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

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

And I'm branded writing House, also a political science professor here at the University of Houston.

Thanks for hanging out, talking politics with us in advance of getting your 50 year mortgage.

Yes, apparently the president is.

All in on and everyone else is just in flat out panic.

And this is my impression of the white House in general.

It's just like the president says, let's do this.

And everyone's like, do what now?

But we also have an exciting week of like, sports related politics, which is always the best, right?

Darryl Strawberry is in the news, my friend.

You've got the Washington commanders considering naming their stadium after Donald Trump, and in some actual good news, the shutdown appears to be at its conclusion, although there are some very serious caveats on that at this point in our week.

So we'll talk all about.

Yeah, but the first thing up is taxes and how taxes interfaces with national politics.

We had both.

Gavin Newsom and Greg Abbott here in Harris County.

If you heard an explosion, it was probably that the political egos forcing themselves together and creating this massive explosion.

What do you make of the politics of this?

Obviously, Newsom is here to take a little bit of a victory lap.

Greg Abbott was here to announce reelection.

What to make of all of this?

I mean, on the side of Newsom is like, I'm gonna troll you.

And it was just political trolling coming to Texas, coming to Houston, the hometown of Governor Abbott.

Governor Abbott announcing that he's running again.

And he's just like, in your face.

Type of politics.

That that's our favorite.

And not he's our favorite of.

The most common man.

The norm.

The norm.

But I think he'd, you know, revitalize.

Revitalizes to one extent, the Democratic base.

In Texas, when you are or Democrats are desperate for that.

I would say fire within.

And I think that Newsom brings that.

And obviously Newsom wants to run for president.

Right.

He's looking at 28 already.

Yeah.

Working hard or doing the rounds, trolling President Trump.

Twitter, formerly known as, Twitter now.

Ex.

Right.

So on and so stop shop.

Yes.

No.

And actually, on that point, you mean Newsom is really experiencing a moment?

He is, you know, successfully coming off of prop 50 in California, where he was able to essentially counteract Texas's efforts to try to increase the number of seats Republicans got.

The amount of social media followers that Gavin Newsom got from that was about 10 million and across all the different platforms.

So he has basically rocketed himself to the very top of that.

And if you look at the polling, he's really the frontrunner.

He has gone from kind of like in the front of the pack.

Right.

But top five in terms of people's preferences for running for president, to basically the first right, right.

Went from 31% in April to about 55% in October.

And right now he's about, 38%.

When you look at polling market, he's doing 30, 38%.

And then it's just decently followed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez by 13%.

Wow.

Yeah.

No.

And it's funny because as a political science point, it was were often want to make some people argue that the betting markets are a better predictor of what's to come than polling.

So I think you're right to point to this, and it does give us some flavor for where the race stands.

And of course, there's a lot of time between now and then.

Unfortunately, it'd be nice if it was tomorrow.

We could just night set it all done.

But we're not.

We have to wait.

But one thing I thought was interesting, too, was not just that he was here trolling Greg Abbott and kind of stealing some of Abbott's reelection thunder.

But also on the stage with him was Gina Hinojosa, who's running for governor against Greg Abbott.

So definitely there's an opportunity there for her that the other don't have.

We'll talk about Chris Bell running for governor in a second.

But for sure, the politics of this are ever shifting.

And Gavin Newsom is certainly right in the center of all of this.

But of course, Greg Abbott had his day, too.

He's announced he's running for reelection.

He also got the endorsement from Donald Trump.

So definitely he's, in the course, as is been common for him to be pretty much, kind of leading the Republican Party.

He's got a huge war chest to, employ at his leisure.

But he also made a pretty serious campaign promise or really series of promise related the same thing.

And that's property taxes, the most reviled of all taxes.

He has argued that voters should be able to vote on abolishing the property tax, that there should be no tax hikes without two thirds of voter approval.

Property tax appraisals should come once every five years instead of every year, and appraisals are capped at 33%.

So this is a lot.

I can hear the dollar signs dinging right now.

What do you think is going to be the result of this?

Is he over promising on this point?

Well, I don't think he's over promising because certainly he has significant control of the political, market.

Yeah, yeah.

In Texas one, he has 87 million reasons right to size these things.

And those 87 million reasons are the amount of money that he has for his reelection.

The big carrot all around with him.

It's just like a big trailer, like.

I don't know, I think it must be in a bank or in a bolt vault.

Yeah.

And gold bars.

Yeah.

No doubt.

That's a lot of.

Money, but.

But what worries me is the way that we need to think about these from a public policy perspective.

So property taxes pay for a lot a lot of stuff.

In this state, especially for municipalities and cities.

So you get trash collection EMS, potentially fire police, school districts, mods, blah, blah, blah, blah, you name it.

Right.

So the services, if you abolish that, the services are going to take a deep bury very, very hard.

And you need another funding source to fund those services.

In Texas, we don't have income tax.

Right.

So if we don't have income tax and we don't have property taxes is how are we going to form that.

Just wondering.

Yeah.

And we haven't had the, the I guess the, the proposal from either Governor Abbott or supporters in terms of property taxes, abolishing property taxes, saying, okay, we're going to do get rid of this thing, but then we're going to do X, Y, or C in order to keep the cities and counties running.

He's the.

Governor.

He doesn't have to make the specifics like the ledge handle that, like all these bills.

Like, I'll pass it if you get it to me, if I like it.

But I think you're exactly right.

So you talk about school taxes specifically?

And that's exactly what funds public schools.

And there are a lot of caveats to this.

Basically, the schools, local taxes and property taxes collected about 80 million, sorry, $80 billion in a biennium for schools.

And that means that if you had to replace that money, you'd have to increase the sales tax by double, at least probably triple, to get to that money.

So that means, of course, that all the pressure is on sales taxes, which is inherently regressive, so that like it creates this imbalance in terms of rich and poor.

That's a huge hole.

That would be totally impractical.

The other thing is that a lot of the debt that service locally is serviced with the notion of having that money backed by the property tax, right.

That pool of money.

Correct.

And so that would have to be fixed somehow.

Else that is the state would have to take on that burden which they have not been willing to do.

But bird like debt discussion has been much more prominent, at the state level.

Well, and especially right in a time where the state has put a lot of stuff on the credit card.

The school vouchers.

Yep.

Well, again, property tax relief.

I mean, those things are already on the books.

All paid for by sales taxes.

Yeah.

You're going to have to change the structure of the Constitution.

Yeah.

You've got legal problems in terms of, like the constitutional right to, an education, a fair and equal education, so that the way that the law is written, you have to have this.

And Robin Hood, the process for distributing money across the different states, states, districts is part of that.

And you have to have something like that to accommodate.

There's a lot of problems with this.

There's a lot of problems.

But he obviously is addressing the one thing voters really care about, and that is about property taxes.

So it is going to be, I think, a really interesting fight to see how this comes down.

And I think for Democrats, part of the strategy is to say like, look, first of all, you've been in power for a long time.

You haven't fixed this.

This is on you.

If you want to fix it with this bizarre scheme, that financial is extremely risky.

Go ahead.

All right.

Good luck.

Right.

Because this thing could easily collapse under its own weight.

So there's a lot of problems with this that they haven't sorted out yet.

But here's the thing.

Even if he doesn't mean for this to actually become law, it's still the case that the over promising and under-delivering I think is something that voters are going to reject.

They don't like this because it feels like they're just being rug pulled all the time.

And there's a real risk for politicians who make these promises and then ultimately cannot deliver.

So then who's Greg Abbott going to blame?

The legislature.

He's going to blame.

Democrats or or the ledge or this or that.

I mean, and I think that there are ways, right, by which you can finance one way or the other, the services that we need.

There are ways by having schools being competitive, good schools being funded by public money, because that is public education.

And then is the we want to privatize, public education.

Right?

Okay.

If that is a choice that Texans want, what are going to be the trade off.

Right.

And remember is, as Governor Abbott said, we are now the eighth largest economy.

Right.

Fair enough.

And that's very good.

I mean, eighth largest economy.

That's a lot of money world.

Yeah.

Yes.

Of course.

Yeah.

Maybe plural as well.

But that's not even a planet.

Oh, he's not.

90, I know, maybe today it is.

Maybe.

Maybe today.

But but the thing is, how are we going to prepare the next generation of Texans that are going to be in charge of businesses running the state, legislating for the state if our public education disappears?

Yeah, no.

The governors have had the biggest problems trying to be politically relevant in public education.

It's been the kiss of death.

And so I think if he handles this correctly, it could be a real problem.

Like if you ask the voters, do you want to eliminate school property taxes?

Everyone's going to be like, heck yeah, we do.

Yeah, we'll have like 90% right now.

But the implications and the application of this is really the most concerning.

So we'll see how this plays out in of course, you know, this is sort of in conjunction with the campaign.

And so it will be contested there.

We have another entrant to that campaign.

And that's Chris Bell who is a former city council member here, a former one term member of Congress.

He's a moderate Democrat in practice, similar to Andrew White, but obviously a little bit different because he has some practical experience in politics.

Is this going to work?

I don't know.

Yeah, but it is.

Once again, we're seeing the let's call the battle royale within the Democratic Party, and especially here in Texas.

And it's the vision that Gina represents more progressive, more, in the sense of being, more up front and on your face type of politics.

And then we have, White and Bell that tend to be more moderate Democrats.

And the question is, is the party here in Texas ready to significantly make that change, as we have seen in in, in other place, right.

As we have seen, for example, with Greg Cassar, with Jasmine Crockett, we have seen the shift, but now is going to be at least a, statewide referendum in terms of where the party's going.

Yeah, that's a great point.

And I think that that divide is really the most pertinent here, because the party's got to figure out where it's going to go.

We'll talk about the shutdown and how that produces this new kind of civil war inside the party.

And we're certainly seeing that play out here.

I think for Chris Bell, the question is can he generate the votes he has in historically not been able to do that?

He is probably in fact, he is the least the recipient of the lowest turnout of the number of votes running for governor since the mid 90s.

He only got about 1.3 million votes.

Now, the race he ran in had independents running, so the Democrats were voting for some of those folks.

But it's not a good look.

And the question really is, I think as you're asking, if there's room for moderates in the Democratic Party, Chris's approach is going to be to be a little bit caustic.

He's perfectly tailor made for social media.

I think he's going to be able to deliver some jabs, but you have to put some knockouts.

And that's really the key for any Democrat.

Yeah.

So it will be, I think, pretty highly contested.

And maybe this party's better off.

I mean, this is something that in primaries you do see kind of as this discussion point and it applies to what's happening potentially in the 18th Congressional District where Al Green, who is a current member of Congress in the ninth district, is saying he's going to run in the newly formed 18th district.

Now, just to kind of keep things clarified, the 18th district is as currently constituted as just had a special election, and there will be a runoff for that.

But then this is to run for the newly drawn district, assuming they're approved by the courts for the next cycle.

So you'd have Al Green running against probably multiple people who ran in the special election in the 18th, forming in the new 18.

And the bride and and the potential incumbent of the new old formerly known as something 18 I. Thought I had it maybe I don't yes.

You you you've confused me.

Hopefully people aren't confused, but I would not blame if they are the long story short is basically that Al Green is going to run for Congress again in a different district.

Yeah.

So on the question about the Civil War inside the Democratic Party, what does this mean?

Once again?

Yeah, I think it's a civil war within the Democratic Party.

You have, green that has been, effective, efficient, representative for his constituents.

But he's 78 years of age.

Yeah, yeah.

And the question is, once again, is when is that turn over?

Happens, right?

When he's generational change.

Generational change because parties have changed.

I mean, believe it or not, the Republican Party, whether people like it or not, has evolved in such a way that caters to very important constituents of their party.

And the Democrats have not evolved in such a way that says, well, this is what we want, and if they're going to bed on, I guess a generation that generation is millennials, that generation is Gen Z's, gen alphas that tend to be more progressive than other type of older generations.

And their claim is that that's going to be the most successful way to generate voter enthusiasm.

We've seen examples of that, but it's also the case that Al Green has a long history of being in office and successfully representing his constituency.

As you said, I think there's a split in the party.

Some people say time for the next generation to emerge, right?

Some also say in this particular context like that, if you're Al Green, you got redistricted out of your district.

They purposely targeted him to get rid of him.

And then, people are saying you should stay and fight, right?

Show them that you're not just going to lay down.

Well, obviously those things are intention and there's this complication.

But for Al Green, at least politically, he can win.

Like the new district 18 is really like half of his district nine.

I know district nine.

Yeah.

So there's a chance he could still basically walk to this nomination.

The electorate skews older.

And so although the generational change you're talking about is happening in some places in Harris County and Houston, the electorate is older on average like it's 50 plus.

So that's a different demographic.

That probably would favor somebody like Al Green in this context.

Also, it's going to be a crowded field, right?

You're gonna have all these people running.

Probably you're going to have Medicare Edwards kind of whichever one wins, maybe both of them will run again.

And so a big field means that there's a good chance that that pushes to a runoff.

And in a runoff, you have to give Al Green a chance right then.

So I just see this as a potential moment for him to kind of hold the line here, regardless of what happens, might like in the current 18 when we have the or when we have the special election, which is sometime in January.

So kind of, a lot of flux, but a lot of churn is happening for Republicans who, like you said this week, Jody Arrington, who is the pretty powerful chair of the budget committee, has decided that he is not going to run for reelection.

He's retiring at the end of the term.

This is a long, kind of time, powerful member who's saying that it's not worth being in Congress.

There's lots of reasons, perhaps, for this, but one is that the House was out of session for about 50 days.

Struck down.

Not bad.

I think a lot of members looked at this and said, this actually works fine.

I like not being in Congress.

So that's one thing, but there are other implications.

So tell me kind of what you think is happening here with respect to the party and Arrington and Texas.

Well being agent had I guess a good, I it was not like I'm going to spend time with family and that kind of stuff.

It was I think I believe, a genuine reason and said that, he believed that public service is a lifetime commitment, but public office should be temporary, basically.

Good.

Right.

So, he's 53.

So he's not in those 80s, ranges or anything like that.

Whether he's, retiring for whatever reason, political reasons, he play a very unique role in terms of, shepherding the one beautiful bill, of President Trump's, tax cuts and spending priorities.

So I think it opens the door.

I don't know if it's fatigue or not, but at least those reasons are something that some politicians on both sides of the aisle should learn and say, okay, it's time for me to leave the these, position and let someone else, enter the fold.

And I think Republicans in particular are worried about what's going to happen in the midterms so that if they're in the minority, that's no fun.

Being in the minority in Congress is really a drag, and you don't get the power and you don't have the accessibility.

And even if you have a president in the white House, you're still struggling to get the kind of support you need.

So I think a lot of members are looking at that.

In fact, you can look at the way that their retirements are happening this cycle and see exactly that.

There are ten senators who are retiring and 29 House members, ten Democrats, 19 Republicans.

Those numbers will probably grow as we get closer.

By.

The primary filing period.

So to me, there is this real exodus that's happening in nationally for Republicans.

But we also see a pretty serious exodus for Texas.

And the implications here are that you're losing so much clout from Texas like you talked about.

You know, Arrington is such a force and was really a linchpin for so many different bills that got passed that the Trump administration desperately had to have.

So with him not there, there's just a lot of chaos and probably a lot of uncertainty.

So if you look at the numbers, basically, you know, this we've talked about this weeks ago, but Morgan Luttrell is not running again.

Michael McCaul is not running again.

There are only four House reps from Texas who have more, who's whose term predates Trump.

Carter, Webber, Williams and Brian Babin.

So there's just not many people left who have that credibility and have that capacity.

And Congress is all about longevity, right?

That's how you gain power.

So this, I think, is going to create some implications for Texas, the way we saw about a decade back, where there was another kind of massive exodus, right?

So we're in the middle of, I think, a real kind of brain drain when it comes to Congress.

But let's talk about what's to happen in the future.

Congress.

James Talarico this week is in the news.

Some good, some bad.

The polling that he's released internally says that basically he's got a lead by about six percentage points on Collin all red.

He's ahead with white voters by about 50 points.

He's ahead with Latino voters by about 50 points.

He's ahead with black voters by about 22 points.

For among people who identify can identify both candidates, does this mean that's a kind of momentum shift in this race?

Well, I mean, again, as we said before, when he, released his, polls, I mean, these are polls, our commission.

Yes.

They might have some truth.

And, is just to generate more fun and to generate more enthusiasm.

I think that.

Yes, probably, not so far away from, from Mildred, but, perhaps inching closer or within the margin of error.

I would assume that that's.

Correct.

Yeah.

Kind of as we expected, it was going to be a competitive race, and that's what we're seeing.

It's not a blowout.

It probably won't be, but there's definitely going to be some tension there.

Another issue that came up this week for Talarico that wasn't so good was that it was reported that he, in his social media accounts, follow several popular porn actors, including OnlyFans models and people who are escorts.

Does this jeopardize his ability to play their faith card when he's doing these things that maybe aren't seen as kind of.

So, obviously Christian?

I don't know, because the response from his campaign was very, I think, porn in the sense of how to handle these things.

Right.

And said, you know, de la Rico engages with people that, engages with him.

Right?

Right.

And he responds to messages when there is support, especially with people that.

They're not background checking know every single person they've been.

Yeah, that's what they said.

We don't do backgrounds or anything like that.

And he responds as a Christian would respond, okay.

So you know, it was head on.

And I think that we, as you probably know more because you are an expert on scandals.

I mean, you study scandals, not that you create.

But I'm building scandals.

Yes, yes, It's the right way.

And there you.

Go.

Yeah, yeah, that's a great point.

Like a quick apology and just an explanation.

It does kind of put some tarnish on the choirboy image, but.

Well, absolutely.

But definitely I think shows also a little bit of kind of red bloodedness like he's on Joe Rogan, right?

He can sort of play both sides to some degree.

But it definitely is going to be something people talk about and it has to be considered.

Along with the big picture this week, which is that the shutdown is now officially ending.

Democrats are claiming victory, saying that well how?

Hahahahaha.

Yes, the few that are still talking to each other okay, are saying that this basically helped to put the health care affordability issue at the center.

Republicans are saying, you know, we held out, they kept unified, they pressed the line and they won.

What do you make of this?

Well, I think that, it's it's a very risky move because that was the whole point to force, the reopening the government with a vote or or getting the subsidies of the ACA back on the table.

That did not happen.

There is a promise, on voting for those in.

The Senate.

In the Senate House and the House, I said, I don't know.

I mean, we'll see, but I'm not making any commitments.

I'm not making any promises.

Which is what the whole thing was about.

Like they had this promise.

They had this deal on the table like weeks ago.

It didn't take it.

There's a lot of dissent inside the party.

People are saying, oh yeah, we should go.

You had these eight Democrats, basically some of whom are not running for office again, and some of them don't run until the next cycle.

Yeah.

Like saying, yeah, yeah, we should totally make this deal.

And other Republicans or Democrats saying like, wow, what did you do?

In addition to that?

There's still a concern this could actually not work.

Where in the you've got, some caveats to this where there's a hemp ban in there that was essentially eliminate all Delta 8 to 9 products.

Yeah.

Which would wipe out a billion and a half dollar industry.

There's also discussions about having this abortion issue is tied to the debate.

And so there's just a lot of, I think, caveats on this.

And as of midweek, you know, it's still in flux, likely to happen but still in flux.

Winners and losers here who came out ahead.

I think that Republicans at least want these round, Democrats, I think, fumble in the sense of not having that party unity.

And what do you see with the ribbons?

We have said it many times here.

Republicans unite, period.

That's it.

Yeah.

Whether it's, X, Y or Z unite.

And the message that that Democrats are giving, especially to the conceit, especially after a week in which they had a very good turnout, is like, oh, by the way, yeah, we're going to take a different route.

They saw the resolve of Donald Trump, right?

They showed that he does not mind if there's some temporary pain in order to accomplish this.

So this is definitely, I think, a kind of real clarity moment for Democrats.

And as it is now, this is still a top issue for voters.

So it's possible that that worked out.

But there was going to be an issue anyway.

They were still going to get that on the table because people are still have to buy food and absolutely and have to buy gas.

And so it's not so clear this was a net win, but it did kind of typify where we are in politics.

Exactly.

And that's at a very rough moment.

And on that note, we're going to shut down the podcast and this program today.

But for sure we're reopening next week.

I'm Jeronimo Cortina.

And I'm reading writing House.

We'll see you next week.

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