McConaughey for Governor

McConaughey for Governor: A Texas Story From the Left Side of the Prairie

I grew up in a trailer off Highway 90, where the smell of refineries was so normal it became part of the weather. My father worked shutdowns. My mother worked nights at a nursing home. We didn’t have much, except stories — and those stories were always about power: who had it, who didn’t, and how the people who worked the hardest always seemed to have the least.

Texas taught me Marxism before Marx ever did.

So when I walked into that campus lawn at UT-Austin last week and saw a stage being erected with a huge printed banner — “McConaughey for Governor?” — it hit me with the kind of surreal feeling you get when a dream collides with a nightmare. Students clustered around taking selfies. Workers unloaded cables. A girl in burnt-orange leggings asked her friend if he thought the actor might “save the vibes.”

Save the vibes.
Texas, where oil barons dine with wildfire smoke in the air, where teachers need GoFundMe campaigns for pencils, where a handful of elites shape the world like gods. The vibes, I thought, are not what need saving.

The McConaughey Mirage

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like Matthew McConaughey. I really do. He’s charming in that barefoot-philosopher, porch-beer kind of way. The man could read grocery lists out loud and make people feel like they’ve witnessed something holy. But politics — real politics — is not a monologue. And Texas is not a movie.

Yet the whispers came back this year.
Is he running? Will he take on Abbott? Can a celebrity shift the state?

Rumors are the currency of a state with too few genuine alternatives.

I spoke to Carla, a cafeteria worker at UT who’s been making minimum wage for 17 years.
“McConaughey?” she said, laughing like she’d just heard the punchline of a joke she didn’t ask to be part of.
“He’s fine. But none of those people ever come down here. They don’t walk my hallways. They don’t know I have three jobs.”

When celebrities enter the political imagination, they enter it from above — from screens, from stages, from somewhere brighter and cleaner than the world the rest of us live in.

A Dream I Don’t Hide

For years, my own private dream has been simple: to see Texas become a place where the working class actually rules. A socialist stronghold. A red Texas — the other kind of red — built not by fear or by culture wars but by solidarity, by the quiet and powerful knowledge that everyday people deserve the world.

Abbott’s fourth-term announcement felt like a reminder of the system’s permanence. The man’s been in office so long that children born during his first term are now in middle school. His governorship feels less like an elected position and more like a geological feature.

So yes — I dream of Abbott falling.
Not because of some political rivalry, but because his model of Texas leaves so many behind. Because the people who built this state — the welders, the teachers, the home-health aides, the undocumented workers who keep the entire engine running — deserve more than tax cuts for billionaires and slogans about “freedom” that don’t feed anyone.

Meeting the Movement That’s Already Here

A few months ago, while reporting on housing struggles in Houston’s East End, I met José, a 24-year-old warehouse worker who’d organized a successful walkout against wage theft.

“When you talk about socialism,” he told me, “it’s not theory out here. It’s survival. People forget that communities like mine have been collectivist long before they had a word for it.”

José told me something I haven’t been able to shake:
“If McConaughey runs, good for him. But we’re not waiting for a hero.”

And that, I think, is the most important thing about this moment.

The Crack in the Wall

A McConaughey gubernatorial run — real or rumored — is less significant for who he is and more for what it reveals: that cracks are appearing in Texas’s ruling bloc. That the political imagination is loosening. That even the establishment senses the public is restless.

But cracks in the wall don’t mean the wall falls on its own.

This state changes only when working people force it to.

A Return to the Stage

On campus, the workers finally finished assembling the stage. McConaughey wasn’t there, of course. No speech, no announcement. Just a structure waiting for a story to be placed on it.

I stood there watching as the wind caught the edge of the banner.
McConaughey for Governor.
It looked bold. Hopeful. Hollow.

Not because he’s unworthy — but because Texas needs more than a personality. It needs a movement.

A movement that builds from below.
A movement that creates power, not applause.
A movement that doesn’t wait for the perfect candidate, because the perfect candidate is every single worker who discovers their voice.

I walked away thinking of my parents, my neighbors, the people who raised me, the people who never got written into Texas’s mythic cowboy stories.

Maybe someday Texas will be a socialist stronghold.
Maybe someday we’ll look back at the “McConaughey for Governor” rumors as a cultural footnote, the calm before the real political storm.
Maybe someday the stage won’t be for a celebrity — but for the people.

Until then, the wind continues across the prairie.
And so do we.