US Politics

Andrew Giuliani, the son of the embattled Donald Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, has announced he will run for New York governor in 2022.The 35-year-old, who served as a special assistant in Trump’s White House and is a former contributor to the hard rightwing Newsmax television channel, made the announcement on Tuesday, declaring: “I’m a politician out of the womb.”If successful in the Republican primary, Giuliani would take on Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic incumbent who has refused to step down despite a number of women accusing him of sexual misconduct.The election would represent a clash of New York political dynasties – Giuliani’s father, Rudy Giuliani, served as New York City’s mayor from 1994 to 2001, and Cuomo’s father, Mario Cuomo, was governor of New York from 1983 to 1994.“Giuliani v Cuomo. Holy smokes. Its Muhammad Ali v Joe Frazier. We can sell tickets at Madison Square Garden,” Giuliani told the New York Post.He added: “It would be one of the epic showdowns in the state’s history.”The campaign website for Giuliani offers no policy information, but the Post reported that he will be “pro-business, pro-police, pro-school choice”.The budding politician has little in the way of political, or even career experience. He became a golf pro in 2016, and appears to have pursued the sport with little success for several years.Aside from playing golf, Giuliani’s website lists his experience as being limited to three internships and a stint volunteering on Trump’s 2016 campaign.Despite this thin résumé Giuliani served as a special assistant to Trump during the latter’s presidency, although his duties appear to have been vague and ill-defined. In 2019 the Atlantic quoted a senior White House official who said Giuliani “doesn’t really try to be involved in anything”, adding: “He’s just having a nice time.”Giuliani did have at least one recurring role, the Atlantic reported: as a frequent golf partner to Trump.Giuliani may have the name recognition in the Republican primary, but to challenge Cuomo he would first have to defeat Lee Zeldin, a congressman from Long Island, and Rob Astorino, a former county executive of Westchester county, just north of New York City.Zeldin, like Giuliani, is an enthusiastic Trump supporter who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, giving him some hope of an endorsement from Trump. Astorino, meanwhile, has the experience in the race. He ran against Cuomo in 2014, losing by 14 points. More

Marco Rubio avoided a Senate challenge from Ivanka Trump but he seems certain to face one from Val Demings, a Democratic Florida congresswoman who was the first Black female police chief of Orlando and who was considered as a potential vice-president to Joe Biden.An unnamed senior adviser told Politico Demings, 64, was “98.6%” certain to run against Rubio in the midterm elections next year.“If I had to point to one” reason why Demings had decided to run, the adviser was quoted as saying, “I think it’s the Covid bill and the way Republicans voted against it for no good reason.“That really helped push her over the edge. She also had this huge fight with [Ohio Republican representative] Jim Jordan and it brought that into focus. This fight is in Washington and it’s the right fight for her to continue.”Biden’s $1.9tn coronavirus rescue bill passed Congress in March without a single Republican vote. In April she made headlines by raising her voice when Jordan, a provocateur and hard-right Trump supporter, interrupted her during a House judiciary committee hearing on an anti-hate crimes bill.“I have the floor, Mr Jordan,” Demings shouted. “What? Did I strike a nerve?“Law enforcement officers deserve better than to be utilised as pawns, and you and your colleagues should be ashamed of yourselves.”Demings was a member of Orlando police for 27 years and chief from 2007 to 2011. She was elected to Congress in 2016. Her husband, Jerry Demings, is a former sheriff and current mayor of Orlando county.Police brutality and institutional racism have become a national flashpoint in light of the killings of numerous African American men.Demings is a political moderate but Quentin James of the the Collective Pac, a Florida group working on Black voter registration, told Politico her police background and political views would not necessarily handicap her.Young and progressive Floridians “aren’t really anti-police”, he said. “They’re against police brutality.”Rubio is a two-term senator who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. He was brutally beaten in that race by Donald Trump, then swiftly aligned himself with his persecutor when he won the White House.The prospect of a primary challenge from Ivanka Trump, the former president’s oldest daughter, was briefly the talk of Washington but she has said she will not run.The Senate is split 50-50 and controlled by Democrats through Kamala Harris’s casting vote as vice-president. Demings’s all-but-confirmed decision to run sets up an intriguing contest in a state where the large Latino population has increasingly broken for Republicans. Rubio is the son of Cuban migrants.Demings’s move also leaves the field open for challengers to Ron DeSantis, the Trump-supporting governor seen by some as a possible presidential candidate in 2024. In 2018 Democrats ran a progressive, Andrew Gillum, a former mayor of Tallahassee.Discussing Demings’s likely Senate campaign, James told Politico: “We came very close with Gillum. But now we’re back with a really great candidate.” More

When Brian Muhammad, a program manager at a gun violence prevention group in California, asked a 16-year-old boy in 2018 how young people were getting guns, he assumed the answer would be Nevada, the neighboring state with looser gun laws.“Who would waste time going to Nevada when you can just get them in the mail and put it together?” the Stockton teen nonchalantly replied.Three years later, homemade weapons known as “ghost guns” have risen to the top of the Biden administration’s policy agenda. When the president announced executive actions targeting gun violence after the mass shootings in Georgia, California and Colorado, they included steps to regulate the sale of the devices – the first time the federal government took up such efforts.Warnings about do-it-yourself guns have steadily grown in recent years, spurred by ominous news stories describing the weapons’ use in a slew of mass shootings, domestic terrorism cases and gun trafficking busts. In California alone, homemade guns were used in a 2013 mass shooting in Santa Monica, a 2014 bank robbery in Stockton and a shooting spree in rural Tehama county that killed six in 2017. In 2019, a 16 year old killed two students and injured three others before killing himself with a ghost gun at a school in Santa Clarita. The next year, as protests over police violence filled city streets, Steven Carrillo used a homemade machine gun to shoot two security guards at a federal building in Oakland and a sheriff’s deputy in an ambush in Santa Cruz.But as the role of ghost guns in high profile criminal cases has grown, community violence reduction workers warn of the less visible toll ghost guns are taking : ghost guns, they say, have become a hot commodity in many vulnerable communities, a trend that has only intensified during the pandemic.The ease with which these guns can be ordered and constructed, their low cost and the difficulties in tracing them have made them readily available in many California cities, the organizers say. Their rapid spread, combined with Covid-19 limitations to the in-person contact so many violence interrupters rely on, have created a dangerous combination that is contributing to the surge in gun deaths that began last year.“We have people buying guns on the street at a faster pace. We can’t keep up with the number of guns especially when they may be more accessible than social services for some,” said Muhammad, of the Advance Peace program, a gun violence prevention organization, in Stockton.‘If a person wants a gun, they can get it’Antoine Towers, the chair of Oakland’s Violence Prevention Coalition, said he first heard about ghost guns at the beginning of the pandemic.First from friends who bought a ghost gun and assembled it, next up were some family members, then his co-workers. Gun ownership in Black communities in California rose significantly during the pandemic, mass protests and election chaos of 2020, and Towers’ network was opting for ghost guns rather than buying full-priced guns from stores that were inundated with sales.Soon, Towers said, ghost guns started showing up at his work. “We already had a problem with firearms, but it became really ridiculous,” Towers said. “[Ghost guns] are so easy to get right now that the only solution I see is figuring out a way to make sure people who have them aren’t using them. It’s heartbreaking.”Once a niche hobby among gun enthusiasts, do-it-yourself gun kits have been around since the 1990s, but they’ve increasingly become a feature on the nightly news since the early 2010s.The kits are substantially less expensive than a traditional gun bought from a federally licensed store. For example: a pistol from Bass Pro Shop, a US-based outdoor sporting goods conglomerate, can range in price from $470 to more than $900 while a homemade pistol kit from Polymer80, a popular online gun retailer, costs less than $180 and can be assembled with common tools like screwdrivers and a few drill bits.The guns aren’t subject to traditional firearm sale mandates, including background checks and serial numbers, because of a legal loophole. Since they are shipped in several pieces, they fall out of the bounds of what the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) classifies as a legal firearm.“The argument is that they can’t fire in the condition they’re sold in. Because they require some assembly, they’re not firearms,” said Eric Tirschwell, the managing director of litigation for Everytown for Gun Safety, a national gun violence prevention advocacy group.Previously, police say, they mostly found ghost guns during large gun busts and underground trafficking operations. But in the past two years, they are more frequently turning up in the backs of cars or the hands of individuals. Increasingly popular among gun owners, the guns have also become an interesting business proposition for traffickers.Tina Padilla, a peacekeeper with Breaking Through Barriers to Success (BTBS), a Los Angeles-based violence prevention nonprofit, said she first heard about ghost guns on the news a few years ago, especially after mass shootings. Then she heard some young people trickle into the nonprofit’s office discussing their purchases and what kits they were eyeing in passing conversation.“I learned the logistics of getting a ghost gun from working in the community and found out that they can be purchased from different sites, with different credit cards to different addresses and the government can’t trace who’s buying these guns and where they’re going,” Padilla said.“Now, instead of people having to purchase weapons for $600 to $700, they can buy them on the computer, put them together and use them on the street,” said Padilla.Police in Stockton first became familiar with ghost guns in 2014, when a homemade AK-47 was recovered after a deadly bank robbery that turned into a hostage situation and hour-long car chase. In 2019, the department recovered 42 ghost guns. And in 2020, it seized 175, nearly four times as many.The ATF has been recovering more ghost guns in the US each year. In 2019, they seized more than 7,100 and in 2020 that number grew to 8,712, according to department data. Police departments in other California cities have reported similar rises. San Francisco police started tracking ghost guns in 2016, and found six that year. In 2019, they recovered 77 and, in 2020, the number leaped to 164. Los Angeles county police found 813 ghost guns in 2020. In Oakland, 16% of all guns seized by police in 2020 were ghost guns. So far in 2021, 22% are ghost guns.Violence intervention workers say the rise in ghost guns has played some role in the rise in gun deaths recorded in cities all across America.“There’s a whole industry of people who are making guns and in this digital age the difficulty factor isn’t there, so if a person wants a gun they can get it,” said Muhammad, the Advanced Peace director in Stockton.Like hundreds of other cities, homicides in Stockton have ticked up in past months. In 2020, 55 people were murdered in the city, the highest number in three years. Muhammad believes that ghost guns have played a role, especially among Stockton’s teens.“We’ve seen a younger group of people engaging in gunplay, he said. “There’s no school right now, and a 14, 15 year old isn’t gonna just sit at home if their parents are out working.” The loss of in-person schooling and extracurriculars, have left “ample time to get in disagreement”, he said.“Whatever people can do to make money, they will. And they know there’s a high demand, with people scared at the beginning of the pandemic and buying guns,” said Rudy Corpuz Jr, the executive director of United Playaz, a San Francisco-based violence prevention and youth development organization.“It’s scary because a lot of the ghost guns are in hands that are not responsible. And when you have kids all over in parks and places where violence happens, there’s potential that one of these can be used, and then one of these kids doesn’t get a chance to grow up.”Padilla, the Los Angeles-based violence interrupter, said the casualness with which she’s heard some young people talk about getting a kit sent to their home worried her. She said language barriers and lack of information among parents can make it difficult for them to regulate the packages that are being sent to their homes.“We need to do more education campaigns because some of these parents may get a package they may not think too much about. We need to let them know that they need to keep an eye out because these guns can cause a lot of harm,” she said.Ghost gun regulationsFollowing three mass shootings this spring, including a downtown San Diego shooting where a ghost gun was used, Biden directed the Department of Justice to develop new regulations around ghost guns. On 7 May, the ATF, which is part of the DOJ, proposed new rules that would close the loophole that allows ghost guns to be sold with little oversight. Under the new measures, the primary parts of a gun kit would be considered firearms, and therefore would need a serial number. Buyers would have to pass a background check.The measures would mark the first effort to regulate ghost guns on the federal level.In California, a 2018 state law required at-home kit builders to apply for a unique serial number, but the requirement only applied to ghost gun builders, and not to sellers, leaving it legal to sell kits without a serial number.San Francisco is set to weigh a proposal that would go further, and ban the sale of ghost guns as well. If the ordinance passed, it would make the city the first in California to do so.Meanwhile, several local district attorneys have sued ghost gun manufacturers and a number of states and cities have had lawsuits against the ATF for their original refusal to regulate ghost gun kits like traditional firearms. The Los Angeles city attorney joined Everytown for Gun Safety in a lawsuit against Polymer80, a popular gun kit seller that is facing a number of other lawsuits in California and Washington DC over their advertisement practices. The suit alleges that the dealer acted negligently and failed “to avoid exposing others to reasonably foreseeable risks of injury”, according to the complaint filed in December.Everytown is also suing 1911builders.com, the gun kit maker and dealer who sold the kit that was used in the Saugus school shooting, on behalf of one of the victims.In November 2019, Mia Tretta was injured in a mass shooting at Saugus high school in Santa Clarita. A 16-year-old student at the school had brought a homemade .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol which he used to shoot five students – two fatally – before turning the ghost gun on himself. The entire incident lasted less than 30 seconds.Since the tragedy, in which she lost her close friend Dominic Blackwell, Tretta’s been a vocal gun violence prevention advocate with Students Demand Action, a youth-led organization that lobbies for strengthened gun laws.“In my situation, we still don’t know who bought the gun. We know who used it, but we can’t trace it back,” Tretta said. “I want people to use my story to show what happens when anyone can get a gun.”‘It won’t stop the guns’Community workers such as Corpuz and Muhammad welcome Biden’s efforts, and agree that the spread of ghost guns needs to be stifled.But they also worry that federal action will beget local police crackdowns, a backlash that would lead to more harm among those who are already most at-risk of being shot. Rather than increased patrols and traffic stops, the interventionists say, communities need traditional violence intervention practices that provide social support and healing services.“The devil’s in the details,” said Corpuz of United Playaz. “You can think a new policy is about the ghost guns but then it leads to harassment. We all want ghost guns off of the street but we have to look to see what the fine print is before we support the rules because they can be harsh on Black and brown communities.”Muhammad of Advanced Peace likened the potential danger of increased policing and harsher sentences for having a ghost gun to the crack-cocaine laws of the late 20th century.“Once the laws happen they affect the bottom rung,” Muhammad said. “Police forces all over the country get access to federal dollars for any campaign, but that won’t stop the shooting; it won’t stop the guns from getting into the hands of young people.” More

When Democrat Mark Kelly was sworn in to office late last year it marked the end of a nearly 70-year drought of Arizona being represented by two Democrats.But since then Kelly, a former astronaut, and his counterpart senator, Kyrsten Sinema, have plotted decidedly different paths in the Senate. Despite being from the same party and the same state and representing the same electorate, the pair of Arizona Democrats have become a sort of political odd couple.The twists and turns that each Arizona Democrat took to get into office – and the moves they are making to retain their seats – reveal two distinct paths Democrats can take to win and retain tough Senate seats. But they can also give differing answers as to how Democrats might keep power, or even extend it.Sinema, a longtime Arizona lawmaker and former Democratic member of the House of Representatives, has carved out a reputation as one of the most conservative members of the Democratic caucus in the chamber. Her name is almost synonymous with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and bucking the Democratic party on key sticking points.Sinema has split with her fellow Democrats on a minimum wage hike to $15 and support for an overhaul to the legislative filibuster. Among the press corps she is also notorious for avoiding virtually all interviews.Kelly himself offered levity when asked about their similarities and differences.“She can run a marathon at a 7.30 pace,” Kelly said. “I cannot do that.”Meanwhile, Kelly, 57, the husband of former congresswoman Gabby Giffords and a naval aviator turned astronaut, has plotted a more low-key course in the chamber. He talks to reporters. He hasn’t committed to overhauling the filibuster but he hasn’t come out in opposition either. He joined with other Democrats in supporting a minimum wage increase.Neither Democrat is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, but the fact that they differ both stylistically and on key policies illustrates both the viability of Democrats in a state that for years has seemed out of reach to liberals and also the debate over what kind of Democrat can take root statewide.Both Sinema and Kelly are essential to Democrats retaining their slim majority in the chamber and, effectively, passing any legislation in the chamber. Kelly is considered more of a reliable party-line vote than Sinema but there are moments when they agree with each other and, in the process, buck the party at large.Kelly, in the hallway interview, said he couldn’t speak for how Sinema approaches legislating, but said in the five and a half months he’s been in Congress “our country is best served by trying to work across the aisle”.They have both bristled at Joe Biden’s approach to border security. Kelly called out Biden on the subject in response to the president’s address to Congress.“While I share President Biden’s urgency in fixing our broken immigration system, what I didn’t hear tonight was a plan to address the immediate crisis at the border, and I will continue holding this administration accountable to deliver the resources and staffing necessary for a humane, orderly process as we work to improve border security, support local economies, and fix our immigration system,” Kelly said in a statement shortly after Biden’s speech.They have also both participated in a bipartisan group of almost two dozen Republican and Democratic senators sometimes referred to as the G20. They have also recently been working on a bipartisan agreement on semiconductors, alongside some of the more conservative senators in both parties.They also both like to invoke the late Senator John McCain, a Republican, as an icon.But even to colleagues, it’s clear that Sinema and Kelly are different in key ways.“I think they are two unique and distinct characters,” said Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado. “And I use the word character freely.”Hickenlooper described Kelly as “one of the most grounded and thoughtful people”, adding: “He sees things that other people just don’t see.“He’s very intuitive,” Hickenlooper said. “They are so different and they are both – I think they’re both really smart and I think they’re both really good.”Asked if Kelly was slightly more liberal than Sinema, Hickenlooper said: “It’s hard to say. Their values are the same. Both are very progressive in terms of they think this country should be based on equality. We should have equal opportunity and schools should work for everybody.”But on policy positions, like the minimum wage, Hickenlooper said they have a “difference of opinion on tactics”.The backgrounds of Sinema and Kelly could only be more different if they were from opposing parties. For years Giffords was the political standard bearer of their family with Kelly in the background with a somewhat non-partisan air to him. His election to the Senate in 2020 was his first foray into electoral politics as a candidate.Sinema, by contrast has been in politics for years and her allegiances have shifted over time. She associated with the Arizona Green party before joining the Democratic party. She served in the state legislature and found success passing legislation by working with Republicans – even when Republicans held a supermajority. Jonathan Patton, who served with Sinema in the state legislature, recalls her finding success by keeping a single-minded focus on passing legislation.“If you’re in the legislature in Arizona, you’re not getting any bills passed,” recalled Paton.But during her time in the legislature, Sinema managed to do just that. She was able to get Republicans to work with her. “I don’t think she’s particularly ideological and I think it was a mistake on both sides for people to think she was. Now does that mean I agree with her on things? No it does not but my point is she was single-mindedly focused on getting things that she wanted, that was important to her for whatever reason,” Paton said.Sinema also taught at Arizona State University and served as a criminal defense lawyer. On the Hill, Sinema has at times been photographed in brightly colored wigs and a bright pink sweatshirt that reads “Dangerous Creature”.Kelly, a twin, spent his earlier years in life as a naval aviator and then a Nasa astronaut. He announced his retirement from spaceflight in 2011. In 2013, years after an assassination attempt on Giffords, the former congresswoman and Kelly founded the gun control advocacy group Americans for Responsible Solutions, which, in the process, made Kelly more visible to the political community. Until 2018 he was a registered Independent. In 2020 he won the special election for Senate, defeating the former senator Martha McSally.In recent years they have both had their eclectic moments – Sinema interned at a California winery and Kelly has been a brand ambassador to a Swiss luxury watchmaker. Sinema has also completed Iron Man triathlon competitions.Between the two senators, though, Sinema is the one with a bigger question mark over her head on key pieces of legislation like filibuster reform and the destiny of Biden’s roughly $2tn infrastructure package. She was one of a series of one-on-one sit downs Biden had with senators this week as the president pushes forward with attempts to find some kind of bipartisan infrastructure deal.Kelly meanwhile, is up for re-election next year and, alongside the Georgia senator Raphael Warnock, is essential to Democrats’ hopes of retaining control of the Senate. Sinema has a little more time before she has to run again.“Mark is in cycle, he’s up for re-election in 2022,” noted Kirk Adams, a former Republican speaker of the Arizona house of representatives. “And a primary challenge from the progressive left would be very problematic for him – not that he wouldn’t win the primary but the effect that he would have in the general – being forced to move more left in what I think is truly a purple state. So that’s the first lens that I would apply to the differences between those two.” More

Joe Biden forfeited more than a third of his annual income in running for the White House last year, with his newly disclosed 2020 tax returns showing a drop in earnings from almost $1m in 2019 to $607,336.Joe Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, released their 2020 joint tax returns on Monday. They show that the couple saw their income fall by some 38% from 2019, largely because Biden had to give up high-paying bookings on the speaker circuit when he launched his presidential campaign.The Bidens paid $157,414 in federal income tax last year – a rate of 26%. In 2019 the balance sheet looked substantially more lucrative, with a combined income of $985,233 and total taxes of $299,346.Details from the Bidens’ 2020 tax return were published by Bloomberg News shortly before the White House made the figures available.Kamala Harris paid an even steeper price after she stood as Biden’s running mate in the presidential election and now as vice-president. Her 2020 joint tax returns with her husband, Doug Emhoff, record federal adjusted gross income of $1.7m last year.That was dramatically down from $3.1m in 2019. Most of the reduction in earnings was accounted for by Emhoff’s relative fortunes.The second gentleman took a leave from the law firm DLA Piper, where he was a partner, once Harris joined the Democratic presidential ticket last August. He left the firm altogether after the election in November.The released tax returns show that Harris and Emhoff paid $621,893 in federal income tax in 2020, a tax rate of 37%.The release of the president’s tax returns further increases the gulf in behavior with Biden’s predecessor in the White House. Donald Trump shattered tradition by refusing to make his tax returns public, while the current president has now released details on his financial affairs stretching back 23 years.Before Monday’s disclosure, the White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that full transparency “should be expected by every president of the United States”.The new documents show that the Bidens donated more than $30,000 to charity – about 5% of their total income. The organisation benefitting from their largesse was the Beau Biden Foundation, a group seeking to combat child abuse set up in honor of the their son who died in 2015 from the brain cancer glioblastoma.Harris and Emhoff gave $27,000 to charity.Despite the decline in their income, the Bidens are still in an elite tax bracket that mean they would be subject to the new top income tax rate of 39.6% under the president’s American Families Plan, unveiled last month. That rate would apply to the top 1% of Americans, who earn more than $540,000 a year. More

The Florida senator Marco Rubio has urged American lawmakers to take the issue of mysterious flying objects seriously ahead of the expected release next month of a US government report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), better known as UFOs.The report follows a renewed push by former government officials and senators including Rubio to investigate reports of UFOs seen by the military.“I want us to take it seriously and have a process to take it seriously,” Rubio told CBS’s 60 Minutes in an interview that aired Sunday night.The Florida Republican said a system was needed to catalogue data on these objects until answers had been found.“Maybe it has a very simple answer,” Rubio said. “Maybe it doesn’t.”When Rubio was acting Senate intelligence committee chair last year, he asked the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense to provide an unclassified report on UAP by next month.“Anything that enters an airspace that’s not supposed to be there is a threat,” Rubio said.Rubio acknowledged that the military and others have a history of dismissing this issue.“There’s a stigma on Capitol Hill,” Rubio said. “I mean, some of my colleagues are very interested in this topic and some kinda, you know, giggle when you bring it up. But I don’t think we can allow the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question.”Despite this stigma, the issue has gained momentum in the past year.In January, a website that archives declassified government documents, the Black Vault, published thousands of declassified CIA documents on UFOs.In August, the Pentagon resurrected its program to collect and analyze information on mystery objects and military members are encouraged to report strange encounters to this UAP taskforce.Luis Elizondo was part of the Pentagon’s earlier version of this group, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), from 2010 to 2017.He told 60 Minutes there were simple explanations for some of the mysterious sightings, but not all.“We’re not just simply jumping to a conclusion that’s saying, ‘Oh, that’s a UAP out there,” Elizondo said. “We’re going through our due diligence. Is it some sort of new type of cruise missile technology that China has developed? Is it some sort of high-altitude balloon that’s conducting reconnaissance? Ultimately when you have exhausted all those what ifs and you’re still left with the fact that this is in our airspace and it’s real, that’s when it becomes compelling, and that’s when it becomes problematic.” More

No football team ever lost a game, says Mike Collier. The players just ran out of time.In 2018, Collier tried to unseat the Republican incumbent, Dan Patrick, as Texas’s lieutenant governor, arguably the most powerful role in state government. He watched poll numbers trend closer and closer – until Patrick bested him by just under five points.But Collier – a Democrat – isn’t jaded enough to turn his back on what he thinks is a winnable fight. And to him, the game’s just getting started.“We came out of the first half down by a field goal,” he told the Guardian. “Now, we’re gonna go win the second half.”When Collier was a teenager, his family moved to a small town just north of Austin. Although he decried how racism pervaded (and still pervades) much of America, he’s nostalgic for the days when Texans were at least bound by civility and preparing for the future.“The Texas that I remember then was progressive,” Collier says. “But it was a Texas-progressive, in the sense that, you know, people could do their own thing.“They could be free.”An accountant, auditor and energy expert by trade, Collier is more sports analogist and goofball than political insider. His endearing drawl sounds like a habit rather than an act, and he seems happiest poking fun at his 27-year-old son or telling dad jokes.But, as he sets his sights on next year’s lieutenant governor race, Collier isn’t kidding around.“A Democrat beats Dan Patrick, and suddenly everybody behaves differently, particularly if that Democrat brings to it our Texas values – which I do – as a Democrat, and we roll up our sleeves and start solving problems honestly,” he says.“I think it’ll change everything.”He’s not wrong.As the second most populous state, Texas accounts for 38 electoral college votes and just added two more congressional seats after last year’s census. It’s home to one of the most powerful constituencies in the union, a bloc that’s handed Republicans control over every lever of state government – at least for now.But Texas’s demography is trending younger and more diverse, generating buzz over a potential uptick in more liberal voters. A Collier victory could represent the first ripple in a blue wave that Democrats have been promising for years now.That, in turn, would transform federal politics.Next year’s election could also lead to the ousting of a conservative firebrand whose political reign has further aligned Texas with xenophobia, conspiracy theories and Trumpism. Patrick, once an outsider himself, has spent years deeply entrenched in the highest rungs of state government, pushing its politics past even his own Tea Party inclinations.After chairing Donald Trump’s Texas campaigns, Patrick has already been endorsed by the former president ahead of 2022. Trump’s support earlier this month was a much-needed boost for the beleaguered state executive, whose approval ratings plummeted to a measly 35% in April, according to the Texas Politics Project.But while Patrick was focused on Trump, Collier worked hard to elect Joe Biden last year. He endorsed Biden early in the primary season, then took on a series of duties – including a senior adviser role – to help his campaign.Collier remembers watching Biden’s launch video in 2019, during a terrible day at an energy conference. The minutes-long clip described a battle for the soul of the nation, with footage of neo-Nazis marching through Charlottesville.“Tears came to my eyes,” Collier says. “I said, ‘this is exactly what’s happening in my America.’”Much like Biden, Collier readily admits that he’s old, has white hair and wears Ray-Bans – pure coincidence, he says. And much like Trump, Patrick is the consummate showman, with an eclectic life story that’s seen biblical highs and lows.Patrick, né Goeb, went from popular sportscaster to bankrupt businessman, then eventually garnered a following as a middle-aged talkshow host. But by the mid-2000s, he settled on a career in public service, eventually ascending to the lieutenant governorship after several terms in the state senate.Now, he relies on his flair for the dramatic – used in another life to get through an on-air vasectomy – to push his conservative agenda.Patrick proudly frequents Fox News segments, where he makes sensationalized claims about the US-Mexico border and spews vitriol about immigrants, one in six of all Texans. In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, he raised eyebrows after making clear that he valued a healthy economy over human life – even his own.“No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’” he told the Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”At times, the bellicose Patrick appears to be waging war against himself. After eight students and two teachers were massacred in a mass shooting at Santa Fe high school outside of Houston in 2018, he personally offered to donate up to 10 metal detectors for the district.But this year, that empathy ran dry when he pushed the legislature to allow Texans to carry a gun with no permit, a policy opposed by the majority of voters.“Our politics reflects the point of view of a very, very small minority of Texans,” Collier says, and Patrick “panders over there to a small crowd that don’t represent our values”.Collier’s vision of Texas is much different. He imagines a state that leads the charge against a global climate crisis, where kids line up to get into the public schools instead of trying to find any way out of them.He knows that too many young, Black men are languishing behind bars. And he doesn’t think hospital closures in Texas’s rural communities should force pregnant people to drive an hour and a half just to find an OB-GYN.“We’re a wealthy nation. We’re a wealthy state. Everybody oughta have healthcare,” he says.When he talks policy, he doesn’t fearmonger, mince words or put on a show. In many ways, he’s the anti-Patrick – or is Patrick the anti-Collier?“I mean,” Collier says earnestly, “He’s just not one of us.” More