Why Joy Diaz Is Challenging Beto O'Rourke in the Democratic Primary for Governor
In March, Joy Diaz and her 10-year-old son Fausto became ill with COVID-19, each suffering through it in their own rooms in their home in southwest Austin. Joy, a journalist who was 44 and not yet eligible for the vaccine, thought she might die. “And so faced with my own mortality, I decided that if I lived I was going to try to fix the state and that is done in the governor’s office,” Diaz told a campaign town hall over Zoom on Sunday night. Asked in the session why she didn’t aim lower and run for city council or a lesser state office, Diaz said, “I don’t know how much time I have left on this earth, and in that time, I want to make a difference.”
After recovering in April, Diaz gave her notice, effective in November, at KUT-FM, Austin’s public radio station, where she had been a reporter and producer off and on since 2005. She promptly joined the second class of the LBJ Women’s Campaign School at the University of Texas, a nonpartisan, issue-neutral program that trains women who want to run for office or manage campaigns. Whatever hard truths were imparted in the eight-month school, none dissuaded Diaz from pursuing her campaign to win the Democratic nomination for governor. “I’m running with all my might and zero dollars to be the nominee,” she told Texas Monthly in an interview last week. (This week she began working with a fund-raising team.)
For that to happen she would have to defeat former El Paso congressman Beto O’Rourke, which doesn’t seem even remotely possible. When O’Rourke announced in mid-November that he was running, many Democrats thought their prayers had been answered: he’s a fund-raising juggernaut who has experience mobilizing Democrats to turn out. Governor Greg Abbott, who formally announced his candidacy for a third term as governor in McAllen on Saturday, is already acting as if O’Rourke is a given to be his challenger, should Abbott survive a primary of his own. Abbott’s campaign, savoring the prospect, launched an ad attacking “wrong-way O’Rourke” a month before the congressman even entered the race. The governor was tapping into the widespread antipathy toward O’Rourke among Texas Republicans and independents, an animus supercharged by the candidate’s leftward lurch during his ill-fated run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, in which he famously called for a mandatory buyback of assault weapons.
While Diaz is focused on defeating Abbott and not O’Rourke, she can’t do one without the other, and her appeal to voters in the March 1 primary is that she would be a less polarizing and more electable Democratic standard-bearer. Her message to voters is that if they don’t like the way an Abbott-O’Rourke race is shaping up, she offers a way out and a viable alternative. “I am the person who will put reason and pragmatism ahead of ideology,” she asserts on her campaign website.
In a poll by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas conducted in October, before the field was set, O’Rourke was the choice of 70 percent of Democrats, with 5 percent shared among other candidates and 25 percent not having thought about it enough to form an opinion. The primary ballot will include three candidates aside from O’Rourke and Diaz—Seguin’s Inocencio Barrientez, Beaumont pastor Michael Cooper, and attorney and engineer Rich Wakeland. Diaz, whose name wasn’t included in that October poll, has received the most press of O’Rourke’s four Democratic rivals, most likely because of her experience at KUT, where she has become a familiar voice and helped created Texas Standard, its daily news magazine show, and also because she has an interesting story.
Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/joy-diaz-beto-orourke/
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And he doesn't need another primary challenger. 
I agree with TexasTowelie that she should try running for Austin mayor first. And she's got to know that Beto will be the Democratic nominee. 
But she still doesn't stand much of a chance, given her lack of experience and that she's a latecomer. I agree with TexasTowelie that she should run for Austin mayor, that's how Pete Buttigieg got his start and look at him now!
