thinking about it now, and I’d say we need a top-to-bottom review of what we want out of the power grid, what responsibilities and enforcement powers the regulators will have, and how often we inspect and audit these things and report on them to the public. We should have learned all these lessons in 2011 but we didn’t, and we really have no excuses if we don’t learn them now.

Another look at how redistricting may go

Feb 27th, 2021
by Charles Kuffner.
Comments are off for this post

RG Ratcliffe analyzes the geographic and political realities the Republicans face as they try to maximize their haul from the 2021 reapportionment.

Rick Perry famously called West Texas—a sparse land with few trees or humans—the Big Empty. The 92,016 square miles of the High Plains, the Panhandle, and western Hill Country have an estimated population of 2.2 million, less than that of Houston. But the region is also some of the most fertile Republican territory in Texas. The Big Empty delivered 78 percent of its vote to Donald Trump last year and elected three Republicans to Congress—all of whom supported overturning the president’s reelection loss in Pennsylvania and then opposed impeaching him on charges of inciting the Capitol riot in January.

These three congressmen are the kind of reliable soldiers and dependable votes the national Republican party wants voters to elect. Later this year, GOP Texas lawmakers will have the chance to redraw the state’s congressional map to try to make the most favorable conditions for similar representatives to win—and to exert great influence on the last two years of Joe Biden’s first term. Dictating the redistricting process because of the party’s House and Senate majorities and control of the governorship, Republican lawmakers will try to find a way to expand the GOP’s 23–13 partisan advantage in the Texas U.S. House delegation and to imperil the current 221–210 Democratic majority in the lower chamber.

But when those lawmakers begin redrawing the maps, they may look at the three West Texas representatives and find themselves saying, “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe, one of you has got to go.” The reason is simple: Even as the state has added enough population since 2010 to receive as many as three new seats in Congress, the Big Empty hasn’t kept pace. A congressional district drawn in Texas in 2011 needed to have a population of 698,488; districts drawn this year will need to have about 763,000. West Texas will be about 100,000 residents short of justifying three congressional districts.

The dilemma of the Big Empty is an example of how difficult it will be for Republicans to create the kind of partisan gerrymanders that have contributed to the large majority in the state’s House delegation that they enjoy today. Texas’s population has grown by 4.2 million since the 2010 census, according to the state demographer, Lloyd Potter, but that growth has not been where Republicans need it. Potter recently told a state Senate redistricting committee that most new Texans live in a triangle anchored by Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio, and encompassing Austin. That triangle is home to the bulk of the state’s Democratic voters: the counties of those five cities went for Biden by 20 percentage points. Trying to redraw districts in the triangle, let alone fitting new ones in, will be a challenge for the GOP.

Republicans will have two main tools at their disposal to reduce the electoral power of the clustered populations of Democrats: splitting a block of them between or among districts to dilute their voting impact, or lumping multiple blocks together in a single district to limit the reach of their vote. We have some sense now, based on Potter’s estimates, of how they might do so, even as we wait for the Census Bureau to release gross population numbers in April and specific census tract data this summer. Here’s a tour of Texas and how the maps might be redrawn, starting out in the Big Empty.

Ratcliffe cites five areas where the GOP will have to make some tough choices: West Texas, where as noted above the population isn’t there for three whole Congressional districts; Austin, where the strategy of cracking Travis County into multiple districts put three Republican incumbents into jeopardy in the last two elections, thus leading to the possibility that they’ll just draw a super-blue district in the county again; Houston, where the same basic strategy of making CD07 more blue is probably the best way to protect other Republicans; the Metroplex, where the big suburbs just aren’t red enough for them any more; and South Texas, where Trump’s gains with Latino voters may be more illusory than real. We’ve touched on a lot of these topics before, but Ratcliffe brings some new details and puts it all into focus. There will be plenty of time to game this all out before actual maps start appearing, so go check it out.