The Texas Politics Project’s survey gauges how registered Texas voters are feeling about the state of politics on a local and national level.
Their latest poll examines President Trump’s overall approval rating, according to Texans, and more.
Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project, joined Texas Standard to discuss the findings. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Well, the big picture here is about President Trump’s approval in Texas. What have you learned from this latest poll?
Jim Henson: Well, President Trump’s job approval has settled back about the midpoint that we expect it to be usually.
So at this point, he is barely above water. 47% gave him a positive job approval, 46% disapproved with a lot of variance in how he’s handling different issues.
Most favorable ratings come with his handling of immigration and border security. But things look less rosy when you start looking at economic indicators.
Is this a short honeymoon period or is it about what it’s expected?
Well, I mean, it’s perhaps a little bit short, but we weren’t too surprised by this drop.
If you go back and you look at other presidents and how they’ve done in Texas and nationally, you get a couple of months and about the time people start talking about your first hundred days, your numbers start going down.
» 100 days, two Americas: Assessing the impact of President Trump’s policies on California and Texas
Well, you mentioned immigration, and that has been the target of several executive orders. And those approval ratings looked very positive among Republicans – not so much among Democrats, and I guess that’s to be expected.
Very much so. I mean, obviously immigration and border security are signature issues for Donald Trump. And the contextual conditions have been very good for him in the sense that things had quieted down in terms of migrant traffic on the border by the time he got in office and those numbers had continued to decline.
So looking at the polling data, nearly universal approval from Republicans, 92% of Republicans, approve of the job he’s doing on immigration. Not so hot with Democrats – 13% approve, 79% disapproves, 69% of Democrats disapproved strongly with independents more or less evenly split, slightly more positive than negative.
So if immigration is very split along party lines, it’s a little more complicated when you look at the economy and tariffs, is that right?
I agree with that. I mean, I think there’s almost a dark cloud behind these good numbers on immigration for President Trump. And what I mean by that is the share of Texans who see immigration and border security as the most important problem facing the state has declined steadily over the last year, year and a half, and it’s been replaced by concerns about the economy and prices.
And if you look at President Trump’s approval ratings on the economy and prices, they’re significantly lower even among Republicans. He’s not in negative territory among Republicans, but the approval is less strong – and among all Texans, it’s in negative territories.
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You also looked at state issues, and of course, the Legislature is about to wrap up its session. What takeaways did you get from voters there?
Well, the main takeaway is that if you look at the top priorities that people say they want, that Texas voters say they want the Legislature to pay attention to, they are generally very practical.
Number one, and this has been near the top of the list for a few years now, is to improve the reliability of the grid. 82% of Texans said that that was extremely or very important.
The follow-on items that were in the top five were lowering the cost of goods, lowering property taxes, ensuring the state’s water supply, and improving access to health care. All of those are very bread and butter, economically tinged issues that Texans are focused on, along with these big infrastructure issues that have been bubbling under in the Legislature for several sessions now, largely as a result of the state’s rapid growth and the fallout of Winter Storm Uri.
