It’s officially official, we have a contested primary for Lite Guv.
Mike Collier
Mike Collier has been itching for a rematch with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick for nearly three years, after coming within 4.9 points of unseating the Republican in 2018.
“I woke up the next morning thinking, ‘I’m pretty sure if I had more time or money, we could beat him,’” Collier said. “That was my first impulse. The dust settled, and we went and analyzed the performance county by county.”
“I quickly realized: If I stay on this, I can close that gap and I can win.”
Collier, an accountant and former chief financial officer of an oil company, said his campaign infrastructure has grown significantly in the intervening years. He worked to support other Democrats running for office during the 2020 general election and served as a senior adviser to President Joe Biden’s Texas campaign.
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Collier formed an exploratory committee in April to consider running again for lieutenant governor, and his campaign officially began Monday morning.
He is the second Democrat to formally announce for the seat. Matthew Dowd, a former strategist for George W. Bush and political analyst for ABC News, launched his campaign for the post last week.
“We’re close to winning, and when you get close to winning, you begin to attract people who say, ‘I’d like to be lieutenant governor,’” Collier said. “I have been devoted to bringing real political competition to the state, which means winning statewide office for the Democrats. I’ve been focused for nearly a decade and went through the darkest of times with the party.”
This will be Collier’s third run for statewide office after unsuccessful campaigns in 2014 for comptroller and 2018 for Patrick’s seat.
But Collier contends that he is a different candidate today than he was three years ago, one with improved fundraising chops and a better grasp of the issues that are important for voters. For months his refrain has been a call to leaders at the statehouse to “fix the damn grid” after widespread power outages during winter storms this year resulted in hundreds of deaths.
In his mind, a surefire way to win over voters is to ask them, “Are you better off now than four years ago?”
“The answer on so many levels is clearly no,” Collier said, arguing that while he has improved as a candidate since the 2018 election, Patrick’s performance has only gotten worse. “This mad dash to pander to the primary voters of the Republican Party has taken us so far outside of where Texans want us to go.”
Collier said his campaign will run on the same message and strategy employed in 2018, which he says entails speaking with people in every corner of the state and working to earn their trust, without taking any one voter for granted.
See here and here for the background. Collier was a strong candidate in 2018, and though he hasn’t been much of a fundraiser the fact that this would be his third time on the ballot if he’s nominated does help. I do hope he can raise more money and that he’s built up his campaign infrastructure, because we all are going to need that. I think he’s got his finger on a winning message, it’s largely a matter of getting that message out. I’ll be very interested to see what his next finance report looks like.
As for Dowd, I’ll keep an open mind. Scott Braddock on the Texas Take podcast (the “It’s Never Enough For Trump” episode) kind of laid into Dowd as just a talking head whose biggest asset is being of interest to the media, and drew a clear roadmap for the Collier campaign for why Dowd bears a significant amount of blame for the state of the Republican Party today, which he now publicly decries. Braddock also speculated that a woman or person of color see an opportunity in this race; all I ask is that it’s someone who would be able to fundraise if that is so. I’m happy to have a contested primary, to draw some attention to this race and these candidates and why Dan Patrick is trash and needs to be removed. Let’s make sure that no matter what else happens, we’re all focused on that. Houston Public Media, Spectrum News, and Texas Monthly have more.