Outspent and unknown, Democrat Vikki Goodwin gives Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick his toughest race yet

By 6 p.m. on a recent Monday, Vikki Goodwin had sat through a five-hour Texas House insurance committee hearing, worked the phones to thank campaign donors for their latest checks, sat for an interview with a cannabis podcast where she bashed Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's push to ban THC products, and was en route to a mixer for a fellow Democrat running for Congress.

Such is half a day in the life of Texas' Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, who is taking on one of the state's top GOP kingmakers on a shoestring campaign budget. But despite his comparatively massive war chest and the name recognition from nearly 12 years in statewide office, Patrick is running like he feels the heat more than ever before. Confronting a scrappy opponent and a rough midterm climate for the GOP, the state's second-in-command has been forced to go after Goodwin by name in speeches and attack ads — a distinction rarely, if ever, afforded to his past Democratic foes — while warning Republican voters and peers the threat is real.

"The first time I ran, people were skeptical up until I won. And then they're like, 'We knew you could do it,'" Goodwin, who flipped a Texas House seat in 2018, said in an interview. "I keep saying that's going to happen again. When I win, people are going to say, 'We knew you could do it all along.'"

Coming off an election cycle in which President Donald Trump won Texas by 14 points, Goodwin, 59, has spent the last year and a half being dismissed as a near-impossible long shot. Patrick, 76, finished 10 points ahead of his last challenger in 2022 and has established himself as a political institution at the Texas Capitol, coming off a 2025 session where his agenda — including many long-sought conservative policies — faced less resistance than ever.

Meanwhile, the Austin state lawmaker remains outspent and unknown to nearly half the electorate in the campaign's final stretch. Yet she narrowly led in a poll conducted earlier this month — a first in recent political history for a Democratic lieutenant governor candidate in October.

At stake, belying the scant attention paid to the race, is one of the most powerful public offices in Texas, which no Democrat has occupied since 1999. As leader of the Texas Senate, the lieutenant governor sets the agenda and pace in the Capitol's upper chamber, often prescribing the fate of legislation as well as the senators whose committee assignments run through Patrick.

When both leading candidates filed their latest campaign finance reports a month out from Election Day, Patrick had 38 times more powder in his keg than Goodwin when it came to cash on hand: $24 million compared to about $643,000. On the airwaves, Patrick as of early this week had spent nearly $14.5 million running political ads. Goodwin's camp had spent less than 1% of that: $25,983, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact.

But Goodwin is banking on Patrick's incumbency being a liability in a midterm defined by voters' frustration with everyday costs and the economy's overall state. And she is hoping for a repeat of the climate that fueled her 2018 win, with polls around the country forecasting what could be a terrible political tempest for Republicans.

Beyond those controlling forces, Goodwin is trying to pick up scattered votes here and there. She's showing up in random places to introduce herself, like weed podcasts or a recent German Heritage Festival in Tomball, where she said she spent a weekend afternoon shaking hands. In 2018, Patrick's challenger Mike Collier deposited his energy in similarly small groups and placed his faith in the concept that somewhere there lies a path to victory — along with an assist from Democrat Beto O'Rourke's coattails.

Publicly ignoring Collier's existence, Patrick won reelection eight years ago by fewer than 5 points, less than half his more comfortable margin four years later.

In another Trump midterm, with this year's Democratic Senate nominee, James Talarico, narrowly leading Republican Ken Paxton, it appears the lieutenant governor is taking the threat seriously. At a recent campaign stop in Midland, Patrick encouraged people in rural Texas to vote — or risk relinquishing Republican power.

"We know we'll do well in West Texas," Patrick said. "But if only 50 percent of Republicans turn out, that's how we lose."

"I want to stay and fight" for Texas

Like countless Democratic officials around the country, Goodwin traces her entry to politics to the 2016 election. After Trump won, Goodwin, a real estate broker, said she thought to herself: I just have to do something.

Her mother had served on the Dallas ISD school board when she was a kid growing up in the Metroplex. She remembered how her mother would complain that there was little local control over money, perhaps the most important issue for any school system, because the Legislature dictates the amount of cash appropriated per pupil.

Riding anti-Trump sentiment, Godowin flipped a once solidly Republican state House seat representing western Travis County with a campaign centered on public education. Her victory was among 12 seats that Democrats flipped during Trump's first midterm, with the help of O'Rourke's near-upset of Sen. Ted Cruz.

Now she's trying to flip a much different seat.

Goodwin said she never thought she would run for statewide office. That changed after she watched Texas' conservative leadership steer the state in a direction that, she said, contributed to her kids settling elsewhere. Her daughter has no interest in returning due to Texas' restrictive abortion laws, a landscape put in place over the dissenting votes of Goodwin and her outnumbered Democratic colleagues. Her son, a doctor, landed a fellowship in Pennsylvania.

"Part of it is because we don't have an environment where they feel like this is where they want to stay and raise their family," Goodwin said. "I love Texas and I want to stay and fight for it."

She has multiple pitches to voters. At a macro level, Goodwin talks a lot about upping the state's share of public school funding and her ambitious plan for universal healthcare coverage in Texas. She also routinely knocks Patrick for pushing a near-total ban of hemp-derived THC products and being an early champion of publicly funded school vouchers for parents to send their kids to private school. Both are unpopular across party lines, Goodwin contended.

This summer she hit the road to advertise her pitch for a state-administered health insurance system. To foot the bill, she wants to create a new tax on legal cannabis and pull in federal money that's currently going to private insurers to help them offset the cost of medical claims. After dipping into the state's savings to start the program, Goodwin's campaign cites an analysis that the ganja tax could regularly generate about $267 million, which would be used to fund the public option part of Goodwin's healthcare plan, along with members' premiums.

As Goodwin sees it, these are issues that voters care deeply about and that have always been top of mind for her, too.

"I have stuck with my core issues the entire time," Goodwin said. "The lieutenant governor, again, is trying to paint me as ultra-liberal."

In recent sessions, Goodwin's voting record has ranked among the most liberal in the Texas House, according to ideological rankings calculated by Rice University political science professor Mark Jones. Like other Democratic lawmakers-turned-statewide nominees, she is running on a platform of policies she has had no chance to enact from her current perch, with Republicans in full control of the Pink Dome.

"The governor certainly has a lot of power, but not the power to pass legislation," Goodwin said. "The governor can say I want to prioritize these things. But it's really the lieutenant governor that has that power to get a bill passed or not passed."

Some of the lieutenant governor's powers are granted by state senators, who at the beginning of each legislative session approve the chamber's rules. If elected, Goodwin would preside over a Republican-majority body that could restrict her control over things like committee assignments and the flow of bills to the Senate floor.

"There's a lot of things besides just running the Senate, and there may be some attempts to change the rules, but I don't know," she said, arguing that some powers are enshrined such as assuming the governor's office if it becomes vacant. "I think of myself as being fairly intelligent. I'll figure out ways to get things done."

Books and power

In mid-August, Patrick's office called reporters to the Texas Capitol for a news conference on an undisclosed topic.

At the gathering, Patrick, joined at the lectern by a prominent Christian conservative advocate, sent a warning shot to school districts he accused of failing to comply with a 2025 law that sought to rid lewd books from the library shelves in Texas' public schools.

"It's the law and we expect you to follow the law. So we're coming for the books," Patrick said in a remark that was quoted widely.

It was vintage Patrick, a self-professed showman who displayed some of the books at his press briefing — but said they were "so filthy, so dirty, so vulgar, so pornographic" that he refused to open them out of respect for the women in the room. With campaign season already well underway, he cast attention on an issue of great import to him and his broader effort to push the state ever to the right. That cause has been defined in part by Patrick's moves to thin the line that separates church and state, which he has signaled will continue if he wins another term.

There's little doubt about Patrick's political prowess. Consider his endorsements in GOP Senate primaries. No Republican has defeated a candidate running for the upper chamber with the lieutenant governor's backing. Or the long list of conservative political trophies he can raise: from the book bill he talked about two months ago to a new law regulating what bathrooms trans people can use to the school voucher bill, also passed in 2025.

Patrick's campaign did not respond to requests for an interview or for a Tribune reporter to spend time with the lieutenant governor on the campaign trail.

Sherry Sylvester, one of Patrick's former top advisers who ran his 2018 campaign, said in a text message that he is "the most effective Texas legislative leader since LBJ."

"Patrick's opponent is an Austin State Rep whose record shows she wants Texas to establish an income tax and increase the gas tax," Sylvester said, alluding to Goodwin's vote against a proposal to make it harder for future lawmakers to enact a state income tax. "She is a knee-jerk back bencher whose votes reveal she is a fan of DEI and critical race theory and is fine with boys playing in girls sports, pornography in public school libraries, drag shows for children and mutilation surgeries on healthy children in the name of 'gender equity.'"

To be sure, Patrick's accomplishments have enshrined him as a leader of the modern Republican Party of Texas. He is closely aligned with Trump — appearing at a recent rally with the president, who heaped praise on him — and Paxton, whose 2023 impeachment trial was presided over byPatrick. After the Texas Senate acquitted the attorney general of all charges of misusing his office for personal gain, Patrick blasted his counterpart in the Texas House for hasty and sloppy work.

Goodwin is hoping Patrick's accomplishments are now perceived as liabilities among an electorate worried about the cost of living above all else.

After the recent Monday Democratic mixer, Goodwin trekked to her final campaign stop of the day: a theater that had just screened a movie about book bans in the state. Following the film, she joined a panel discussion on the film at the front of the theater.

Near the end of the talk, a woman near the back stood up. "The question is for Rep. Goodwin," she said. "I'm curious, what specifically would you do if elected as lieutenant governor to support libraries and librarians?"

Pointing out that she's always called for the state to hike its share of public school funding, the Democratic hopeful said she would continue that push and also look to offer schools more flexibility to use that cash. Goodwin added that she wants "to end the chilling effect and let school districts know that it's fine to have diversity and equity and inclusion.

"Let's bring in the books that are going to teach kids about people like themselves," she said. "Let's go back to that process that we had pre all these book ban bills."

Distributed by Newsbank, inc.