AUSTIN – Just moments after Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was serving up a thick and juicy slab of political red meat to a conservative think tank in Austin on Thursday, the leading Democrat hoping to oust him in November was a few blocks away eating his vegetables.
Rhetorically speaking.
Mike Collier, an Austin outsider who came to Democratic politics through the unlikely route of being an accountant-finance guy for button-down firms like Exxon and PriceWaterhouseCoopers, was explaining the scholarly white paper his campaign prepared on school finance and property tax policy.
Its thesis is that Republican leaders for years have been promising property tax relief, but tax bills keep rising. And despite that steady rise, the state’s financial commitment to public schools continues to lag.
“Read it,” Collier urged the handful of reporters who covered his event at Democratic Party headquarter just southwest of the Texas Capitol and the several dozen viewers who tuned in to his remarks via Facebook Live.
He might have sounded more like a substitute teacher imploring a classroom full of fidgety seventh-graders to crack open Moby Dick than a candidate for what many have argued is the most powerful elected office in Texas.
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Unlike Patrick, a natural showman who parlayed a career in conservative talk radio into political success, Collier is an explainer who takes references to him as a policy wonk as a compliment. The 26-page report he distributed titled “The Great Texas Property Tax Swindle” is laced with charts and tables that shows things like school district spending per student adjusted for inflation since 2010.
It’s dry stuff, but Collier seemed energized explaining it and welcomed detailed questions from reporters and his tuned-in Facebook friends. He got a few, but they did not seem to be near as wonky as he had hoped.
If Collier, who is 56 and has full head of grayish-white hair, looks and sometimes act more like a Republican it’s because he was one – until 2011. The GOP’s growing drift to the right on social issues and what he says is the party’s disassociation with improving public schools prompted his switch.
Although still an outsider, Collier is not new to politics. In 2014, he decided to run for state comptroller and sought to capitalize on his familiarity with the world of finance to win the approval of voters.
Unfortunately for him, Collier picked one of the worst years for a Democrat to run statewide in already Republican-friendly Texas. He got clobbered by 20 points in the general election won by Glenn Hegar, then a state senator from Katy.
This time, it would appear that he has chosen an even steeper mountain to climb. Patrick dominated the 2017 legislative session by flexing both the written and unwritten powers of his office. The lieutenant governor presides over the Texas Senate and sets its agenda. The senators who chair the important committees and carry the sexiest legislation do so because Patrick wants them to do so.
Bills that find themselves on the fast track to passage were placed on the fast-track by Patrick. None of the priority legislation that Patrick wanted passed was left stuck in the Senate. Some of his pet projects, such as the so-called bathroom bill and school vouchers bills did, however, get killed in the House.
If Collier has an opening, even if it’s a narrow one, it would be that enough voters have had enough of the sort of wedge issues Patrick promotes and that the coming mid-term elections give a better than average bump to the party that’s not in the White House.
In poker terms, Collier is playing to draw the always-elusive inside straight. And the cards are stacked against him.
Patrick, who faces underdog challenger Scott Milder in the March 6 primary, started 2018 with $12.6 million in his warchest and has already made $5 million TV ad buy. Collier, who must overcome a primary challenge by first-time candidate named Michael Cooper of Fort Worth, was sitting on less than $60,000 in the bank to start of the year and doesn’t have the fundraising infrastructure that Patrick has built.
But, if Thursday’s event is a guide, Collier does have the zeal for deep-dives into the complex world of tax policy and the patience to explain his plan for improving it. The question is, are there enough voters in Texas willing to join him at the lunch table for the vegetable-plate special?