Mike Collier
Mike Collier is willing to bet Texas voters know his name.
In fact, he’s confident that when he last ran for lieutenant governor three years ago and came within 5 percentage points of winning, it was because most of the 3.8 million Texans who checked his name were voting in support of his candidacy, and not just against Republican incumbent Dan Patrick during a watershed year for Democrats.
“They’ll only do that if they like the candidate they’re voting for,” Collier said. “Yes, a lot of people voted against Dan Patrick but they’re not going to vote for just anybody. They looked and they [said], ‘I don’t like Dan Patrick, he’s bad for the state. I like Mike Collier, I think he’s good for the state.’”
His evidence? In two-thirds of Texas counties, he outperformed Beto O’Rourke, who led the top of the ticket in 2018 against U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and sparked a flurry of excitement among Democrats that year.
But several other statewide Democratic candidates with little name recognition and no real campaign funding also outperformed expectations against their GOP counterparts that year, largely on O’Rourke’s coattails. Collier wasn’t even the party’s second-highest vote-getter statewide. That was Justin Nelson, who came within 295,000 votes of unseating Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Collier, a 60-year-old accountant and auditor from the Houston area, will have his chance to prove his bonafides next year after announcing earlier this month that he is officially running for a rematch against Patrick.
“I came very close to beating Dan Patrick. I came within 4.8 points,” he said. “And I decided that looking at the numbers, that I can beat him.”
But first, he’ll have to get past Matthew Dowd, a former George W. Bush strategist turned Democrat, and any other candidate that joins the race in a Democratic primary. Collier said he looks forward to the contest.
“My strategy is to keep talking to every Texan and have a much better team, much more money and a network of surrogates and friends and volunteers and champions and validators all over the state,” he said. “I think I win the primary.”
The rest of the story is a nice profile of Collier, hitting on some of the things he did in his 2018 campaign, his case against Dan Patrick, and how he is differentiating himself from Matthew Dowd. If you didn’t know anything about him to begin with, it’s a good introduction and I think it makes him look very presentable. My hope is that there are stories like this to be done around the state, in newspapers and for local TV stations. They can be about Dowd too – really, I hope there are stories about both of them. But to whatever extent that happens, both Collier and Dowd are going to have to show they can raise enough money to fund a robust statewide campaign, and get their names in front of as many voters as they can. There’s a quote in the story from a poli sci professor about how Collier’s vote total in 2018 was more a reflection of what people thought of Dan Patrick than of Mike Collier, and I agree with it. The next step is to be more than “not Dan Patrick”, and that’s going to take some money. I very much hope the January finance reports reflect that.
UPDATE: Almost as if on cue, here’s the Chron’s Erica Greider writing about the Dowd/Collier race from a more Dowd perspective.