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

I'm Jeronimo Coritina And I'm Brandon Rottinghaus.

We are political science professors here at the University of Houston.

We have had a great season.

This is, unfortunately, a kind of bittersweet moment because we're at the end of the season.

But of course, we'll be back next year.

But we wanted to spend this time and have a little kind of relook at some of the top moments of the year.

Yeah.

Season four has been.

Wild.

putting it mildly.

Yes, yes.

So we have covered elections.

We have covered, court battles, political strategy, the economy, redistricting fights.

All the easy stuff.

cetera, etc., etc.. So what are we going to do today?

Well, we're going to go through some of the top moments that we could glean from the impactful political stories that we've brought to you and some of our favorites overall.

And this is going to be the best of Party Politics according to you, not us.

Let's jump right in.

But let's talk about some specific races, because obviously that's going to drive much of the turnout.

We talked a little bit last week about the primary and the Republican and Democratic side's top of the ticket.

That's largely the brass ring.

Everyone's motivated by that.

What were your top takeaways from those races?

Well, I think, as we said last,week, one of the key thing is, well, was the, the reality in terms of voting and then what the polls were saying.

Right.

So it's not worth even repeating that.

But, I think that, that indicates that we have to be very careful in terms of how we interpret, polls when they're polling and granted, polls are just the picture of that day.

But also, we have to be mindful that public opinion swings just like that does not happen, right?

No, least, let's say, 100 years of public opinion research has never, ever, suggested that.

So that's one issue.

The other issue, I think it's very important is the geographic distribution of, of the board for both the Republicans and the Democratic, primary.

When you look at the maps, you see that, Talarico did a very good job in, I guess, expanding, his campaign, operation all over the state and perhaps was not very good in urban centers.

And then on the other hand, we see that, John Cornyn did better in urban centers, on average, than Ken Paxton.

Right.

The Texas Triangle was won by, Cornyn, in comparison to, Paxton that had, you know, a wider reach in, other non big urban centers.

Yeah.

It's interesting because the turnout in rural areas in 2024 was higher than in urban areas.

We might see that switch.

And that's not surprising in a, you know, a in a midterm year.

But it's interesting to see that that could be the tale of how this goes down.

Talarico I think, ran a good campaign.

Obviously, there's some internal churn about how the campaign was going to unfold.

Who was a better candidate in general.

That debate took place largely online, including a lot of people who weren't from Texas.

So obviously there's going to be some need to mend that fence, and it's going to be a very expensive race on both sides.

We could see the setting records, and I'm not surprised that this has already set records for a primary.

And that's, to the tune of about 110 to $120 million.

I think the Crockett didn't run a great campaign.

We mentioned this last week.

She didn't get a jump start as Talarico did.

She didn't engage in the kind of fundamental campaign tactics that you have to in a place like Texas to buy up ads in these media markets to get a good ground game.

There are a lot of people who also and I want to get your take on this, said that like the late Harris endorsement of Crockett actually hurt her.

What do you think about that?

I'm surprised that this has become a point of contention, but there's so much bad blood with Kamala Harris that perhaps it just became a kind of instant negative.

What you think?

Well, I don't know.

I mean, it was, first of all, super late.

Yeah.

Real late.

Even after early voting, it's right.

Right.

So I don't know if it was, something that, helped Crockett or not.

I think that, when you're talking about the Texas electorate.

Right.

Even Democrat voters are not your liberal, Democratic voters in other states tend to be a little bit more conservative.

I don't know if the if the if, at the end.

Right.

Because this is a primary electorate at the end, in the general election eve, that's going to motivate a lot of, other, voters.

Right?

So we I mean, Jasmine Crockett got, 1 million votes.

Yeah.

No, I did, which is not bad.

Talarico got like around 1.2, 1.18 or whatever it is, a million votes.

But you have to start thinking about the other million, right?

How can you bring especially in urban areas, how are you going to bring these folks, into the fold in such a way that they don't feel, abandoned or something like that?

So true.

That's going to be, especially important.

And Talarico has an advantage that he doesn't have to go to a runoff.

Yeah.

That's great.

Now, he can spend that time raising money and the money building momentum and mending fences.

And he needs to.

Yup.

I mean, Jasmine Crockett carried five of the biggest counties in Texas with the biggest Black populations.

The only one that he carried was Bexar County.

Right.

That is, I think, by itself, a need and a real wake up call for the Talarico folks.

The good news is they've got a lot of money to be able to potentially do it.

Another problem for her was that, like external money didn't show up for her, right?

But they did.

For Talarico, he had a three month head start.

He outraised her in like hard money, but he also basically had a lot of outside money, about $8 million from the Lone Star Rising PAC and and oh, about $1 million for right from the kind of Crockett, Texas forward PAC.

So the money really mattered here and the jump start really mattered.

And at the end of the day, that's the kind of way that you win.

Texas.

So in a sense, this is sort of what Democrats are going to face.

And if they can recreate that, then they can be successful.

But for Democrats on the Republican side, looking across the aisle, this is really the dream scenario.

Well, that conversation certainly still holds up.

I mean, yeah, because we're still talking about whether Texas is going through a political realignment or if it's just, you know, one of those one election cycle blimps.

Yeah.

There's always a risk in overestimating what one cycle means.

And, you know, talking about a realignment is something that you take, you know, decades to accomplish.

Well, yes.

And when we hear the those things are skin crawls because we as political scientists, we hate that.

I will assign more reading if I have to.

Alright we will be homework on this.

But definitely.

But seriously, I think that that clip captures something very important Texas politics, right?

The first one is that campaign still matters, that ground games matters and matters a lot.

And of course, money matters.

Your favorite and organization matters.

Yeah.

And your favorite geography matters.

Right.

We see this is a huge state, lots of different dynamics in terms of turnout.

So always worth watching.

Boom.

Exactly.

Here's another clip that centers on the question about immigration, and especially on the constitutional nature of birthright citizenship.

Yeah.

This was one of the moments in politics where we get everything, we get politics, we get law, we get history, we get identity, and everything collides at once.

Totally true.

Here's part of that conversation.

And another issue is about birthright citizenship.

Yep.

The question here is, of course, on the substance of it, whether or not, you know, this is legitimate, whether it's constitutional, it can be overturned because it's already set in the Constitution.

But the question here is whether or not this president can overturn it by executive order now.

So far, what's happened is that basically the administrative nature of the courts have disallowed a practice where you had like a district court get the case and say, okay, we're going to make a nationwide injunction all right?

So no one can, you know, have a sort of blanket junction across the country.

Now, that's one procedural matter that has impacts, actually, because then you can kind of continue the process of implementing that policy without having the delay of the courts basically waiting to see what they might ultimately decide.

So they haven't decided on the merits of it yet.

But in Trump versus Casa, they will decide on the merits.

They could decide on the merits of birthright citizenship generally, but they could also decide on whether or not presidents can do this through executive order.

I'm guessing that the likelihood of them saying that presidents can undo a constitutional matter by executive order is pretty low.

Yeah.

But the prospect of maybe shaping and changing what birthright citizenship means could be something the court considers.

But, look, the U.S.

is one of the few countries in the world that have, birthright citizenship.

Interesting.

Most of that birthright citizenship happens in America, the continent, Mexico and most of South America also have that in Europe.

This is going to be a combination, right?

Either or it's going to be be, a blood like jus sanguinis rather than use solely.

Okay.

Yeah.

Wow.

There you.

Go.

My is a deep dive.

But I mean, it's it's very powerful.

Especially here in the US because of our foundational ethos and foundational myth.

In a good way.

Right.

This is a country that is based on the pursuit of freedom, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc., etc.

in the sense that everyone is welcome and you're welcome to be part of the American dream.

So that is very deep, right?

So when do you limit that?

You're going against the very own fabric and nature of what is America and what is United States.

Right.

So limit in our notion of what it means to be an American.

It's a great.

Point.

Yeah.

And there's no doubt that this is part of what the court's thinking about in this context.

Once these conversations move into questions are very important right there about national identity.

And also they become emotional very, very quickly.

So true.

It really is the core of kind of what defines the American identity.

Yeah.

And also I'm embraced that.

You got me to bring up my Latin in the middle of the show.

Right.

This may have been the most academic moment in party politics history.

And so how people still watched after that.

So you know what?

Thank you for that.

Well, speaking of political strategy, one of the biggest fights that we talked about this season was about redistricting and whether or not Republicans overplayed their hands.

Oh, yeah.

And this clip turned into one of the most talked about discussions online that we have seen.

Another liability for the Republicans is what happened in Virginia this week.

The Virginia legislature voted to re-engineer their maps, basically converting the total number of seats from being like a 6 to 5 Democratic majority to be a 10 to 1 Democratic majority.

So Democrats have netted four seats in a redistricting battle that the Republicans basically started.

So how is this the case that we've seen a kind of negative consequence to this whole redistricting effort that the White House wanted?

Well, once again, if history serve us one way or the other, when Tom Delay, the exterminator Yeah, exactly.

Hot tub.

Tom.

Exactly.

Did this in a mid-cycle redistrictic, the consequences were disasters.

And we're seeing the same thing over and over.

And in addition, if the economy was good, if gas prices were two bucks per gallon, so on and so forth, then I would say, yeah, Republicans are just going to cruise over and win control of every single legal seat.

But the problem is that context.

The problem is these erratic domestic policy that doesn't solve the issues that President Trump did tell us during his campaign.

And also, there seems to be an important fragmentation within MAGA.

We are seeing among all these people in the world, Carlson Tucker.

Just saying, you know, basically we made a mistake regretting backing Trump.

Wow.

Regretting backing Trump in such a way that it's like, wait, what?

What happened?

And then John Cornyn came out and said, hey, Ken Paxton, who has been endorsed by Tucker Carlson, like, what do you make of this?

Right.

You're against Trump now.

So like every part of the kind of MAGA enterprise is being like torn at the seams, you know.

Exactly.

Well, so what do you think this means for the midterms?

Right.

Obviously the balance of power is pretty thin for Republicans.

They've only got a handful of seats in majority that could easily flip the other way.

But these seats are so gerrymandered, obviously, that maybe this won't change anything.

What do you think's going to happen?

Well.

Of course, but in some places gerrymandering is indeed in place.

But the composition of those districts are not as homogeneous as people would tend to think.

So, for example, in some districts, yes, you have people that may or may not vote one way or the other, or you have different races and ethnicities, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, both differently.

So the assumption here is that people are going to vote as a homogeneous block.

And that may not happen.

Especially Latinos.

Right.

Exactly.

That's a Texas thing and also a Florida thing.

Whose fighting out this very battle Ron DeSantis right now is like the most worried man in America, sweating the effort from the White House to pressure Republicans in Florida to make the same changes Texas did.

They might not.

They're balking.

And if they can't get Florida to redistrict, then basically the only win that Republicans had at the White House had on this redistricting effort was Texas.

And that's not enough even now.

As you said, basically to flip these seats.

But in Texas, the jury still out because we don't know what's going to happen.

We have seen indication, as we have said before here, that Latinos supporting the Republican Party and Latino supporting Trump was maybe a blip.

Maybe not.

It's not a part of a partisan realignment.

partisan alignments.

Decades, decades and years and many, many elections to come to life.

And just one blip in one election.

That's not it.

What a mistake, right?

I mean, it's so that they should have asked and or read something in political science to tell them this, because this is sort of so obvious that they've blundered this and it's their own fault.

I mean, if you look at the map here, right, the like Utah, which is the most conservative state in the nation, the Democrats actually gained a seat.

And if you look at what happened in California, they picked up Democrats, picked up seats there.

The Republicans balked at making these changes in places like Kansas, in places like Indiana, right.

Where right now.

Like, yeah.

And now the White House has to spend a bunch of money to try to, you know, kind of expunge those folks, which they might not get either.

So it's just been like a money and time and like political capital that's not paid off at all.

Well, it's not paid off.

And people take notice of these things.

And that is what sometimes political strategies are 11,000ft away from, from the ground.

Do not realize.

These like Arlington, Virginia based strategists were like, yeah that'll play.

Yeah.

That'll play in the middle of Iowa.

It's like, brother, you haven't been to Iowa, right?

You haven't been to Texas.

You don't understand how the electorate operates.

So the issue here is that that has consequences because especially they want for the worst thing that could have happened and is gas prices.

It's not that you say, oh, I don't know if if my cereal is two things or more.

This is like you go in and it's going to be double of what you were paying.

Yeah, totally.

Those are still liabilities.

I mean, I just bought a box of Kix cereal.

Remember Kix cereal?

Mom.

Parent.

Kid tested.

Parent approved.

Right.

Was the logo.

It was the little circles that are kind of semi-sweet.

Oh, look.

Three bucks for a little modest box.

Oh, you know, this is the kind of thing that adds up.

Who?

Look at this thing and say, this is like, not going to work for us.

So even if it wasn't gas prices, it could have been that the one thing that doesn't sell, I think, is just the sort of concept of like how democracy is being kind of challenged, right?

That's something that Hillary Clinton tried in 16 and something that Harris tried in during 2024, and it just wasn't working.

And so that aside, there's still kind of consequences to all of this that make Republicans in the White House look out of touch.

Right.

So you level all this on top of each other, and it looks like things are just kind of falling apart to that point.

I completely forgot, we spend that much time talking about cereal.

But, you know, politics at the end, it's always about cereal.

That should honestly be the tagline for the show.

But what's interesting is that that conversation really showed how voters experience politics through daily life.

And that's what we bring into this show.

And it's transition the literature into real life experiences.

Yeah.

You know, redistricting is not just about kind of the lines on paper.

It's also about the real politics and how people get represented and how people feel represented.

Oh, yeah.

And that's absolutely how people notice prices at the grocery store.

Yeah.

Economic frustration is at the corner of a lot of the fights that have been had this year, and that we'll be fighting over the next couple of years.

And this basically summarizes why midterms are always dangerous for whoever is in the White House.

And finally, one of the most surreal conversations we had all season long.

Well, yeah.

And that narrows it down to about 40 episodes.

It's a good point.

Yeah.

And this was this discussion about Donald Trump, The Pope, political messaging and why this traction can become a political liability eventually.

Donald Trump versus the Pope, and then Donald Trump portraying himself as a doctor slash.

Jesus Christ in a picture that was taken down.

But that I think really rocked a lot of Republicans who looked at this very kind of askance and said, what is going on here?

What do you make of any of this?

Well, it's once again, it's the president picking fights with left and right, right and left, center, up and down, whoever.

Right.

Anyone that doesn't go with whatever the person says.

He or she is going to be attacked.

Right.

It's like it doesn't matter anymore.

Oh, no it doesn't.

His way.

Or the highway.

Right?

Yeah.

Well, he's he's way over the way.

Yeah.

The Pope comments said, you know, it was the lesion delusion of tens in terms of the conflicts.

He doesn't agree in terms of how some people use the scriptures to justify x, Y. Or z. Because at the end he says, Jesus Christ is all about love.

Love your neighbor.

And here we don't see that.

And then President Trump came back and say that the pope is pope because Trump was president.

And if not, he was not going to be elected.

And it was just like, what?

Like there are 53 million Catholics in America.

That's about 20% of the electorate.

Do you think this is going to have an impact on support among the people.

Of the Catholic Church?

Yeah, I think, you know, for Catholics, the pope is.

The pope.

Yeah.

And it's it's a very powerful figure, right.

There's like the two most important Americans, right?

The Pope and Donald Trump.

Right.

And they're fighting.

Absolutely.

And I think that, you know, the past two popes, I mean, Francis and then Pope Leo are in a very I would say, let's call it this way in a very taking the teachings of the church.

Right.

Especially when you go back to the 1960s, the Vatican second encyclical, whatever it's called, of social justice, of being nice to the neighbors, of creating development, consciously creating corporations, having, you know, social responsibility, so on and so forth, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

So I think that that brings Catholicism to a point right where you see the tension.

And I think that in this case, the Pope, at least among Catholics, is going to win.

Yeah.

No.

And the president got a lot of pushback on this, right?

People from every religious stripe had objections to presenting himself as Jesus.

Jesus.

And the president said, well, I didn't mean for that to be the case.

It was me as a doctor that's also been pilloried in lots of ways that everyone has seen by now.

I think that.

What you.

Yes thank you internet.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

And it's like, you know, you know, West Texas is losing water because AI and all these data farms are sucking up all of these resources so that we can make these bizarre memes.

That we're using ourselves and these odd situations.

So I think that it obviously has ramifications politically.

Peter Baker has written an article in The New York Times about the real question about the kind of mental stability of the president right now.

That's not just this.

It's like weeks in, you know, prior to this, with respect to the Iran war and just some of the very, you know, sort of outlandish things that he said, even for Trump, who often does such things.

So this is definitely a kind of, you know, Rubicon moment where I think a lot of Republicans are really worried that this is going to be a problem.

And the thing to me and of course, all this aside, you know, we don't have the tools to assess all of this per se.

But one thing we can do is to understand that the White House is off message.

Right.

They need to solve a lot of problems at once, and they're not able to, because their messaging is basically hijacked by a lot of these sort of side quests.

So one of the things for sure that's happening here is that, like the president wanted to talk about affordability issues, especially with respect to the kind of tax bill that they put into place.

There is evidence that the tax bill is working right.

But the problem is now inflation is eating up the savings and the gas prices are increasing.

So that's eating up the rest of it.

So even though people are saving money, it's also the case now that they're not netting any money because of the other kind of policies.

But you don't care.

You don't care about that because the saving money thing is let's call a medium term effect, right?

You are saving it.

But it's little by little by little.

The impact here is like if you are punched by Mike Tyson in the face, right.

You go to the pump and you were paying, I don't know, 30 bucks to fill up.

Your car.

Now it's 60.

Yeah.

That's it.

I mean, it's it's as simple as that.

And you just see the pump going and going and so like, when the hell are you going to stop?

Like, please stop.

It's like a casino.

Exactly it just keeps going.

Going and going and going, right?

Yeah.

And, you know, if you have one of those fancy cars that want to drink gasoline above 90 something.

It's just like, yeah.

Well, you drive up and you start to put, you know, the sort of stuff together to get the gas into your car.

And you look at the prior person's like, Bill, right.

It's often left and it's like, oh, $110.

And it's like, oh my gosh.

Like it's a shock.

Yeah.

And I do think that that has ramifications politically.

So there's no way that you can fix it.

That whole stretch of news felt like we entered a different reality, like on a different universe.

Oh, yeah.

And the funny thing is that every week we would say, well, it can't get stranger than.

These, right?

And then it did.

Right?

Yeah.

But one of the thing from that conversation that still stands out is that voters can tolerate a lot of politically things going on, but they usually care most about what affects them directly.

Yeah.

Affordability, gas prices, whether housing is too high or not, just everyday costs like cereal that like exist and their.

World and those things cut through all the noise.

Yeah.

In an era where the politics of everyday life feels like it's just chaos all the time.

And that's going to do it for our best of Party Politics.

A special and for season four.

Yep.

Thanks to everybody who watched, who listened, who commented, who argued with us online.

We had so much fun this season.

Yeah.

And if you missed any of our episodes, this is and you can watch the full season right now on Houston Public Media YouTube channel.

You can follow us on X while we're in hiatus @HPMPolitics for clips, updates, plenty of other political conversations, and all kinds of updates on what's going on in politics.

And don't worry or worry, but we'll be back at the end of August for season five.

Until then, thanks for joining us.

See you next season on Party Politics.

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