Julián Castro — formerly a presidential candidate, secretary of the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, and mayor of San Antonio — told KXAN this week that it’s “very unlikely” that he will seek any elected office in 2022.
Castro said he is focused on helping elect Democratic candidates through his political action committee, People First Future.
“Right now, I don’t plan to run in 2022,” Castro said. “I feel like I just went through the marathon of 2020 and then supported candidates and so, right now, I don’t have a target in mind in terms of when I’m going to run again.”
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Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said the political window could soon close for candidates like O’Rourke and Castro, if they don’t win races soon.
“There’s a real shelf life for a political career if you can’t strike while the iron is hot,” Rottinghaus told KXAN. “The likelihood is that activists are going to move on, donors are going to consider new people, and people are going to forget you.”
As we know, Beto is thinking about running, so we’ve got that going for us. I don’t speak for Julián Castro, I have no sway over him, I have no business telling him what to do, but I basically agree with Brandon Rottinghaus about political shelf lives. One reason for that is that the Democratic bench is a little deeper than it used to be – remember when every article that speculated about which Dem might run for a statewide position mentioned John Sharp, mostly because there were so few obvious possibilities to mention? I will remind everyone, myself included, that it is still early, though given the short runway to the filing deadline and the need to raise a gazillion dollars against Abbott and his war chest, it gets late real quickly. My request to Julián Castro, if he really isn’t going to run, is to make that clear to other potential candidates so they don’t have to factor him into their thinking, and maybe encourage – and promise to support – other potential candidates that he thinks would do well. We do need to start forming a lineup, so that we can speak with a more unified voice against Abbott and his myriad screwups and failures as quickly as possible.