Barbara Radnofsky has been talking about a run for Attorney General in Texas in 2010 for some time now; I had a conversation about it with her back in 2007. Today she officially announced her intent, making her the third Democrat to do so for a statewide office. She told me on the phone that didn’t intend to do anything fancy at this point, and would be concentrating on fundraising for the next few months. She had previously filed her paperwork to run, so she can raise funds for her campaign.
As Vince notes, others have been in the mix for AG on the Democratic side: David Van Os, who ran for AG in 2006; Larry Veselka, who is currently on the list of candidates for the US Attorney position in Houston; State Sen. Kirk Watson, who has also been mentioned as a possible candidate for Lt. Gov.; and State Rep. Patrick Rose. Of those, I think the most likely to run is Van Os. While I would not mind seeing contested primaries up and down the ballot – we’re going to have a ton of them here in Harris for county judicial races – if Van Os were to ask me I’d suggest he take a crack at the 3rd Court of Appeals, which could use a little more partisan balance. But that’s just my opinion.
As far as her prospects, or that of any Dem statewide, I will say this. What we’ve seen in the last couple of elections has basically been two categories of statewide race: Well-funded R versus underfunded (or unfunded) D, and unfunded R versus unfunded D. We haven’t seen well-funded R versus well-funded D since 2002, and I think we can all agree that the electoral landscape is considerably different today than it was then. In any event, in the races where both candidates are not well-funded, which I think represents the baseline vote for each party, the Dems have done better. If current AG Greg Abbott, who has a huge pile of money, runs for something else as he’s rumored to want to do, Radnofsky would be in a position to start out roughly at financial parity with her opponent, most likely Solicitor General Ted Cruz. Given that she almost surely has higher name recognition to begin with, if she can build on the $1.5 million she raised in 2006 – say, double or triple that – this could be a pretty tight race. I’ll be very interested to see what kind of numbers she posts for the January disclosures.