Mike Collier's Excellent Political Adventure [View all]

When it was his turn to speak at the Cinco de Mayo political rally in San Antonio’s Rosedale Park, Mike Collier hopped off the stage to get closer to the audience. The event, hosted by the Bexar County Democratic Party, had drawn a thousand or so attendees, most of whom had come to see gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke. Preceding O’Rourke, however, was a parade of down-ballot candidates. Each had exactly three minutes to give a short campaign pitch. The 61-year-old Collier, who is running for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor in the May 24 runoff election, paced back and forth before the crowd like a talk-show host. With his neatly parted white hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and pleasantly bland demeanor, he was a dead ringer for daytime-television personality Phil Donahue.

“I’ll tell you a fun story about being on the campaign trail,” said a revved-up Collier. He recounted a visit to San Angelo, during which he gave a speech to a group of Republicans at a cattle auction. “I had to get their attention, so I look around and see this great big pile of dirt—or so I thought—and I jumped up on that. I started to speak, and I realized what I had done. It smelled terrible!” After delivering his speech atop a pile of manure, he said, an audience member approached him. “ ‘You know, Mike, I never thought I would listen to a Democrat make a stump speech.’ And I said, ‘I never thought I’d give one from a Republican platform.’ ”

Collier has been telling versions of this anecdote since 2014, when, as a political novice, he won the Democratic nomination for state comptroller before losing to Republican Glenn Hegar by more than twenty points in the general election. He told the story during his 2018 campaign for lieutenant governor, when he came within five points of unseating incumbent Republican Dan Patrick. And he’s kept telling it this year as he seeks a rematch with Patrick.

As Collier acknowledges in his 2017 campaign memoir, Out of Comptrol—“the tale of my excellent political adventure,” as he describes it—he pinched the anecdote from Ronald Reagan and simply reversed the political parties in the punch line. That’s no accident: Collier, who grew up north of Austin in Georgetown, spent the first fifty years of his life as a Republican. Reagan was an early political hero. Since switching parties around 2010, Collier has positioned himself as a candidate who can uniquely appeal across party lines. He talks frequently about removing partisanship from government, and he campaigns extensively in rural parts of the state where Democrats seldom venture. In 2018, when they were last on the ballot, O’Rourke, running against Senator Ted Cruz, outperformed Collier in big cities, but Collier outperformed O’Rourke in rural areas.

Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/mike-collier-lieutenant-governor-race/