Vouchers and faith-based government initiatives are more popular with Texans than you might think, according to a statewide poll conducted for the Texas Lyceum. And Texans aren't as conservative about school prayer as the people who represent them, according to that survey.
Nearly two-thirds of Texas adults — 65 percent — said they would support a program "in which parents are given taxpayer money by the government that they can use to pay for a child's tuition at the school of their choice." The poll director, University of Texas at Austin prof Daron Shaw, said that result was a little unexpected; usually, when words like "taxpayer money" are included in the question, the opposition grows. In this poll, 30 percent said they oppose vouchers.
Faith-based initiatives — where the government gives money to religious groups ministering to the poor — found favor with 68 percent of the people surveyed. Support was heavier for those programs and for vouchers among minorities.
Want to display the Ten Commandments in a public place? They're cool with that (60 percent) or don't mind (22 percent). Only 14 percent object to those displays.
Shaw has done a mess of polling and analysis for a client list that includes George W. Bush's presidential campaigns, Fox News and the Texas Poll.
School prayer was a mixed bag, with only 14 percent objecting to any sort of prayer. On the other end of the spectrum, only 16 percent favored denominational prayer and only 22 percent favoring non-denominational prayer. The biggest group — 45 percent — say they prefer a moment of silent reflection so kids can pray as they wish or stare at their shoes or whatever it is they do with quiet moments.
James Henson, who heads the Texas Politics project at UT Austin, said the results catch the nuances in religious practice and what people want from government. "Texans want religion on the menu, but don't want to be force-fed it," he said. He also pointed out some gaps between public opinion and the just-ended legislative session. Vouchers never moved in the Legislature this year, in spite of favorable public opinion, for instance.
Both Henson and Shaw were caught off-guard by the voucher responses. Support for the idea was stronger than they expected. "Voucher is usually a code word that drives the numbers down," Shaw said. But that word was included in the question pollsters posed to respondents.
"When we put this thing together, we had kind of the working hypothesis that Texas is a particularly religious state in a particularly religious society, so therefore we expected a pretty conservative, pretty traditional view across a range of issues," Shaw said. "In fact, there's a lot more subtlety, a lot more nuance that we found."
A couple of findings raised questions about the differences between what people say about themselves and how they actually behave. The respondents were religious, with 68 percent saying they believe the Bible is the literal word of God and 47 percent saying they'd personally had a born-again experience. Nearly three-fourths said they regularly go to church, with 52 percent saying they go once or twice a week. Put a liar's discount on it: Shaw said the tendency to give answers according to "social desirability" usually skews results by eight to 13 percent.
The respondents said they get their news from television, and they were split evenly between cable and broadcast TV. Over three-fourths have Internet access, but only 13 percent get most of their political news there.
The survey of 1,002 adults was done April 26-May 7 and has a margin of error of +/- 3 percent. They're rolling out more results over the next couple of days, and in July will post all of the raw data from the poll so other political scientists, hacks, journalists and hobbyists can see all of the internal data. The Texas Lyceum is a non-profit, non-partisan leadership and public policy group that's been going for more than 25 years. This is the group's first poll and they say they're committed to doing this for at least three years, in the interest of getting a regular third-party poll going in Texas (like those in other states). They focused on religion and politics this time because that's the theme of their annual public meeting, set for July in Austin.
Department of Disclosure: Our editor had a finger in this pie, commenting on the design of the poll before it was done and writing the poll summary you can see online at TexasLyceum.org. That's not an endorsement of the results and doesn't mean the Lyceum's endorsing us, either. Now you know.