Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R-TX) border security policies are popular among Texas voters, including Texas Hispanics, and help explain former President Donald Trump’s double-digit lead over President Joe Biden in the Lone Star State.
For the past three years, the Abbott administration has repeatedly clashed with the Biden administration over immigration and border security. This conflict reached its peak in 2023 with, among other things, the passage of legislation authorizing a record $3.5 billion annual expenditure of Texas tax dollars on border security, as well as the passage of Senate Bill 4, which makes illegal immigration a state crime in Texas and empowers Texas law enforcement to arrest illegal immigrants.
The Biden administration has challenged SB 4, with the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals set to rule in the near future on the law’s constitutionality in a case that is all but certain to be decided eventually by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation surveyed a representative sample of 1,600 Texas likely voters, including 404 Hispanics, during the second week of April. The term “Hispanic” is used since, when asked their preferred term to refer to members of their community, 72% of the Texas Hispanic respondents preferred “Hispanic,” compared to 26% and 2% who preferred “Latino” and “Latinx,” respectively.
The survey found strong support for two signature Abbott administration border policies.
First, 61% of Texas likely voters supported (and 34% opposed) spending $3.5 billion in Texas tax dollars annually on border security, ranging from border wall construction to the deployment of the Texas National Guard to the border. Two-thirds of white and three-fifths of Hispanic likely voters supported this policy, as do 86% of Republicans, 64% of independents, and even 33% of Democrats. Among Hispanics who lived near the border, 70% supported the policy.
Second, 58% of Texas likely voters supported (and 40% opposed) SB 4, which makes illegal immigration a state crime. Two-thirds of white and half of Hispanic likely voters supported this policy, as do 95% of Republicans, 56% of independents, and 16% of Democrats.
The survey also found far more approval for Abbott’s than Biden’s handling of the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. While 54% of likely voters approved of Abbott’s handling of the situation at the border, only 24% approved of Biden’s handling of the situation at the border. Conversely, while 44% disapproved of Abbott’s handling of the border situation, 73% disapproved of Biden’s handling of the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Two-thirds of white and half of Hispanic likely voters approved of Abbott’s handling of the border situation, compared to only a fifth and a fourth who approved of Biden’s border policy. And while 93% of Republicans and 54% of independents approved of Abbott’s border policy, only 63% of Democrats and 21% of independents approved of Biden’s.
Texas Republicans have made immigration and border security one of their top planks for the 2024 campaign. The more Texas voters evaluate candidates based on their border and immigration policies, the better Republicans can expect to do in Texas in 2024.
In part due to negative evaluations of the Biden administration’s border security and immigration policies juxtaposed with the more positive evaluations of the Texas Republican policies, the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation survey found Trump holding a 12-point lead over Biden in vote intention in Texas, more than double his 2020 margin of victory (5.6%) over Biden in the state.
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Key to Trump’s lead over Biden is his narrow 4-point advantage among Texas Hispanics, who are expected to account for a quarter of those Texans who cast a ballot this fall. This 4-point advantage contrasts markedly with 2020, when Biden defeated Trump among Texas Hispanics by a margin of 17 points. In contrast to the substantial shift in Hispanic vote intention from -17 points (2020) to +4 points (2024) for Trump, among white likely voters, the presidential vote intention in 2024 (+31 points for Trump) is comparable to the actual vote in 2020, when it was +33 points for Trump.
In sum, Trump owes his now double-digit lead over Biden in large part to Texas Hispanics, Hispanics who are much more supportive of Republican border security policies than one would presume based on the rhetoric of coastal Latinx elites.
Mark P. Jones is the chief analytics and information officer at the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation and the political science fellow at Rice University’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. Jason Villalba is the chief executive officer at the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation and a former member of the Texas House of Representatives, where he served the people of Dallas for six years.