Public polling is often used to present the idea that a given policy is popular, probably in hopes of swaying lawmakers to vote a given way. The reasoning sounds good, too. If a policy is popular and you vote against it, you might lose reelection, and we all know the one thing you can trust a politician to care about is their job.

But the truth is that public opinion is far more complex than that. Plus, polling is often not really that indicative of what the people really want.

That doesn’t stop some pollsters from trying to spin things just the same.

Take this piece from the Houston Chronicle, for example.

In it, the authors try to argue that Texans massively support several key gun control issues, saying that 85 percent want to prohibit “assault weapon” ownership for adults under 21, 89 percent want universal background checks, and 88 percent want red flag laws.

That certainly looks pretty massive.

It’s also absolutely nonsense.

I’m not saying the polling is necessarily wrong, though I have doubts that nearly 90 percent of Texans want their rights restricted in such ways. I don’t know how the questions were asked, which is one of the problems with polling. Asking the same question in a different way can skew the results in a given direction. Did that happen here? I honestly don’t know.

Here’s what I do know, though. No matter how much this polling claims Texans want gun control, their voting patterns don’t reflect that in the least.

The op-ed invokes Uvalde at one point, but let’s think about this for just a second here. This is an area where there was a mass murder that killed children and created massive outrage. Their Republican congressman took the anti-gun side and almost lost his primary to guntuber Brandon Herrera. Rep. Tony Gonzales won that race by something like 400 votes and reportedly spent more than ten times the amount of money Herrera did, and still almost lost.

If anyone was going to let gun control dictate their voting, it would have been the totality of the voters of the Uvalde area, and it just didn’t happen.

One of the issues with most polling, particularly on gun issues, is that they never bother to assess how important the issue is to the people they’re polling. Will it dictate who they vote for in the Republican primary? In the general election? No? 

If not, there’s no reason for Republicans to bother since pro-gun voters will vote against anti-gun lawmakers. 

Somehow, that doesn’t seem to get factored in these discussions. Gun rights advocates are gun rights voters. Most of the people polled aren’t making gun control a priority in their voting patterns for whatever reason.

Texas is a very red state. It has a mostly Republican legislature, a Republican governor, two Republican senators, and sided with President Donald Trump in 2024. Almost all of those took pro-gun stances during their respective campaigns and got elected for it.

And this is assuming that this was a true cross-section of the population of Texas and not a poll really just conducted inside the city limits of Austin. That’s me giving them the benefit of the doubt, and I’m not entirely convinced me doing so is warranted.