Matthew Dowd Says He Won't Run Against "Craven" Greg Abbott, but "Cruel" Dan Patrick? Wait and See.

[TexasTowelie]

The former Bush adviser pledges to help Texas Democrats win in 2022—including, possibly, by putting his hat in the ring.


A little more than a week after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Matthew Dowd announced he was leaving his job as chief political analyst with ABC News after thirteen years with the network. Freed from his talking-head obligations, Dowd could now speak out even more pointedly about what he believes to be the threat to democracy posed by Trump and his imitators. This summer, in tweets and cable interviews, the Democrat turned Republican turned Democrat has excoriated Governor Greg Abbott for a response to COVID-19 that has cost Texans lives. In a June appearance on MSNBC, Dowd said that democracy is in peril and “the only fix to this is Republicans have to lose, and lose badly, in a series of elections, and I’m willing to do whatever I can, on any day I can, to make sure that happens.”

Political apostasy is not new for Dowd. He began his career as a Democrat, serving as an adviser and strategist to Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock from 1989 to 1999. Then he became a Republican, drawn to what he saw as the bipartisan appeal of Governor George W. Bush. Dowd went on to advise Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign and served as the president’s chief strategist during his successful 2004 reelection campaign.

But in 2007, the same year he began working for ABC, Dowd publicly repudiated Bush for his conduct of the war in Iraq and other policies. In recent years, he has looked for ways around what he considers the failures of the two-party system, flirting in 2017 with an independent bid for U.S. Senate against Ted Cruz, and founding an online community, Country Over Party. But the ongoing threat posed by Trumpism, brought home by the events of January 6, jerked Dowd back to his early allegiance to a Democratic party that he now sees as an indispensable bulwark of a democracy under threat as never before.

Texas Monthly spoke with Dowd, who lives in the Hill Country town of Wimberley, about his diagnosis of what ails the GOP, his nascent plans to run for office, and whether Democrats will ever have another shot at governing Texas.

Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/matthew-dowd-possible-democratic-run/