By Christine Sinatra, Texans Care for Children

A couple of years ago in a seminar for children’s health advocates, a pollster shared some promising new national data: about 9 out of 10 voters said they support public children’s health insurance programs. Up went the hands of those of us in the room from the red states.

“Do you have any regional data for these polls?” asked one skeptic.

“What was that number like among conservative voters?” asked another.

Despite reassurances, advocates for children in conservative states sometimes wonder whether children’s health care is really as popular where they live as it is in states where Medicaid and CHIP are treated with the same reverence as Mom and apple pie. After all, our news website message boards crawl with ugly comments about leaving uninsured kids to the E.R.’s; the words “children’s health care” go unmentioned by top candidates for public office; and budget battles are waged on the backs of children. Surely all this adds up to our people valuing children’s health less here than in other states, right?

Wrong. In Texas–the state that brought you the phrase “maybe we should opt out of Medicaid,” home to the President who punted on reauthorizing CHIP, the state with the nation’s highest rate of uninsured children–it turns out health coverage for uninsured children is a clear winning issue. In fact, in a poll released by the Texas Tribune and the University of Texas late last month, 9 out of 10 voters said they oppose state cuts to CHIP. In fact, CHIP out-polled a lot of items many might think would be less controversial. For example, although our state experiences serious traffic congestion, high correctional and undocumented immigrant populations, and a host of schooling challenges, more Texans would maintain funding for children’s health care than for highway construction, prison expenditures, border security, or even public education. Roughly tied with support for CHIP was popular support for maintaining rates for Medicaid providers–the doctors and hospitals you might think would make easier targets than the kids themselves. Far more voters supported specific tax hikes over cuts to children’s health programs or provider rates.

This poll wasn’t an outlier, either. Earlier in the year, a poll by the states’ newspapers found a clear majority of Texans support maintaining health care funding for low-income children and families. Since then, as advocates started bringing more attention to proposed cuts and awareness grew, support for keeping funds for children’s health care in the budget climbed still higher.

What is true on the telephone seems true in the voting booth, too. After the last time state leaders made deep cuts to children’s health care programs in 2003, over 225,000 children lost their coverage. Many politicians paid for this at the polls. In fact, under attack explicitly for their votes against CHIP and Medicaid, incumbents throughout the state lost their seats.

All this evidence has not just advocates but state leaders rethinking earlier assumptions. As in many states, the last election cycle here brought a wave of new conservative legislators to our Capitol, many promising they would balance the state’s $27 billion budget deficit through cuts alone. Yet fewer and fewer legislators now interpret November’s election as a mandate for that approach. One conservative member of the State Finance Committee recently told his colleagues, “We have got to find the revenue to make these cuts less of a burden on Texans. . . . Any other idea in this building is crazy to me.”  One of his conservative counterparts in the House suggested his constituents would never forgive him for putting cuts before sensible revenue choices.

The budget choices ahead in Texas will not be easy. If they are aligned with the will of Texans, however, they won’t be short-sighted either.