And McConaughey hasn’t campaigned one day!…
The Texas Republican Governor should begin to worry?
It is unknown if the actor would run?….Or as a Democrat , Republican or whatever….
Democrats sure wouldn’t mind having him on their team….
Actor Matthew McConaughey leads Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, by double-digits in a hypothetical election match-up, according to a new poll.
McConaughey, who won a Best Actor Oscar in 2014 for his lead role in Dallas Buyers Club and lives in Austin, is a newcomer to politics but has been critical of both Republicans and Democrats in interviews over the past several months.
The actor has suggested that he holds relatively moderate political views, and new polling published by The Dallas Morning News and the University of Texas at Tyler on Sunday suggests that he could have a path into electoral politics if he were to challenge Abbott in 2022.
The polling showed McConaughey ahead of Abbott by 12 points, well outside the polls margin of error of plus or minus 2.92 percentage points. The actor was supported by 45 percent of Texas voters while the incumbent governor was backed by just 33 percent of respondents. Meanwhile, an additional 22 percent of the southwestern state’s voters said they’d vote for someone else….
image….Yahoo News
Name recognition that’s all.
Whether he could actually be a viable candidate in the long haul?
We will only find that out if he takes the plunge.
Gotta be a jolt to Texas GOPer’s
Let’s see what they do
From RRH….
TX-Gov: Buried in this massive survey conducted by the University of Texas at Tyler is a horserace question pitting Gov. Greg Abbott (R) against actor Matthew McConaughey (?). A plurality of respondents pick the Wild Turkey spokesman over Abbott, 45-33. However, the pollster didn’t include a party designation. McConaughey, were he to run, might do so as an Independent. The problem with that, though, is something that we’ve seen before: defacto Democrats running as Independents either end up losing votes to their left when someone still wins the party primary, and/or they lose their nonpartisan shine when they get pigeon-holed as the Democratic stand-in anyway. There are exceptions like Sen. Angus King (I), but they’re rare. As for the poll itself, it includes a lot of non-voters and not nearly enough Hispanics.
Don’t discount movie stars: two of them became Governor of the largest state in the country and one of those two became President for eight years.
However, given the choice between X (inc.) and Someone-who-is-not-X (unspecified), many of those who choose the latter, already having a negative opinion of X will fit that potential challenger to fit each of their own views, desires and interests; but when they know the challenger’s position on taxes, schools, abortion, immigration, etc., a significant fraction will find they agree even less with the challenger than they do with the incumbent. The devil they didn’t know appeals even less than the devil that they do know.
On the other hand, if Matt McConaghey* is getting nearly half the votes in that match-up and Abbott only one third, that does suggest a big problem for the current governor. Cf. my remarks about Andrew Cuomo.
What does he run as?
As an Indie he has not chance I’d think…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a New York Times story published Tuesday that he does not support Gov. Greg Abbott, a fellow Republican, as Abbott runs for reelection, the latest — and most revealing — sign that some state GOP leaders are on a collision course ahead of the 2022 election.
“The way this typically works in a primary, is it’s kind of everybody running their own race,” Paxton told the Times. “I don’t think he supports me; I don’t support him.”
Within hours of the story’s publication, Paxton bashed it as “fake news” and insisted he supports Abbott. “He’s a great Governor and a Great Texan,” Paxton tweeted….
More…
I agree with DSD’s comments, but the 2006 Texas gubernatorial race had two independents (Carole Strayhorn and Kinky Friedman) who each received double digit percent of votes. The Democratic candidate (Bell) also had significant support. Rick Perry eventually won the race. Strayhorn and Friedman both probably hurt Bell more than Perry although CG sometimes reminded me of Strayhorn a couple of times with regard to specific things she said.