Mike Collier
Fox News host Laura Ingraham is joining a growing list of Republicans attacking Mike Collier, the Democratic candidate for Texas lieutenant governor, as polls indicate a narrowing race between him and incumbent Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
Ingraham reposted an article from a right-wing website on Sunday criticizing Collier for opposing private school vouchers, which would allocate public funding to send children to private or charter schools. It’s an increasingly popular policy among Texas Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbott, who have cast both vouchers and charter schools as a way to ensure parents can find alternatives for their kids if they don’t like their local public school.
Collier has said he would lead the charge to ban them if elected as a top state policymaker.
Teachers’ unions and Democrats have likened the push for school vouchers to an effort to defund already-struggling public schools.
“Vouchers are for vultures,” Collier said during a speech at Texas Democrats’ convention in Dallas earlier this month.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz also blasted that remark last week, calling Collier’s stance “sick.”
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It’s a marked change from Collier’s last run against Patrick in 2018, when Republicans generally shied away from mentioning Collier by name or publicly attacking him. Collier lost to Patrick by five percentage points that year. Recent University of Houston polling indicates it’s now a 4-point race.
“As Mike Collier closes the gap in the race for lieutenant governor to just 4 points, it’s no surprise that Dan Patrick’s extremist allies suddenly rush to his defense,” said Collier campaign manager Ali Zaidi. “And while Dan Patrick continues to hide from the voters of Texas, Mike Collier will be on the ground, on the airwaves and online — exposing the truth about Dan Patrick’s eight years of failure to fund our schools, rein in property taxes and fix the damn grid.”
It’s interesting because while Republicans have always attacked Democrats as a group and high-profile Democrats who may (Beto, Biden, Hillary Clinton, Obama, etc) or may not (Nancy Pelosi, AOC, etc) be on the ballot, they almost always reserve those attacks for those brand names. They very rarely attack candidates with lower profiles who name ID they will inevitably raise by their actions. I don’t know what’s behind this apparent change in strategy – maybe it’s just the ants-to-a-picnic effect of a Fox News personality making Mike Collier their main character for a day, in which case this will disappear as quickly as it manifested. I hope Collier is able to raise a few bucks from it in the meantime.
On a side note in re: the “tightening” polls: Yes, there have been a few recent poll results that show a fairly close race for Governor, with one of those polls also putting Collier within four points of Dan Patrick. It’s more than one poll, and some of those individual polls showed movement in a Dem direction since their previous sample, but I still hesitate to attribute any meaning beyond the simple numbers to them. Maybe there is a Dobbs effect (with perhaps also a Uvalde effect), and maybe it will all dissipate like the morning dew as our attention spans fill up. I’ve been burned on this topic too many times, and I can already see the headlines that we’ll get if this “trend” doesn’t continue. The data is what it is at this point. If the Republicans are responding to it – we don’t know that this is what they’re doing, but let’s roll with that for a minute – then that’s another data point. That’s as far as I’ll go with it.
Pretty easy target. He’s angry and unlikeable on the campaign trail.
Robert: anyone with any sense should be angry, for reasons beyond count.
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