 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 or 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 forum's events are made possible by our incredible members and sponsors including the Downtown Austin Alliance and Carbock Ruin. 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. Now, I'll turn it over to our moderator, Sonika Nyak, editor in chief of the Daily Texan and senior at the University of Texas at Austin to lead our discussion. Hi, everyone. I'm Sonika. I'll be the moderator today. I want to thank the Future Forum for having me and I'm really excited to have some really interesting and engaging conversation today. 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, Boston American Statesmen, and the Los Angeles Times. He is reported from the US Supreme Court, the Texas-Mexico border, and Houston during Hurricane Harvey. In 2021, he was a finalist for the Toner Prize for Excellence in Local Reporting for his coverage of Texas politics during COVID-19. Let's all give a warm welcome to James. Next up, we have Madeleine Mechelberg, who is the chief politics reporter at Austin American Statesmen, where she covers the Texas Legislature, elections, and the 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. Last but certainly not least, we have Jasper Scherer, 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. 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. 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? We can just go in order here, James, Madeleine, and then Jasper. Great. 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 with Governor Abbott facing some primary challengers and Don Huff-Fines and Holland 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 still has a pretty firm lead, probably will get out of having to do a runoff. I think he could probably clearly win that primary, but it would be surprising if he didn't. I think that would be a bit of a blow to him and it would really confirm some of the criticism that he's faced I think from the right wing of his party that he hasn't been conservative enough, that he caved on issues like COVID and other issues like that. Then of course, on the democratic side, there's Beto O'Rourke running for governor. I think the position that people have wanted him to run for for a couple of years now. The question with him 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. In 2018 he was running against Ted Cruz, who was highly unpopular. You really either hate him or love him, right? And there was a lot of dislike of him. 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 can only run so many times and lose so many times 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. And it just is a matter of, how much money is he gonna have, which seems like it's not going to be a problem. And our voters still buying what he's selling, which we'll see in November. And then the other main race, I think is the attorney general's race. Obviously, Ken Paxton, the attorney general, Ken Paxton has had a lot of issues in the last couple of years. He still has the security fraud indictment case from, gosh, seven years ago now, I guess. 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 a batch of challengers who are not, nobody's, you know, Congressman Louis Gohmert, strong conservative, George P. Bush, big name recognition and I have a Guzman, who is a strong lawyer in her own right. So I think those are probably the marquee matchups that I see 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 gonna 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 a grid shut down. We had an endless legislative session, which people have flouted as the most conservative on record. So I think Democrats are gonna 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 both of those parties, that's kind of the story that we're gonna see for them through this election. Yeah, I would agree with everything James and Madeline said, 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 re-drew all of the, 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. 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 hardline conservative groups that have gotten involved in races in the past that sort of, I think went a little bit dormant during, you know, 2018, 2020 when 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, you know, hardline kind of groups that try to play kingmaker in the Republican primaries, 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 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 pretty overwhelmingly that's kind of an issue that a lot of them are focusing on this time. Yeah, thank you all. That was a great start to our conversation. And all of you sort of touched on the fact that one of the biggest races, of course, is the governor race. 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 Huffins and Alan West. So how do these politicians campaigns or images differ from each other? And do you expect, you know, their image or their campaign strategies to greatly affect the outcome of the race? I could jump on that one first, I suppose. I think, you know, clearly Don Huffins and Alan West, 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 COVID-19 pandemic and sort of framing his response to it as, you know, overly draconian, you know, instituting measures they, in hindsight, believe were, you know, too extreme. And, you know, I think in more recent weeks, we've seen them also focusing on some issues that, you know, the power grid, I think that's another well-known issue, but also some kind of lesser known issues that I know all three of us have done quite a bit of coverage on the governor's operation, the Lonestar border program that he's kind of, excuse me, he's been coming under a lot of pressure from West and Huffins 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 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 West and Huffins have focused on a lot. So with all that said, I think as James was saying earlier, the polling still looks pretty solid for Abbott. And I think it's just, you know, obviously a matter of whether he can get clear that 50% plus one vote threshold that he needs. Yeah, I agree with what Jasper said. I think you nailed that dynamic of Huffins 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 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 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 think Abbott is really doing a good job of ignoring Huffins 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, Huffins 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 Huffins and Alan West to actually ding them on issues because he has adopted basically their platforms. When he made the announcement about the Texas state funded border wall in July of last year, Don Huffins sort of sent out a mocking statement sort of and said, well, thank you for joining our campaign. Thank you for adopting our platform. And to the extent that, especially for Republican primary voters, they say like, well, yeah, he's just adopting Don Huffins's or Alan West platforms, which he is. I mean, how much does that matter to the average Republican voter? There's certainly a loud minority of the Republican party that is to the right that is already supporting Don Huffins 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 not conservative enough. And I think over the last two years, especially after we got over that initial sort of hump of COVID, I think it would be hard to say that Greg Abbott hasn't been strongly conservative because he was out in front of a lot of COVID issues and lifted restrictions way earlier than other states. Of course, there's always the comparison to Ron DeSantis that the right wing of the Texas Republican party wants to make. But certainly, country-wide, nationwide, Governor Abbott has been a pretty conservative leader. And so I'm just, I mean, to echo what Jasper and Madeline have said, I'm not sure that the attraction is really gaining there, at least not that we've seen 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, the Texas Tribune and James Berrigan is the best reporter in the world. That's sort of like an internal poll. And you would rather have something that's been peer reviewed. Yeah, thank you all, some great points there, especially concerning and characterizing Abbott. So on the other side there, we mentioned Beto briefly, but we've seen Beto generate significant traction during his Senate run in 2018. Do you guys expect that same momentum to carry over into the governor's race? I'm happy to start on that one. I think obviously that's what our 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, in his campaign war chest already raised. And while O'Rourke is 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 put a dent in what Abbott's raised so far. I think one of the problems for O'Rourke 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 O'Rourke. 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 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 of 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 agree with that. And I would just say that like, Beto O'Rourke's biggest problem is 2020 Beto O'Rourke. And the things that he said during that presidential campaign, the famous line that hell yes, we're gonna take your Bayard 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 minimize the damage in. And once you've said that, you can't even get your foot in the door. He's, as Madeline said, he wasn't a known entity in 2018. So it was all the upside. It was all, none of the negatives, all of the positives. And again, he was running against Ted Cruz who love him or hate him, but you have strong feelings about him. And if you hate him, you're gonna 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 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 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 going to 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 said in the past. But just as an anecdotal note, and as as reporters, I know we hate anecdotes because we like data, but I had a good friend in North Texas who loved Beto O'Rourke in 2018, just thought the world of him. And when he got into the race for governor, I didn't hear from him at all. I used to hear from him like almost every day in 2018. Hey, how's that are doing? Or, you know, what are 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 going to 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. You've got the policy positions he took that could be problematic with Republican voters, kind of independents, folks in rural areas. I think he was also kind of positioning himself as one of the more moderate candidates in the Democratic primary and in the grand scheme of things that might not be considered all that moderate overall, but at least compared to the field. So, you know, I think that when he got in in, 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, and I think, you know, now you've got Abbott focusing pretty directly on a work early on, whereas in 2018, you know, I think Ted Cruz went several months before he even mentioned Beto's name. And, you know, I think, you know, Abbott also rarely paid any attention that year to Lupe Valdes, his opponent. So I think that speaks to the strength of, you know, a works candidacy and comparison, but also, you know, clearly, you know, he's at risk of having his negatives driven up even farther. And I think one last point to make on this is, you know, 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 Beto would be in trouble. You know, Biden from the polls that we've seen is significantly underwater in Texas. And, you know, he's not on the ballot this year, but it's gonna be really hard for any Democrat in Texas running statewide to overcome that. You know, I think Beto 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 at it. You know, I think the power grid presented that 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, but at the same time, it's, you know, we have a long way to go until November. Big issues can emerge out of, you know, completely nowhere. I think George Floyd's death in the summer of 2020 was a good example of, you know, that caught fire really quickly. So I think that's really the big thing to watch is just if there's any sort of big development that a work can 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 and in light of Texas Democrats performance during the 2020 election and, you know, taking into account redistricting all of the things and sort of as Madeline was saying as the GOP stands very confidently right now, 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? I'd love some insight into that. Well, I would say just off right off the bat compared to recent years, it's 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 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 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, you know, I think there's just, like I was saying earlier, just so much more enthusiasm or so much more activity, I should say, happening in the Republican primaries, you know, and that's, like I was just saying, and you know, the last question there, that's not to say that there, you know, can't be some sort of, you know, redefining events that happens between now and November, but just, especially with redistricting last year and just so many of these districts for Congress and the state Senate and the state House and really everything up and down the ballot that were in play in recent cycles that just, you know, it's not really the Democrats, the candidates' faults necessarily, it's just that because of the way these districts have been drawn, it's, you know, I think the saying is that you can't outwork redistricting or gerrymandering, if you wanna call it that. It's, so I think that's really for this cycle and maybe, you know, the next few cycles, that's gonna 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 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. Again, in comparison to 2018, 2020, I think that's gonna 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 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 redistricting has really messed with 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 US 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 post-mortems 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 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 feeling a little shy to go out or nervous to go out and 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 have 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 no chance. I mean, there's honestly no chance that in 2022, it turns blue or really anytime in the near future because of exactly what Jasper and Madeline have been talking about. Their best shot at this was in 2020. They for plethora of reasons fell short, but that's just how the cookie crumbles. It's, they fell short. And then right after that, they got into redistricting and that has set them back 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 them and go hard at him, fund him strongly and just go at him. That's your best shot. You gotta have a chink 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 the 80s and 90s is to start winning statewide elections and then you start having 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 your bench is for many reasons also unwilling to take that shot? There's no infrastructure, there's no money, there's all this stuff, you gotta give up a lot of stuff personally and professionally to go and try to run. It's a difficult thing to do to run a political campaign, especially when you're basically going up against Goliath and the Republican Party of Texas. 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. As a reminder to our guests, if you do have any questions that you want asked, I'll be doing a little Q and A in about 15 minutes. So please feel free to get your questions ready and into the Q and A function. So switching gears a little bit to the power grid. The power grid has become a much more important issue than it has in past years, especially in light of the freeze and things like that. So how do you guys think that the politics of the power grid are gonna 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. And I think 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 changes that were put into place by state leaders saying that 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 gonna 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, nobody can guarantee that, of course there's gonna be, there's a possibility that there could be these outages. So he went from being really confident about these things and what Republicans passed to maybe trying to soften that, 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 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 gonna be feeling really great going into the voting booth. I think it's maybe small consolation for Democrats to make the point that, this storm was significantly less intense than the one a year ago. And that's accurate. And I think it's a work has said something along the lines of, this is not a legitimate test of the power grid. And I think there's some evidence to back that up. But that when you're talking about, how this is gonna play at the ballot box, especially several months from now, it's just hard to see. I mean, I think voters have pretty short attention spans. We all, even when we're not talking about voting, not to get too deep on you, but our society is, we have pretty short attention spans. 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, focusing so intently on it for the intervening several months leading up to November. So I think big bottom line takeaway is that, it might not necessarily have, maybe I'll put it this way. It didn't really hurt Republicans. I'm not sure it necessarily helps them as much that, the light stayed on and there weren't any sort of comparable situations to last year. But I think it certainly is a blow in a lot of ways to Democrats chances heading into November, yeah. Yeah, Jester 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 grid failure. So, hey, you take that and you move on. And we wrote about this like in December, how, and you all, I think we're catching onto this as well. It was a Roark, it was Mike Collier, everybody, everybody on the Democratic side was latching onto, hey, the grid, the grid, it's getting cold. Like, let's talk about the grid. And 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 not. It's not one of those issues that gets people super fired up and it's not one of those issues that's gonna get you to the polls. And so I think that while it is an important issue, I don't think unless some major infrastructure failure happened, I don't think it was gonna last for them all the way to November. And so they have to sort of figure out like what else is there to offer? 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 are gonna 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 gonna have 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 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 gotta move on to other issues. They've gotta have, I think to Jasper's point, like what is the issue that is gonna 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 to the ballot box. So now turning our attention a little bit to the Attorney General race, you're talking about Ken Paxton a little before as well, but he's facing three GOP challengers. 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 just kind of set the stage. I think, you know, clearly we're watching to see A, whether Paxton is forcing to run off 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, Louis Gohmert, the congressman from East Texas who's also running against him is kind of, I think the most kind of directly in Paxton's lane ideologically. They share a lot of, you know, similar views and I think, you know, Gohmert'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, 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 Gohmert as I think James mentioned, but he is, you know, taking a few more shots at Bush now. So I think, you know, it's hard to say how, how, you know, how significantly Paxton could be hurt by all those allegations on March 1st, but some of the polling that we have seen and it has been pretty sparse, but it doesn't seem like at first glance that those scandals are actually hurting his 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. And, you know, that's another argument to keep an eye on like how persuasive is that among voters? But I think, you know, there was one question that was asked in a recent, I think it was the University of Houston poll that came out maybe a week ago where the researchers asked, this was a statewide poll, you know, which of these, of these four Attorney General candidates, would you consider voting for them or, you know, not, you know, ever consider voting for them under any circumstances? And Paxton's numbers were, it was pretty striking. I think it was in like the 70s, 70 percentile, you know, people would consider voting for him and it was like 15, 17 percent 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 against him in the runoff. Well, to just put a finer point on that, I think, I think Jasper, you were getting at this, but 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 the securities fraud case looming over his head before. So, I mean, that has not stopped them in the past. What the more recent legal problems have done is to create a path for opponents to say, you know what? I think I can get a shot at this guy. I think I can beat him. And, you know, three is a crowd really. So four is even more of a problem for an incumbent, right? But once you start getting more than three people, it's really hard to win a race outright, I think, 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 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 than anything really, that they're willing to stick with General Paxton despite all the legal troubles, despite all the legal problems. And so that'll be really, really interesting because it is extremely difficult to get out of 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 really pose a serious threat to him. And to the extent that, 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 gonna signal kind of their direction of the Texas GOP where their priorities lie and what we can expect from them moving forward. Yeah, thank you all. I'm gonna move it to questions from the audience now just so we have enough time to get through those. So to our guests, if you have any questions, feel free to add them to the Q and 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 look at this from a Houston and a Harris County perspective, maybe we can get more in this statewide stuff, you know, going forward, but I just remember leading into the 2020 election, 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. In a lot of the areas where that growth is happening, long-term we are seeing, you know, I think 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, you know, Hays 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 cases 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 in their faces. And a lot of the areas where that growth was happening, the Republicans ended up holding on by, you know, two or three points. And now they've short up a lot of those districts to be, you know, to ensure they're not competitive for, you know, at least this cycle, probably a few going forward. So that's all to say for the down ballot races, I think it's, you know, clearly a wait-and-see approach. And even statewide, even with the rapid growth, you know, I think it's not all Democrats that are coming into the state. So I think that's kind of an obvious, but, you know, important point. Yeah, I would say 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 gonna impact some of those statewide races, but an immediate impact speaking from the Austin perspective is, and I think it's in Houston as well, we got two new congressional districts. And in Austin, that's district 37 because of population growth, Texas got two additional ones. And so Congressman Lloyd Doggett, who's represented the same 35th congressional district for a decade, is now moving over to run in the 37th and is 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 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 one thing that Jasper said to me, and I haven't done as much research as it sounds like Jasper, you have done, but I mean, I would say that it's kind of hard to say because overall, not everyone that is moving here has more democratic or liberal or progressive or blue tendencies, whatever you wanna call it. There's some people who move to Texas because of the voting history and the culture and the politics, they like that and that's why they move here. And then secondly, that overall, no matter how many people you have coming per day like we have here in Austin, some of those are actually gonna elect the policies that are in place in Texas. And even beyond that, you still got a whole state of 30 million people that has been operating this way for many, many years, two decades at least under a Republican rule. And it's hard to make that shift with just people coming in from out of state. Yeah, thank you. Our next question is from Victoria who asks, if we can talk a little bit more about campaign strategy, ad buys, ground game, press outreach, messaging, masks or no masks in literature, what are campaigns doing right and what are they doing wrong? And maybe if one or two you wanna give some insight, that would be great. So we can give to everyone's questions. I think this time around as Madeline was saying, people are getting out there. People don't wanna repeat the mistakes of 2020 and people being Democrats. Democrats wanna get out there. They don't wanna repeat the mistakes of 2020. They wanna make sure to door knock. They wanna make sure to have that contact. And they obviously needed a lot of these candidates don't have the name recognition that other people have. One thing that my colleague, Patrick Spitek noticed is that Democrats, including Beto O'Rourke are being very careful about them asking policies and saying like, hey, I think they have signs at their campaign events saying like, hey, I can't remember if 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 still get out there and campaign. I think ad buys are gonna be super important. For example, in the, I think Texas AG race, I'm sorry, the Republican AG race, a lot of those folks have a lot of money and they've gotta get their name recognition up and up and up. So, I think that's gonna be super important, not as important for Democrats because they just don't have the money to do it. All right, great. Sandy in the chat is asking a little bit about changes in voting policies. So what effect do you think the changes in confusion regarding mail-in ballots will have, I guess like along with that, some of the other things that have been changed, I think like drive-in and things like that as well. I think the full effect of the kind of the confusion we've seen recently on the mail-in ballots, it's still early enough that we don't really know how widespread or how significant that's gonna be. I mean, I think it's any effect is notable, but it's as far as affecting a massive percentage of the mail-in voting population. Hard to say at this point, but I think one of the biggest changes that maybe will have the biggest, one of the biggest impacts is the banning of election officials sending out unsolicited mail ballot applications to all registered voters, which we saw Harris County attempt to do in 2020 and they ultimately that got struck down by the state Supreme Court. But I think that was a pretty effective way of spurring turnout, especially in 2020, during a pandemic, we're 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 kind of giant omnibus election bill that outlawed that practice going forward. So I think that's, obviously we wanna 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 a big one. Okay, great. 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. I can tackle this one. I think an important thing is to know when you're talking about polls, 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 that Trump would win by a lot smaller margin than he did. My experience is pretty limited to Texas. I don't know 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 is the best journalist, which conflicts with my internal polling that designed 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, 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 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, go ahead. Just to add on to that. I think what Madeline said as a former political fact 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 not like 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 whole thing, you know? 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? 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 polling 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 polling these less high, the lesser profile races. So there just is not a really great way of knowing. And so you do have to be cautious of that stuff because obviously the campaign is gonna tell you, well, our internal polling shows that we're looking good because otherwise they wouldn't be telling us. It's like, no duh. And those internal polls 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. Thank you all for those insights. Thank you to Madeline's cat for making a surprising appearance as well. Okay, I think we have time for one last question. Someone asked, can you name some potential Democratic candidates for the AG race that you think would be competitive on the level of the Republican challengers in the primary? I wrote a story on this. I can just chime in. I think people like Raphael and Chia, you know, the Castro brothers would have been good. I think that people had thrown around Gina Inajosa, Austin State Representative Gina Inajosa. Those were some of the names that I had heard sort of being thrown around. So, you know, those are people who have experience in state and federal politics. They're also accomplished lawyers in their own right. And I think those are the kinds of people that you want taking a realistic shot. They're also, you know, it has to be said they're people of color. So they appeal to a younger, more diverse populace in the state of Texas. And I think would have been 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 current field, 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 obviously as a candidate of color has previously run 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 much today, but just sort of the amount of focus that South Texas is going to, you know, have in November especially, I think that, you know, Democrats are probably will take all the candidates they can get from that area who have any sort of built-in advantage for South Texas. Well, thank you all for this wonderful conversation. And thank you to our audience for tuning in. And thank you to the Future Forum for including me in this. I will hand it back to Eric to close this off since we're hitting 7.30. All right, well, thank you so much, Sanika, for moderating the panel and to the panelists and to Tofu as well for sharing your time and insights with us this evening. For those watching, if you're not yet a member of the Future Forum, I encourage you to sign up on our website at lbjfutureform.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, the President of the Texas Civil Rights Project, Mimi Marziani and Tony Poleski of the Statesman and KVM. More details are available at lbjfutureform.org. Thank you all tonight for joining us and hope to see you again soon.