Patrick Misses Texas Voters Message
with Claim His Ouster Wasn't Personal

Capitol Inside
November 13, 2026

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick got the first part of analysis on the Texas midterm election right but flubbed the second half with rhetoric that gives the impression that the message from the voters went clear over his head.

In the latest episode of the Lt. Dan podcast, Patrick spends nearly 26 minutes attempting to answer some of the questions that he's been getting from supporters who want to know how the Republicans who controlled the state for 30 years could lose it overnight the way they did. Patrick hits the nail square on the head when he tells his followers that most of the voters knew nothing about the Democrats they elected to positions that Republicans were trying to defend at the polls last week.

"This was a wave election," Patrick explains. "I didn't take it personally because most of the Democrats didn't even know who they were voting for going down the ballot. Most of the Democrats on the ballot didn't even campaign. They just put their name on the ballot and they happened to be the dog that caught the bus this time."

Patrick lumped the Democrat who ousted him - Vikki Goodwin - in the category of candidates who won simply because they happened to be the Democratic nominee. "My opponent, well, no one even knew who she was," the lame duck leader said.

But Patrick missed the boat when he suggested the 2026 midterm election wasn't personal. The truth is, there's never been an election in America that was more personal than the 2026 midterm vote in Texas and all of the other swing states that went blue last week. It's true that Goodwin and a lot of other Democrats who flipped seats were relatively unknown to the lions share of people who voted for them as candidates in races that were off the radar while fights for U.S. senator and governor got all the attention.

But that was due to the fact that a majority of the voters felt like anyone would be better than the Republicans who they do know well with Governor Greg Abbott, U.S. Senate nominee Ken Paxton and Patrick as the ultimate examples. The midterm election was a referendum on Trump - and none of the candidates on the Texas ballot have been more closely associated with the most unpopular president in history that Patrick, Paxton and Abbott.

The election was deeply personal for voters who are Democrats, independents, large sums of people who'd never voted and Republicans who'd watched their party deteriorate in recent years and decided enough was enough. Patrick poured $52 million on his bid for another four-year term in 2025 and 2026. Goodwin, a state representative from Austin, spent $3 million on the lieutenant governor's race that she won by more than 6 points with almost 52 percent of the vote.

Voters may have not know much about Goodwin. But they knew all the needed to know about Patrick, Abbott and Paxton - and the votes they cast for the Democrats in the top three races on the Texas ballot were votes against those three Republicans who'd been in office here for 12 years apiece.

One of the things a majority of the Texas voters hated about Patrick was the way he transformed the Texas Senate into a partisan battlefield by taking most of the power that Democrats had enjoyed as minority party members away. The historically vengeful lieutenant governor punished the Republicans who dared to defy him and turned the rest of the GOP's senators into the most ineffective and impotent group of lawmakers in modern Texas with the threat of the doghouse ever looming. The Senate Republicans appear lost now without someone to tell them what to say and do.

Voters remembered Patrick's starring role in the hatching of a private school vouchers program that's siphoned significant sums of money from public schools, including some that are shutting down to the loss of students who received subsidies from the state to go to religious and other private academies.

Famous podcaster Joe Rogan said this week that Republicans lost as badly as they did in Texas as a consequence of the THC ban, which Patrick championed and bullied the Senate and House Republicans into supporting. Patrick made a flurry of blatantly false claims as scare tactics to deprive Texas adults of the right to smoke weed and eat gummies if they so pleased.

Rogan said the Texas cannabis policies are "ass backwards" - and the lame duck lieutenant governor is the face of that. Patrick has been a roadblock to sports betting and casinos based on archaic religious views. And the list goes on. A lot of Texans saw votes for Goodwin as votes for freedom that Patrick had been denying them.

Patrick was clearly at his best in fights with the House on property taxes. Patrick won every one of those. It was never close on that particular issue.

Patrick refused to go down the rabbit hole where conspiracy theories about voter fraud have been bubbling. Patrick called last week's vote in Texas "a fair election" and said "you have to accept the outcome." The lieutenant governor's good loser persona may not sit too well with his friend Mike Lindell - the furniture salesman who President Donald Trump called a national treasure and rallied behind in a losing GOP primary fight for governor in Minnesota earlier this year.

Lindell is arguing that Democrats stole the election in Texas with a special algorithm that switches votes from GOP candidates to Democratic opponents in election machines that have been rigged. Lindell, who most folks know as Mr. Pillow, said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was on board the case he plans to present to the president on an alleged election heist in Texas. Paxton, who many Republicans blame for the blue blowout after losing the U.S. Senate seat to Democrat James Talarico, has been on the South Pacific island of Fiji at a conference for Republican state attorneys general and shown no interest in trying to overturn the election like he's tried to do in the past.

So the outgoing lieutenant governor was on the mark when he said that a lot of candidates won in Texas last week for nother other reason besides the fact they were the Democratic nominees. But that's a direct affect of the fact that they'd decided that anybody would be a better choice than the Republicans who they knew the most about.

 

Mike Hailey is the editor, publisher and founder of Capitol Inside. His column Hailey's Comment appears here on a fairly regular basis

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

Copyright 2003-2026 Capitol Inside