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Matthew McConaughey

McConaughey opines for gun control

by Charles Kuffner.

14 comments

I believe that responsible, law-abiding Americans have a Second Amendment right, enshrined by our founders, to bear arms. I also believe we have a cultural obligation to take steps toward slowing down the senseless killing of our children. The debate about gun control has delivered nothing but status quo. It’s time we talk about gun responsibility.

There is a difference between control and responsibility. The first is a mandate that can infringe on our right; the second is a duty that will preserve it. There is no constitutional barrier to gun responsibility. Keeping firearms out of the hands of dangerous people is not only the responsible thing to do, it is the best way to protect the Second Amendment. We can do both.

Depraved acts of violence, with guns as the weapon of choice, are ripping apart families, tearing at people’s faith, and shredding the fabric of our society. We have an epidemic of indiscriminate mass shootings, of parents burying their children, of inaction, and buck-passing. Saving the unnecessary loss of lives is not a partisan issue.

The need for mental health care, school safety, the prevalence of sensationalized media coverage, and the decaying state of American values are all long-term societal factors that must be addressed, but right now, we don’t have the luxury of time. We need to focus on corrections and countermeasures that can also and immediately reduce the gun violence tragedies that have become too common in our country.

We need to make the lost lives matter. Our leaders must make bipartisan compromises on a few reasonable measures to restore responsible gun ownership in our country.

He goes on to support enhanced background checks, raising the age for buying assault weapons to 21, national red flag laws, and a national waiting period for assault rifles, and he’s also now advocating for them in public. You could certainly go farther on a number of these, like all the way to an assault weapons ban like we once had, and he studiously refuses to name the reason why no gun control laws can be passed (it’s so much easier to make grand “both sides” pronouncements), but if we did manage to get these items it would be a step forward, and it can’t hurt to have someone like Matthew McConaughey make the case for them. So, two and a half cheers, B+ for the effort, and so on. Via Reform Austin.

McConaughey not running for Governor

by Charles Kuffner.

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Thank God that’s over.

Actor Matthew McConaughey on Sunday removed himself from consideration as a potential candidate for governor after months of toying with a campaign.

In a video posted to his Twitter account, McConaughey, who lives in Austin, said he was honored to be considered for “political leadership.”

“It’s a humbling and inspiring path to ponder,” McConaughey said. “It is also a path that I’m choosing not to take at this moment.”

McConaughey’s video came just over two weeks before the candidate filing deadline for the Texas primary.

Since earlier this year, McConaughey said he was mulling a run for governor, though he did not specify whether he would run in the Democratic primary, in the Republican primary or as an independent. He has previously described himself as “aggressively centrist.”

Look, there’s a world in which I’d have taken McConaughey seriously as a candidate. We took Kinky Friedman seriously as a gubernatorial candidate way back in 2006, even as he invited us to not take him seriously, because he regularly spoke about his intent to run for over two years before he actually ran. (Seriously, the first “Kinky for Governor” story I saw was in September of 2003.) Like Kinky, McConaughey never developed anything like a coherent policy position, but unlike Kinky he also never seemed to have any motivation to run.

Normally when a famous person or brand-name politician is asked seemingly out of the blue if they might consider running for a particular office, I assume it was a setup, designed to call attention to the prospect as part of an overall marketing strategy. In this case, I’m not actually sure. I mean, I think the subject came up for publicity reasons, just not “run up a flag to see if this candidacy could be viable” reasons. We can (and I do!) blame all of the ridiculous polling on the subject, which allowed McConaughey as a partyless entity that somehow ended up on a ballot against Greg Abbott, for extending this drama way past its expiration date.

But now we can cut all this nonsense out and get on with the real race. Again, it’s not that McConaughey couldn’t have been a serious candidate, but to be taken seriously he needed to address the question of how he was going to run – was he going to file for a party primary, or go the much more challenging independent route – and not just whether. He never did, so this was always annoying background noise to me. And now it’s over and we can get back to whatever we’d been doing before. The Current and the Chron have more.

DMN/UT-Tyler: Abbott 45, Beto 39

by Charles Kuffner.

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The state’s weirdest pollster does it again.

Freshly announced gubernatorial hopeful Beto O’Rourke is running six percentage points behind Gov. Greg Abbott in a direct matchup, and Abbott leads both the Democrat O’Rourke and Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey in a three-way race for Texas governor, according to a Dallas Morning News-University of Texas at Tyler poll released Sunday.

In a race between Abbott and O’Rourke, the two-term GOP incumbent leads among all registered voters, 45%-39%. A substantial 22% want someone else to be governor, the poll found.

By nearly 2-to-1, all voters would be more likely to support McConaughey than O’Rourke. Pluralities of Democrats and independents want the Oscar-winning movie star and products endorser to run.

Still, McConaughey continues to lack a clear lane into next November’s general election. By 65%-11%, Democratic voters believe O’Rourke is the best opportunity for Democrats to break a statewide losing streak that dates to 1998.

In the hypothetical three-way general election contest, Abbott is the choice of 37%; McConaughey 27%; and O’Rourke 26%. 10% of voters want someone else. The poll, conducted Nov. 9-16, surveyed 1,106 adults who are registered voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.

With the race taking shape, McConaughey has just more than three weeks left in the candidate-filing period to jump in, noted UT-Tyler political scientist Mark Owens, the poll’s director.

“It appears that if Matthew McConaughey chooses to enter the race before Dec. 13, he will be more on par with Beto O’Rourke than Governor Abbott,” Owens said.

“Even if McConaughey delays a start in public service, both Abbott and O’Rourke have become the face of the two political parties in Texas.”

You can see the poll results here. I’m not going to spend too much time on it. We have the Hispanic Policy Foundation poll, which had a completely different result for the three-way race, and the UT/Trib poll, which didn’t ask a three-way question but which found less enthusiasm overall for McConaughey. That “22% want someone else” number from this poll, by the way, actually comes from the Abbott-McConaughey question, which as we have discussed ad nauseum is meaningless since there’s no way that can happen.

Anyway. This result is in between the two previous ones, which suggests that the spread is a reasonable one. We’ll see what we get with future polls, of which I think we’ll have plenty. Guess I need to add a widget to the sidebar to track them.

Hispanic Policy Foundation poll: Abbott 44, Beto 43

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

At long last, some new polling data, and this one is eye-catching.

A year before they could meet in a showdown for the state’s top office, Gov. Greg Abbott and expected Democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke are virtually tied, according to new polling from the Texas Hispanic Policy Foundation (TxHPF).

The poll shows Republican Abbott leading O’Rourke, 44% to 43% among voters who went to the polls in 2020, with the rest of respondents unsure or supporting minor-party candidates. The race is virtually unchanged if actor Matthew McConaughey, whose name has come up in gubernatorial-race speculation, appears on the ballot as an Independent candidate.

Among all registered voters, Abbott is the choice of 43% and O’Rourke of 42%, with 12% unsure of whom they would vote for and 3% choosing minor party candidates. The results remain nearly identical if the population is restricted to 2020 presidential election voters, with Abbott preferred by 44% and O’Rourke by 43%, with 10% unsure and 3% supporting minor party candidates.

O’Rourke, a former Congressman from El Paso who previously ran for president and for a seat in the U.S. Senate, has not formally announced his candidacy for governor but is widely expected to run.

The poll found that 49% of Hispanic respondents favor O’Rourke and 31% favor Abbott. Hispanics who are evangelical Protestants are more likely to vote for Abbott (42%) than O’Rourke (37%), while Catholic Hispanics and non-religious Hispanics overwhelmingly favor O’Rourke (56% and 46%) over Abbott (29% and 28%).

Before taking on the Democratic nominee, Abbott must make it through a competitive Republican primary. The new polling shows the two-term governor with an overwhelming lead in the GOP race: Abbott is ahead of his next-closest rival, former state Republican Party Chairman Allen West, by 51 percentage points, with 64% of the most likely GOP primary voters intending to vote for Abbott compared to 13% for West.

“Governor Abbott has shored up his right flank and stands firmly on solid ground with Republican primary voters,” said Jason Villalba, Chairman and CEO of the TxHPF. “But based on our data, it appears that he has achieved this objective by cutting deeply into his support with Texans who vote in the general election. Much can happen over the course of the year, but these numbers show that not only can we expect a competitive general election, but that Abbott’s shift to the hard right may have imperiled his governorship.”

[…]

The TxHPF has previously established its credibility in measuring public opinion in Texas. In August 2020, the TxHPF was the first major research organization to forecast that then-President Donald Trump was running relatively well among Texas Hispanics. Those survey results proved to be strikingly accurate on Election Night 2020, when Trump performed stronger than previous Republican candidates in heavily Hispanic regions of the state.

For the survey 1,402 respondents were interviewed online between October 14 and 27, with a margin of error of +/- 2.6%.

The data they provide can be found here – it doesn’t provide the individual questions or the totals for each, so make of it what you will. The topline numbers are the Abbott/Beto number, which has Abbott up 44-43, and a three-way race that includes Matthew McConaughey as an independent, which goes 40/37/9, a much less sexy result that those idiot polls that had Abbott versus McConaughey straight up without ever acknowledging that the only way that could happen is if our boy ran in and won the Democratic primary first.

As far as I can tell, the last straight up horse-race poll result we have is from September, in which Abbott led 42-37. Both that one and the other most recent result, from July, which had Abbott leading Beto 45-33, are from the DMN/UT-Tyler series that included those dumb Abbott/McC matchups. Since then what we’ve had is multiple polls that have highlighted Abbott’s declining approval rating, but basically no other election polls. I have to assume that Beto will indeed make official his candidacy, at which point I suspect we’ll get all the polling we can handle.

The one thing this poll doesn’t have that I would have liked to have seen was an approval rating for President Biden, which has also tanked since late spring, matching the national trend. This poll does a very nice job of taking a closer look at Latino response to Abbott and Beto, and boy would it have been cool to see those same questions about Biden and maybe even that other guy, to perhaps provide some extra context about the last election and what we might see this time around. Alas.

They also polled the primaries, with Abbott well in the lead and Ken Paxton just above fifty percent, thanks mostly I’d say to none of the other candidates being remotely well known to the voters. Same for the Ag Commissioner race, and the Dem primaries for Lite Guv and Attorney General, which is now out of date anyway. Primary polling is a lot harder to do, and the fact that many candidates aren’t well known doesn’t help. I’d say Abbott is in good shape to win without a runoff, Paxton may be able to avoid a runoff, and the rest isn’t worth worrying about.

As always, this is one poll, so don’t put too much weight on it. I do think we’ll start to see more results, and once that happens I’ll add a new widget on the sidebar to track them all. That has sure come in handy for me when I’ve had to trawl through the archives here to provide comparisons to past numbers. Let’s get this thing on the road already. The Texas Signal and the Chron have more.

Does this sound like a guy who’s running for Governor?

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

I mean, probably not. But you never know.

Actor Matthew McConaughey is apparently not interested in running for Texas governor unless he thinks the role would allow him to truly make a difference.

On Thursday, the Texas-born actor went on the New York Times Opinon’s Sway podcast, an interview show hosted by Kara Swisher, and explained what he meant by “measuring” a possible run for governor next year, saying he is still learning about politics from mentors — who he refrained from naming — and is considering how useful he would be in the position.

“Is that a place to make real change or is it a place where right now it’s a fixed game, you go in there, you just put on a bunch of band-aids, in fours year you walk out and they rip them off and you’re gone?” the actor told Swisher. “I’m not interested in that.”

The self-proclaimed “folk-singing philosopher, poet-statesman” went on to call politics a “broken business” when it comes to political ideologies and said he fears a civil war if politicians remain on a path of “preservation of party” while not truly considering their constituents. McConaughey also reasoned that he could have have more influence in an informal role.

With regards to fixing this issue, McConaughey said, “One side I’m arguing is ‘McConaughey exactly, that’s why you need to go get in there. The other side is ‘that’s a bag of rats man. Don’t touch that with a ten foot pole. You have another lane. You have another category to have influence and get done things you’d like to get done and help how you think you can help and even heal divides.'”

You can parse it out however you want. I tend to think that actual candidates are more definitive about their intentions, or at least follow a familiar script when they’re being teases (*cough* *cough* Beto *cough* *cough*). This reads more to me like someone who hasn’t fully engaged with the question, and his subsequent remarks about “third parties” and “aggressive centrism” are just pablum. It might read differently if he were busy articulating positions and how he differed from the establishment, but that requires taking positions and risking the discovery that they’re not as popular or as original and differentiating as you might think. But that’s just me. If you’re dying for him to run, you probably think he sounds like he’s raring to go. We’ll know soon enough. The Texas Signal, which actually listened to that podcast and transcribed some of its more interesting bits, has more.

Beto and McConaughey

by Charles Kuffner.

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Our guy has a few thoughts about that other guy.

Beto O’Rourke

Beto O’Rourke says he is still “very seriously” thinking about running for governor — and that he is not surprised Matthew McConaughey, another potential candidate, is polling so well against Gov. Greg Abbott.

During an interview at the 2021 Texas Tribune Festival, the former Democratic U.S. representative from El Paso praised McConaughey for using his star power to help Texas, including after the 2019 mass shooting in O’Rourke’s hometown of El Paso. Addressing a recent poll showing McConaughey with a lead over Abbott, though, O’Rourke suggested the actor is benefiting from being a blank slate to most Texans when it comes to his current politics.

“He’s a really popular figure whose political views have not in any way been fixed,” O’Rourke said. “I don’t know, for example, who he voted for in the most consequential election since 1864 in this country. I don’t know how he feels about any of the issues that we’ve brought up. … So I think that might explain part of [the polling].”

See here for the background, and here for my explanation of the McConaughey bubble, which is similar in nature to Beto’s. If you can project whatever you want onto a candidate, you’re probably more likely to support that candidate. Not that complicated.

Pressed on his decision-making timeline, O’Rourke only said, repeatedly, that he would make up his mind “in the near future.”

O’Rourke did offer a case against Abbott, while responding to a question about whether he could run for U.S. Senate again in 2024.

“The fight in front of us right now is the one that we’re talking about today in Texas right now, given what’s going on,” O’Rourke said. “Given the deep damage and chaos and incompetence that is connected to Greg Abbott — from the winter freeze, the abortion ban, the permitless carry, the anti-mask mandate, the terrible toll that COVID has taken on this state and where it has decimated populations along the border, like in my hometown of El Paso — this is what we need to be focused on right now.”

[…]

O’Rourke said Democrats’ underwhelming showing in [South Texas] was partly due to the Biden campaign not paying enough attention to the state overall.

“That didn’t help things, but it also had a lot to do with Democrats far too often talking to Hispanic or Latino voters on the border as though they’re somehow apart or separate from the rest of the state, and talking to them in the language of victimhood or grievance or, ‘This bad shit is coming down on you, and aren’t you angry and aren’t you with us?’ instead of talking about the aspirational things that matter most to us,” O’Rourke said. “‘Am I going to be able to hang on to my job? Can I find a better one? Could I afford to buy this boat or send my kid to college?’”

O’Rourke said Republicans in 2020 — including former President Donald Trump — “had a really compelling message, even though it was predicated on a false choice.” That false choice, as O’Rourke described it, was between keeping one’s job and staying safe during the coronavirus pandemic, an apparent reference to the business shutdowns that played out in the months before the 2020 election.

“From listening to folks in South Texas and along the border,” O’Rourke said, “that really resonated.”

That’s a pretty good explanation of what happened, and a good pivot to Abbott’s weaknesses. I do think that Beto is a better candidate than before. He just needs to make it official.

Quinnipiac: Everyone is under water

by Charles Kuffner.

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Not a great poll for anyone.

As Governor Greg Abbott faces reelection in 2022, a slight majority of voters say 51 – 42 percent that he does not deserve to be reelected, according to a Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pea-ack) University poll of Texas registered voters released today. In June 2021, voters were split, as 48 percent said he did not deserve to be reelected and 46 percent said he did.

Today, Governor Abbott receives a divided 44 – 47 percent job approval rating, marking the first time Abbott’s score is underwater since Quinnipiac University began polling in Texas in April 2018. In today’s poll, Republicans approve 83 – 12 percent, independents are divided with 43 percent approving and 47 percent disapproving, and Democrats disapprove 89 – 6 percent.

Texas voters say 50 – 33 percent that they do not think Beto O’Rourke would make a good governor, while 17 percent did not offer an opinion. Voters say 49 – 25 percent that they do not think Matthew McConaughey would make a good governor, while 26 percent did not offer an opinion.

Voters were asked about Abbott’s handling of four separate issues, and he received one positive score out of the four.

Handling the economy: 53 percent approve, while 39 percent disapprove;

Handling the situation at the Mexican border: 43 percent approve, while 46 percent disapprove;

Handling the response to the coronavirus: 46 percent approve, while 50 percent disapprove;

Handling the issue of abortion: 37 percent approve, while 53 percent disapprove.

Voters are split on whether Abbott is taking Texas in the right or wrong direction, as 48 percent say that Abbott is taking Texas in the wrong direction and 45 percent say in the right direction.

Voters were also asked if they thought Greg Abbott would make a good president. Two-thirds (67 percent) said no, while 24 percent said yes.

Voters in Texas give President Joe Biden a negative 32 – 61 percent job approval rating. This marks a 24- point net change from June 2021, when 45 percent of Texas voters approved of the job he was doing and 50 percent disapproved.

On Biden’s handling of the response to the coronavirus, voters give him a slightly negative 44 – 49 percent approval rating. This is a substantial drop from June 2021 when they approved 58 – 37 percent.

On Biden’s handling of the situation at the Mexican border, voters give him a negative 20 – 71 percent approval rating, which is a drop compared to a negative 29 – 64 percent rating in June 2021.

All that is from the Quinnipiac press release, which contains poll data as well. Their June results are here.

The negative trend in Abbott’s approval numbers has been seen in every other recent poll, with the UT-Tyler/DMN poll being the most recent example. As with the other polls, this is the worst position Abbott has ever found himself in, in many cases the first time he’s had a negative rating. I have no idea if this will persist – all of the usual cliches about what constitutes a long time in politics apply here – but it’s been quite interesting to see. As I’ve noted before, this is mostly about Democrats shedding any positive feeling they ever had about Abbott, with independents largely being sour on him as well. Whatever crossover appeal Abbott once had – and past election results say he had it – it’s not showing up in these numbers.

As for Biden, we don’t have nearly as much recent approval data on him as we do for Abbott. That UTT/DMN poll showed a decline in his rating, as one would expect given the nation numbers, but it was not nearly as bad as this – they had him at 42/50, which I thought was pretty decent all things considered. The UT-Texas Policy Project had him at 40/51 in August, but that may be old enough as to be out of date. We’ll have to wait and see what other pollsters say. My feeling is that the Q-pac number is a bit of a negative outlier, but we’ll need to see the data to know.

As for Beto and McConaughey, the only numbers for them – really, for Beto – that I want to see are head-to-head numbers with Abbott. It continues to mystify me that a pollster like Quinnipiac would ask a fuzzy question like this one without also doing a straight up poll of the race. I do not understand the reasoning behind that.

One more thing, which stood out quite a bit for me in the crosstabs: There’s a huge gender gap, for Abbott and the Republicans in general. Look at these approval numbers:


Candidate  With men  With women
===============================
Abbott        49-39       39-54
The Lege      43-46       34-54
Cruz          54-38       40-55
Cornyn        42-35       30-46
Biden         26-68       38-55
Trump         48-42       39-53
Beto          25-61       41-39

On the abortion issue specifically, Abbott is at 44-45 for men, 31-60 for women, easily the most negative response he got on any of the individual issues they asked about. Biden and Beto (this was for the “would make a good Governor” question) do better with women, but the dichotomy with the Republicans (including the Lege) is just striking to me.

I should note that there were similar gaps in the June poll. Indeed, it was even more apparent in Abbott’s numbers then, mostly because men were more strongly in favor of Abbott then – he was at a very robust 58-35 with men in June, and at 39-56 with women, a tiny bit lower than in September. His “deserves re-election” numbers went from 54/40 for men and 39/56 for women in June to 49/43 and 36/57 in September. Maybe the men are catching up to the women, and maybe this is evidence that the dip is temporary. Either way, the numbers strongly suggest what a 2022 electoral strategy might look like. I’ll keep an eye on this as we start to get more numbers.

UT-Tyler/DMN: Abbott loses ground

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

A well-timed poll result.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) may be feeling the pressure, the latest poll from The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler shows.

Abbott’s approval rating has dropped to 45 percent in the aftermath of controversial legislation such as a ban on mask mandates amid the COVID-19 pandemic and a ban on most abortions after six weeks. It’s far too early to tell how things will play out in next year’s election, but two well-known potential candidates look like they could give Abbott a serious run if they do wind up entering the race.

Actor Matthew McConaughey, who has hinted that he’s entertaining the idea (though it’s unclear what party, if any, he would represent), led Abbott by nine points in a hypothetical matchup in the new poll, while former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Tex.), who ran against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) for a spot in the upper chamber and later took a shot at the Democratic presidential nomination, cut a previous 12-point head-to-head deficit against Abbott down to five in the survey. Abbott does have a more comfortable lead against Republican primary challengers, however.

The DMN story is here, and the poll data is here. I’ve covered the McConaughey matter before, and you can refer to those previous entries because the issue remains the same. For what it’s worth, the UT-Tyler poll doesn’t mention Beto’s party either, but I think we can safely assume that a decent number of poll respondents correctly identify him as a Democrat.

The headline result here is that Abbott leads Beto 42-37 in this poll after having led him 45-33 in the July poll. We will surely start to get a lot more head-to-head data now that Beto is semi-officially in the race. We do have some previous results we can look at to provide some context, so let’s do that. First, here are the approval/disapproval numbers for Joe Biden and Greg Abbott, plus the favorable/unfavorable numbers for Beto:


April

Name     App  Disapp  Neither
=============================
Biden     48      41       12  
Abbott    50      36       15
Beto      35      37       27

June

Name      App  Disapp  Neither
==============================
Biden      47      41       11
Abbott     50      36       14
Beto       31      40       29

September

Name      App  Disapp  Neither
==============================
Biden      42      50        9
Abbott     45      44       11
Beto       34      42       24

I’ve combined the strong/somewhat approve/disapprove numbers for Abbott and Biden, and the strong/somewhat favorable/unfavorable numbers for Beto; there was also a “don’t know enough” option for Beto, which I added into the “Neither” column. Biden’s approval drop is expected given the national numbers, and honestly they’re better than I might have expected given that. Abbott is doing better here than in the recent Texas Politics Project and Morning Consult polls, but the direction is the same. Again, it’s hard to say how the various factors will play into the 2022 election, so for now let’s just note that this is where we are.

Two other data points of interest. Both were asked for the first time in the September poll, so there’s nothing to compare them to from this source, but we do have some data from elsewhere. First, this poll included a “right direction/wrong direction” question for Texas, with the result being 44/54 wrong/right. Dems were 40/59 for “wrong”, Republicans were 59/39 for “right”, and indies were interestingly 33/64 for “wrong”. Make of that what you will, and compare to the recent Texas 2036 survey of people’s “right/wrong direction” attitudes.

Finally, this poll gets into mask and vaccine mandates and the bans on same:

Do you support or oppose Governor Abbott’s ban on mask mandates?


        Total    Dem  Ind  Rep
==============================
Support   44%    33%  32%  67%
Oppose    55%    66%  67%  33%

Do you support or oppose Governor Abbott’s ban on vaccine mandates?


        Total    Dem  Ind  Rep
==============================
Support   49%    37%  38%  72%
Oppose    49%    62%  60%  28%

There’s also a question about mask mandates in schools, with 50% saying masks should be required in all K-12 classrooms, 26% saying schools should be allowed to decide, and 20% saying no mandates. There’s national data showing that the public is broadly in favor of how Democrats and President Biden have responded to COVID (and also of mask and vaccine mandates) and opposed to the Republican response. This is the sort of thing that can certainly change over time, but for now, and for a nascent Beto campaign, coming in hot on a platform that strongly criticizes Abbott on this issue would seem to have some traction. Again, more polling will surely follow, but this is very much an issue to watch.

Other questions from McConaughey Poll II

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Part Two of my look at the June DMN/UT-Tyler poll, which has its share of interesting results.

Still, not everything is coming up roses for Abbott. His job approval rating is respectable, with 50% approving of his performance and 36% disapproving.

But that pales next to the 61%-23% split in his favor in April 2020, as Texans rallied around him in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic.

Also, Texans’ assessment of Abbott’s response to the devastating February winter storm has soured, at least slightly. For the first time, though it’s within the poll’s margin of error, more said Abbott responded not well or not well at all than said he performed well or very well.

And amid continued calls for conservation of electricity, Texas voters are losing confidence that the state’s electricity grid can withstand heat waves and spiking demand this summer, the poll showed.

[…]

A plurality of all voters continues to say Attorney General Ken Paxton, accused by former associates of misuse of office, has the integrity to be the state’s top lawyer: 33% say he does and 25% say he doesn’t. “These numbers are likely to soften,” pollster Owens said, as Paxton’s two opponents in next year’s GOP primary for attorney general, Land Commissioner George P. Bush and former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman, begin pounding on him. Among likely primary voters, Paxton has support from 42%; Bush, 34%; and Guzman, 4%. A Trump endorsement could shake up the race, though not push any of the three clear of a probable runoff, Owens said.

See here for part one, and here for the poll data. To cut to the chase, here are the approval numbers given, including the same numbers from the March and April polls:


Name         March     April      June
======================================
Biden      47 - 41   48 - 41   47 - 42
Abbott     52 - 31   50 - 36   50 - 36
Patrick    38 - 27   37 - 26   37 - 24
Paxton     36 - 29   37 - 26   37 - 24
Cornyn     40 - 26   42 - 24   37 - 21
Cruz       42 - 45   44 - 42   45 - 38
Beto       37 - 42   35 - 37   31 - 40
Harris     42 - 43   43 - 40   39 - 42

Note that the question for the first four is “approve/disapprove”, and for the second four is “favorable/unfavorable”. There are usually some small differences in numbers when both questions are asked about a particular person, but not enough to worry about for these purposes. The numbers are weirdly positive overall, especially when compared to the recent UT/Trib and Quinnipiac numbers. For UT/Trib, which only asks “approve/disapprove”, we got these totals for June:


Biden      43 - 47
Abbott     44 - 44
Patrick    36 - 37
Paxton     33 - 36
Cornyn     34 - 41
Cruz       43 - 46

And for Quinnipiac, which asked both – the first five are approvals, the Beto one is favorables:


Biden      45 - 50
Abbott     48 - 46
Paxton     41 - 39
Cornyn     41 - 42
Cruz       46 - 49
Beto       34 - 42

They didn’t ask about Dan Patrick. For whatever the reason, the “Don’t know/no opinion” responses are higher in the DMN/UT-Tyler polls, which seems to translate to lower disapproval numbers, at least for the Republicans. The partisan splits are wild, too. These are the Democratic numbers only (June results):


Name       DMN/UTT   UT-Trib     Quinn
======================================
Abbott     29 - 60    8 - 82   10 - 85
Patrick    25 - 42    6 - 71       N/A
Paxton     27 - 50    7 - 66   27 - 56
Cornyn     26 - 35    6 - 74   20 - 69
Cruz       26 - 58    5 - 86   12 - 84

LOL at the difference between the UT-Trib and DMN/UT-Tyler numbers. It’s like these are two completely different samples. With the exception of their weirdly pro-Paxton result, Quinnipiac is closer to UT-Trib, and I think is reasonably accurate in its expression of Democratic loathing for these particular people. I don’t have a good explanation for the unfathomable DMN/UT-Tyler numbers, but because I find them so mind-boggling, I refuse to engage in any of their issues polling. You can’t make sense from samples that don’t make sense.

The last thing to note is the Republican primary result for Attorney General, in which Paxton has a modest lead over George P Bush and Eva Guzman barely registers. I think this is basically a measure of name recognition, and thus should serve as a reminder that most normal people have no idea who many of the folks who hold statewide office are. I expect she will improve, and it may be that she will start out better in a less goofy poll. But again, she’s not that well known, and she’s running against two guys that are. That’s a handicap, and it’s going to take a lot of effort and resources to overcome it.

McConaughey Poll II: It’s all still ridiculous

by Charles Kuffner.

4 comments

Sorry, none of the canonical sequel subtitles fit here.

Gov. Greg Abbott, after trailing potential challenger Matthew McConaughey in the spring, has rebounded and now has a slight — but not statistically significant — lead over the movie star in a hypothetical matchup in next year’s race for governor, according to a poll released Sunday by The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler.

Abbott, a two-term Republican, is favored by 39% of Texans of all political stripes, while McConaughey, who hasn’t picked a political party or even committed to running, draws backing from 38%. Nearly a quarter of Texans said they’d vote for someone else.

The poll, conducted June 22-29, surveyed 1,090 registered voters and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

It showed that since April, Abbott has improved his standing with all voters, though he’s still behind among independents. He is likely to handily dispatch fellow Republican and former state Sen. Don Huffines of Dallas in their tussle for the GOP gubernatorial nomination. Among Texans who say they’ll vote in the Republican primary, Abbott leads Huffines, 77% to 12%.

While no major Democrat has announced against Abbott, former El Paso congressman and presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke hasn’t ruled out another bid for statewide office.

If O’Rourke tosses his bandanna in the ring, he starts out behind: While about two-thirds of Democrats support O’Rourke, 78% of the more numerous Republicans back Abbott. And Abbott’s edging O’Rourke among independents (35%-28%), for an overall lead of 45%-33% in their general-election showdown.

[…]

Pollster Mark Owens, who teaches political science at UT-Tyler, noted that Abbott improved his standing with potential GOP primary voters, with 67% of them picking him over McConaughey in June, compared with just 59% in April.

Simultaneously, Abbott nearly doubled his admittedly small support among Democrats, to 15% in the latest poll. Among independents, McConaughey continued to lead Abbott, though by 39%-29%, compared with 44%-28% in April.

“Signing new laws and optimism of new jobs across the state has given a renewed context for Governor Abbott to regain support from conservative voters who were disaffected by pandemic restrictions,” Owens said.

See here for the poll data, and here for my discussion of the previous poll, for which all of my objections still apply. The one unsurprising thing about this poll is that it shows a reduction in support for McConaughey among Republican voters along with a corresponding rise in support for Greg Abbott among Republicans. This is not a surprise since (spoiler alert) Greg Abbott is the Republican candidate in the race, and Matthew McConaughey is not, and could not be in a November scenario against Abbott. It’s not noted in the story, but McConaughey’s support among Democrats also fell, from 66-8 in the April poll to 56-15 in this poll. That too is a reflection of the fact that at least at this time, McConaughey is not the Democratic candidate against Abbott, either. He still could be, if he wanted to and was willing to work for it, but until such time this is all just make believe.

As for the Beto/Abbott matchup, first let me say thank you for including the question, and second that in this poll Beto wins Democratic voters by a 66-17 margin. I feel confident saying that if this is the November 2022 race, Beto will get more than 66% of Democratic voters, and Greg Abbott will get less than 17%. Abbott will also get more than 78% of Republican voters – he wins them 78-9 in this poll – and Beto will get less than nine percent, though not that much less since there’s less room for it to shrink and there are always some crossovers. Point being, again, all this is a made up exercise in meaningless numbers.

The somewhat interesting result in this poll is the Don Huffines-versus-Greg Abbott question, which is bizarrely asked of all poll respondents and not just Republican primary voters. That’s how you get a result of 39% of Democrats saying they would vote for Don Huffines, instead of 100% of Democrats saying they would fling themselves off a cliff, given an election choice of Huffines and Abbott. For the “Republican primary voters” subsample, Abbott wins 77-12, with 11% saying they would vote for someone else. This was all done before Allen West decided to inflict himself on us, and so it serves as a data point to see what if any effect West’s entry into the race has on Abbott’s base level of support among Republicans. Does West pick up whatever support he gets from the 23% who already said they weren’t voting for Abbott, or does he peel away some of Abbott’s support? My guess is it’s more the former than the latter, but we’ll see.

The poll also has some approval/disapproval numbers, some issues polling, and an AG primary question. I’ll get to that in the next post.

Quinnipiac: Abbott has weak re-elect numbers

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

As Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, seeks reelection next year, voters in the Lone Star State are divided on whether or not he deserves to be reelected as 46 percent say he does and 48 percent say he does not deserve to be reelected, according to a Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pea-ack) University poll of registered voters in Texas released today.

Republicans say 82 – 13 percent that Abbott deserves to be reelected, while Democrats say 88 – 11 percent, and independents say 50 – 42 percent he does not deserve to be reelected.

With former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat, not ruling out a possible gubernatorial run in 2022, voters overall say 52 – 41 percent they would not like to see him run for governor. Democrats say 77 – 14 percent they do want to see O’Rourke run for governor, independents are divided saying 50 – 45 percent they do not want to see him run, and Republicans say 89 – 6 percent they do not want to see O’Rourke run.

Another name gaining attention for a possible gubernatorial run is Matthew McConaughey, the actor and Texas native. His political party affiliation is unclear. While 41 percent of voters say they would like to see him run, 47 percent say they would not like to see him run. Independents and Democrats are split, as independents say 47 – 43 percent and Democrats say 44 – 43 percent they would like to see him run. Republicans say 60 – 29 percent they would not like to see him run.

Governor Greg Abbott receives a mixed job approval rating as 48 percent of Texas voters approve of the job he’s doing and 46 percent disapprove. This is little changed from his 48 – 44 percent job approval rating in July of 2020. Today’s disapproval rating is the highest for Abbott since being elected in 2018. Other job approvals are mostly mixed.

President Biden gets 45/50 approval numbers, while Abbott scores slightly better on favorability than he did on approval. For reasons I do not understand, they did not ask the obvious Abbott/Beto, Abbott/McConaughey, and Abbott/Beto/McConaughey horse race questions. The poll data is at the bottom, underneath the press release stuff. The Quinnpiac polling analyst sums Abbott up as “A Trump favorite in a state that is turning less red in recent election cycles, Abbott has a decent but in no way overwhelming grasp on reelection”. There’s a separate Q-poll out that asks about some issues, and I’ll get to that tomorrow. We haven’t had much in the way of polling data lately, so enjoy this for what it’s worth.

We return again to the “Is Beto running for Governor” question

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

It’s all about tonal shifts.

Beto O’Rourke

There’s no road trip, no soul searching. No beard or blogging. But Beto O’Rourke is making a political life decision again.

Three years after becoming Democrats’ breakout star out of Texas, and a year removed from crashing back to Earth in a short-lived presidential run, O’Rourke is again weighing another campaign — this time for governor.

But now O’Rourke, who teased an announcement of his bid for the White House on the cover of Vanity Fair, is being quiet about it. He says he hasn’t ruled out anything, but isn’t saying much else. And Texas Democrats are itching for an answer.

“Impatience is not the word for it,” Texas Democratic Party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa said. “But anxious is.”

For months, O’Rourke has kept his options open. A top aide to the former Texas congressman and presidential candidate said O’Rouke, 48, has not ruled out challenging Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in 2022 but has taken no formal steps toward a campaign, like calling donors or recruiting staff. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss private deliberations more freely.

[…]

The decision facing O’Rourke comes at a dark moment for Texas Democrats, even by the standards of a hapless 25 years of getting clobbered in statewide elections and steamrolled in the Legislature. For one, they are still wobbling after their massive expectations for a 2020 breakthrough flopped spectacularly. The party had hoped to flip the Texas House and O’Rourke led a massive campaign to do just that, but failed to give Democrats a single extra seat.

The Election Day wipeout emboldened Texas Republicans, who have responded by muscling through staunchly conservative measures over guns, abortion and teaching curriculum that Democrats are all but powerless to stop.

Any Texas Democrat running for governor faces long odds against the well-funded Abbott, who could ultimately face a stiffer challenge from actor Matthew McConaughey and his musings about joining the race himself. Still, O’Rourke went from virtual unknown to nearly upsetting Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018, and relishes the role of underdog.

You know my opinion, and the less said about McConaughey, the better. Honestly, this kind of “insider speaking anonymously to a reporter” story is an old tactic, meant to keep the name out there and gauge interest without having to make the formal commitments just yet. Not talking to a reporter, even anonymously, is always an option for someone who has no intention of being candidate, as well as their associates. In that light, this is an indicator that he really is thinking about running. But then, that is what I would think.

Oh Lord, we’re still talking about Matthew McConaughey

by Charles Kuffner.

9 comments

Please make it stop. At least, please make it stop until and unless there is some actual thing that is worth talking about.

Alright, alright, alright … he might, he might, he might.

Matthew McConaughey has publicly said a run for Texas governor in 2022 is a “true consideration.”

But the Academy Award-winning actor’s interest goes a step further than musings in interviews. McConaughey has been quietly making calls to influential people in Texas political circles, including a deep-pocketed moderate Republican and energy CEO, to take their temperature on the race and to talk about seriously throwing his hat in the ring, according to multiple people familiar with the conversations.

Most political strategists say they doubt McConaughey, a Texas native, will sacrifice his status as a beloved cultural icon in the state for the dirty business of politics. They don’t see a viable path forward, either, pointing to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s backing among the business community and millions in the bank — but the state’s political class is keeping a close eye on the Hollywood star’s plans nonetheless.

“I find it improbable, but it’s not out of the question,” said top Republican strategist Karl Rove, who relayed a recent encounter with Lawrence Wright, describing the New Yorker journalist as “hyperventilating” at the prospect that his close friend and fellow Texan might run. (Asked for comment on McConaughey, Wright replied in an email, “I’m trying to lower my profile in this, so I’ll politely decline.”)

[…]

“I’m a little more surprised that people aren’t taking him more seriously, honestly,” said Brendan Steinhauser, an Austin-based GOP strategist. “Celebrity in this country counts for a lot … it’s not like some C-list actor no one likes. He has an appeal.”

There’s little question that McConaughey — who became a household name for his starring roles in top films like “Dazed and Confused” and “Dallas Buyers Club,” delivering memorable lines in his signature languid drawl — would draw national media attention should he enter the race against Abbott.

What’s less clear is what kind of platform McConaughey would run on or even which party banner he would run under. McConaughey has been peppered with questions about politics and news of the day while promoting his memoir, “Greenlights,” but overall, has been vague about his political leanings, saying little about specific issues or policies.

The political calculations for a decision about party affiliation would also be tricky.

“The question is: Would he run as a Republican? A Democrat? Independent? And where is he on the political scale? He says he has a funny phrase about being a hardcore centrist, but what party would he run under?” said Rove.

See here and here for some background. God help me, I agree with Karl Rove, who is at least asking the right questions for these stupid articles.

There are only two types of people McConaughey could be talking to, assuming this isn’t all a bunch of hooey. One is the kind of person who could write him a very big check in the event he does run. He’s going to need a lot of those people, because Greg Abbott has a gazillion dollars in his campaign finance account. It’s true that McConaughey has more name recognition than your typical novice candidate, but he’d still have to let people know what he stands for and what he’d want to do, not to mention attack Abbott and defend himself from Abbott’s attacks. And two, he’ll need to talk to people who would be willing to work on his campaign. In the class of political professionals, there are likely two types: Those who will tell him that running a campaign will be very difficult and his odds of winning are not great, and those that will be happy to cash his checks. Good luck with that.

One more thing:

Meanwhile the Democratic Party has no announced candidate as of yet. Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, whose 2018 Senate run against Ted Cruz vaulted him into national prominence and a failed presidential bid, has yet to make a decision about whether or not he enters the race.

Former HUD Secretary and fellow 2020 hopeful Julián Castro is another potential candidate.

“He hasn’t ruled anything out and we’re watching the race closely,” said Sawyer Hackett, executive director of Castro’s People First Future PAC.

We have discussed the Beto situation. This is the first I’ve heard from someone connected with Julian Castro on the topic in awhile, and it’s not a No. So there’s that. The Texas Signal has more.

What is the point of this Matthew McConaughey poll?

by Charles Kuffner.

6 comments

I have questions about this.

Matthew McConaughey commands more support to be Texas’ next governor than incumbent Greg Abbott, according to a poll released Sunday by The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler.

However, the film actor and political newcomer could hit potholes in either major party’s primary if he enters next year’s governor’s race, the poll found.

For months, McConaughey has teased political pundits and TV talk show hosts with musings that he might enter politics in his home state.

If he were to take the plunge and run for governor, the poll found, 45% of Texas registered voters would vote for McConaughey, 33% would vote for Abbott and 22% would vote for someone else.

McConaughey’s double-digit lead over the two-term Republican incumbent is significant. The poll, conducted April 6-13, surveyed 1,126 registered voters and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.92 percentage points.

But 56% of Republican voters said they’d vote for Abbott, compared with only 30% for McConaughey.

While Democrats broke 66% to 8% for McConaughey, and independents 44% to 28%, more than twice as many Democratic primary voters — 51% — said they wanted a progressive candidate for governor than wanted a centrist — 25%.

That could pose a problem. McConaughey, who has criticized both major parties, has suggested he’s more of a moderate.

And in the GOP gubernatorial primary, that’s also not obviously a ticket to success. Solid majorities of poll respondents who described themselves as conservative, evangelical or retirement-age Republican primary voters said they’d vote for Abbott.

[…]

Jason Stanford, who managed the campaign of second-place finisher and Democrat Chris Bell in the 2006 gubernatorial race, said McConaughey poses no threat to Abbott.

“There doesn’t appear to be a huge groundswell of discontent for Abbott,” Stanford said. Once McConaughey declares as a Democrat or Republican, reality will set in with Texas voters, he added.

“If you ID as a Democrat or a Republican, you’re going to get different answers about him in polls,” Stanford said. “He’s fun, but once you put him in a political context, things will change.”

Poll details can be found here. There’s some issues and approval polling that I’ll get to in a separate post and which is actually kind of interesting, but as for the Abbott/McConaughey question, the only thing you need to read is what Jason Sanford said, because he’s 100% correct.

The first problem with this poll question is in the question itself, which is worded as follows: “Matthew McConaughey has been talked about as a potential candidate for Governor of Texas. If he ran, would you be likely to support him more than Governor Abbott?” Do you see what’s missing in that question? It’s any mention of what (if any) party McConaughey would be claiming. If he’s running as a Democrat against Abbott, then there’s no way in hell he gets 30% of Republicans to support him. Even getting ten percent would be seismic and likely enough to win, but we can’t tell what kind of actual crossover appeal he might have because the question is asked without that piece of information, leaving the respondent to assume that this is some theoretical, non-partisan race. You know, the kind that we don’t have for state elections.

If McConaughey were to run as an independent, then this would need to be polled as a three-way race, because the Democrats would surely have a candidate as well. One could possibly imagine a scenario in which McConaughey mounted an independent campaign and the Texas Democratic Party decided as a tactical matter to support him, the way Dems have supported independent candidates for Senate or Governor in Maine and Kansas and Alaska in recent years. The problem with that scenario is that while McConaughey could announce his independent candidacy now and start staffing up for it, he can’t begin the petition process to get on the ballot until after the primary election, or after the primary runoff if there was one for Governor, and there’s nothing to stop someone from filing to run as a Democrat in the primary in the meantime. Any Democratic nominee, whether a candidate who might be viable against Abbott on their own or a more marginal type who still has appeal to some part of the Democratic base, will draw enough support to make an independent far less competitive in the general. To put it another way, it’s extremely unlikely Matthew McConaughey gets 66% of the Democratic vote in a three-way race.

Maybe I’m wrong about these assertions. You could ask again and name McConaughey as the Democratic nominee, and see how much Republican support he gets. You could also ask about a three-way race that features Abbott and McConaughey and an actual, named Democrat. And if you’re going to do that, why not also ask the horse-race question about just Abbott and that same Dem? Why not ask the Abbott-versus-Beto and/or Abbott-versus-Julian question, which would allow a comparison to McConaughey as a Dem, then ask again with McConaughey in there as an independent? We all understand that at this point in the calendar all these questions are mostly for funsies, but with some useful information in there if you know how to look for it. At least the Abbott/Beto or Abbott/Julian questions would give a data point about whether Dems have any cause to feel optimistic or not, and the three-way race question might tell us something about how much Republican support for Abbott is softer than it looks. Any of it would tell us more than the actual question did.

And of course, if McConaughey were to run against Abbott in a Republican primary, then asking this question in a sample that includes more non-Republicans than Republicans is going to give you a nonsense answer. Point being, if I haven’t beaten it to a sufficiently bloody pulp yet, identifying McConaughey’s partisan affiliation in this question matters. Not including it makes this whole exercise useless for anything that blog fodder and Twitter posts. Which they got, so mission accomplished.

One more thing, before I end this post and write the other one about approvals and issues polling: For some reason, the sample – which as before is partly phone and partly web panel, and all made up of registered voters – voted in the 2020 Presidential election as follows:

Trump – 36%
Biden – 32%
Other – 1%
Did not vote – 30%
Refused to say – 1%

If you’re thinking that’s an awfully large “did not vote” percentage, consider how the sample from their March poll answered the same question:

Trump – 43%
Biden – 38%
Other – 4%
Did not vote – 11%
Refused to say – 4%

Why so different? I have no idea. Why do we think we can draw reasonable conclusions from a poll sample that includes such a large number of people who didn’t vote in the highest turnout election in Texas history? Again, I have no idea. To be sure, the 2022 election will have smaller turnout, and an RV sample is all that makes sense at this time. But maybe weighting the sample a bit more towards actual voters might make any projections about the next election more accurate.

Is Beto running for Governor or not?

by Charles Kuffner.

2 comments

Nothing has changed. Please back away from any ledges you may be approaching.

Beto O’Rourke

Former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke has not ruled out a run for governor after all.

Earlier Friday, The Dallas Morning News published remarks O’Rourke made on an upcoming morning program that roused the Texas political class and suggested he no longer was interested in running for governor.

“I’ve got no plans to run, and I’m very focused on the things that I’m lucky enough to do right now — organizing, registering voters and teaching,” O’Rourke said on NBC DFW’s “Lone Star Politics,” which will air Sunday. “I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing now.”

The O’Rourke camp then quickly reached out to The Texas Tribune to clarify his sentiment.

“What I said today is what I’ve been saying for months: I’m not currently considering a run for office,” he said in a statement. “I’m focused on what I’m doing now (teaching and organizing.) Nothing’s changed and nothing I said would preclude me from considering a run in the future.”

The El Paso Democrat flirted with a run earlier this year when he said in an interview that running against Republican Gov. Greg Abbott was “something I’m going to think about.” Last month, he stoked more rumors of his interest in the seat when he reemerged as an organizing force amid the Texas winter storm.

[…]

O’Rourke suggested suggested Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins as other potential gubernatorial candidates in the television interview. Former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro is another oft-mentioned potential contender, and Austin-based actor Matthew McConaughey is also publicly mulling a run.

“My plan right now is to run for reelection,” Hidalgo told Texas Tribune CEO Evan Smith on his “Point of Order” podcast last month. Asked if she would rule out running for something else in 2022, she said, “I wouldn’t say it’s something that I’m actively pursuing right now.”

I first heard about this little kerfuffle on Friday afternoon when I saw this tweet:

.
In an appearance on Lone Star Politics Podcast with @dallasnews and @NBCDFW, O’Rourke suggests @JudgeClayJ or @LinaHidalgoTX would make good candidates.

— Mede Nix (@medenix) 3:44 PM – 02 April 2021

I admit my first thought was “ah, crap, now who do we need to pin some hopes on?” I belong to a Facebook group called “Beto O’Rourke for Governor of Texas” (*) and cruised over there to see what the freakout looked like, but didn’t see any postings related to this. Maybe the news hadn’t crossed from one social network to the other yet, I thought, or maybe everyone was just in denial. And not too long later I saw the updated Trib story, and realized that it was all a nothingburger. We are exactly where we were on Friday morning, when Beto was sort of acting like someone who might be a candidate but hadn’t said anything committal one way or the other. So for those of you who might have seen the initial news but not the later update, here you go. You may now resume your previous feelings about this subject.

(*) I remain on Team Julián, but will be perfectly happy with Beto. If there is a “Julián Castro for Governor of Texas” Facebook group, I have not been invited to join it yet.

Matthew McConaughey redux

by Charles Kuffner.

3 comments

Again? sigh All right…

Two weeks ago, in these very same digital pages, I claimed that Matthew McConaughey had shown more leadership during Texas’s devastating winter storms than Senator Ted Cruz, simply by clearing the low bar of not scuttling off to Mexico. Now, I don’t know for a fact that Matthew McConaughey reads this column, or that he’s even aware of its disturbingly obsessive chronicling of weekly McCona-nutiae. However, it now seems like he may have caught wind of the sentiments expressed, and—rather than sending me hate mail, like a normal person—he may be taking it to heart. McConaughey now says that running for Texas governor is a “true consideration,” and no longer just an idle fantasy to fill magazine interviews.

The Austin actor took his latest tentative step into genuine statesmanship during an appearance on Crime Stoppers of Houston’s The Balanced Voice podcast, where host Rania Mankarious brought up the political aspirations he’s been casually floating since last fall. “I’m looking into now again, what is my leadership role?” McConaughey replied. “Because I do think I have some things to teach and share, and what is my role? What’s my category in my next chapter of life that I’m going into?”

See here for the background. Look, there are three options here, if McConaughey is actually thinking about this and not just letting his mind wander a bit on a podcast: File as a Republican, file as a Democrat, and file as an independent. I think we can all agree that I have as good a chance of beating Greg Abbott in a Republican primary as McConaughey does. As for filing as an independent, I have two words for that: Kinky Friedman. Here are two more, as a bonus: Grandma Strayhorn. The one thing that such a move would do is split the anti-Abbott vote, for which the only possible outcome is an Abbott re-election. Abbott would surely do better than Rick Perry’s 39% in 2006, making any plausible pathway to beating him that much less likely. Maybe if literally nobody filed as a Democrat there might be a chance, but that’s not going to happen – even if no remotely credible candidate chooses to take on Abbott, some Gene Kelly type will, and that will be that.

Which leaves filing as a Democrat as the only viable option. I grant that the odds of winning against Abbott as a Democrat aren’t that much greater than either of the other two scenarios, but they are greater than zero. That means doing the work to win over a Democratic primary electorate, which I assure you wants very much to beat Greg Abbott and which right now is hoping that Beto O’Rourke or Julian Castro files to run against him. McConaughey could win a Dem primary, especially if he announced first and started raising money and actively campaigning and, you know, stated some policy opinions and action items for his hoped-for term as Governor. If he did the work, in other words. No guarantees, of course – if Beto or Julian or some other Democrat of reasonable stature and accomplishment threw a hat into the ring, I’d make that person the favorite just for their having been committed to the party and its ideals and membership for more than five minutes. But at least he’d have a chance. If he did the work. No sign of that yet, so my position remains the same: Until I see some evidence of actual candidate-like behavior, this is not a thing. Nothing to see here, move along.

Matthew McConaughey?

by Charles Kuffner.

Comments are off for this post

I suppose I’m required to have an opinion about this.

Academy Award-winning actor Matthew McConaughey isn’t gearing up to run for governor in Texas, but he certainly did not rule it out during a radio interview this week.

“I don’t know,” McConaughey said when asked by talk radio host Hugh Hewitt in a national interview. “I mean, that wouldn’t be up to me. It would be up to the people more than it would me.”

But the 51-year-old Uvalde native was clear: He sees big problems with how things are going with politics in general.

“Look, politics seems to be a broken business to me right now,” he said. “And when politics redefines its purpose, I could be a hell of a lot more interested.”

In the interview to promote his new book “Greenlights,” he talked about watching other actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Clint Eastwood get involved in politics and thinking it was interesting to see people of different backgrounds doing the work. But he said he’s still not sure it’s the best route to get things done.

“You know, I still question how much you can really get done in politics, and I don’t know if politics is my avenue to get what maybe I am best equipped to get done,” McConaughey said.

McConaughey didn’t say whether he is a Republican or a Democrat.

Yeah, my opinion is that this is a slow-news-day kind of story, with nothing actually to it. I could write a whole lot of words as to why I think this, but honestly, it’s not worth the bother. I’ll just say this much: I am not gearing up to run for Governor either, but I certainly have not ruled it out. My publicist is now standing by to book interviews.

UPDATE: Looks like not having an opinion was the smart move.