In 2018, Texas’ ultraconservative Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick barely bothered to run for reelection. His campaign launch amounted to flying a charter jet to municipal airports across small-town Texas, stopping just long enough to do an interview with a local TV station. Mostly, he just went on Fox News and hung out with Donald Trump. Despite the attempts of his Democratic opponent Mike Collier—a corporate accountant who’d previously ran for Texas comptroller—Patrick ignored him.
Despite his confidence, Patrick was reelected in 2018 by just 5 percentage points, losing ground in the suburbs and showing weakness even in the deep-red expanses of rural Texas. In 171 counties, Collier actually outperformed then-Senate candidate and political star Beto O’Rourke—besting the latter in rural Texas 25.6 to 24 percent. Collier attributed his modest inroads to Patrick’s radicalism and his own incessant focus on bread-and-butter issues like public education, teacher pay, and property tax reform.
“I think people respond to me because they’re looking for somebody other than Dan Patrick,” Collier told the Observer in an interview last month. “Dan Patrick won’t work on real issues. He’s all about culture wars … and it’s taken us to a very, very bad place.”
