Republican skepticism about public education spending joined with the governor’s determination to hold the line on spending, including on public education, is likely to carry the day — whether it takes a few hours or 30 more days.
Jim Henson
Jim Henson directs the Texas Politics Project and teaches in the Department of Government at The University of Texas, where he also received a doctorate. He helped design public interest multimedia for the Benton Foundation in Washington, D.C., in the late 1990s and has written about politics in general-interest and academic publications. He also serves as associate director of the College of Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services unit at UT, where he has helped produce several award-winning instructional media projects. In 2008, he and Daron Shaw, a fellow UT government professor, established the first statewide, publicly available internet survey of public opinion in Texas using matched random sampling. He lives in Austin, where he also serves as a member of the City of Austin Ethics Review Commission.
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Politics
Guest Column: My Lege in a Box
Call it the Justin Timberlake Treatment: The Legislature has found itself boxed in as it searches for a way out of the budget divide.
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Politics
The Polling Center: Rick Perry Versus the U.S.O.
No campaign postmortem will be complete without noting the huge role played by Barack Obama in the 2010 governor’s race.
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Politics
The Polling Center: Finding the Actual Voters
So how to create a likely voter model? Campaign pollsters typically use a combination of past voting history — available off the registered voter list — and current interest and engagement. Those who have voted in the past, as well as those who are jazzed about voting this year, tend to get into the likely electorate.
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Politics
The Polling Center: Another View of Those Undecideds
Six points separate Rick Perry and Bill White, but that’s not all there is to it: The pattern of partisan preferences evident in the latest polling suggests that the Republican Party still holds a substantial baseline advantage over the Democrats in Texas.
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Politics
The Polling Center: White’s No Mad Man
Bill White deciding to travel to points far from Austin and Dallas while President Barack Obama visits the state today to raise money and speak at the University of Texas presents us with yet another mountain-out-of-a-molehill political story in the long, hot summer of gassy coverage of the governor’s race. A look at Obama’s standing in Texas makes it clear that White would be nuts to share a stage with Obama unless he feels like doing a favor for Gov. Rick Perry’s ad team.
Posted inState Government
The Polling Center: Green Pastures Yield a Small Harvest
The potential Green Party drain of votes away from the Democrats is probably pretty small.
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Politics
The Polling Center: Location, Location, Location
At this point, anti-incumbent sentiment in Texas appears to be dwarfed by party identification and opposition to the national Democratic Party.
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Criminal Justice
The Polling Center: Droning to the Choir
The governor’s political radar is characteristically fine-tuned here, at least for the short term.
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Politics
The Polling Center: Poll Roads
An election that initially favored Sen. Hutchison has settled into a contest where Sen. Hutchison’s support is in the high 20’s while Gov. Perry’s is in the mid-40’s.
