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Goodwin sold houses in Austin for decades, then at 51 knocked on her first political door and beat a sitting Republican for a seat his party had held for years. Now she's running against Dan Patrick — the man who's run the Texas Senate for a decade — and most Texans still don't know her name. That's the whole race.
She and her husband built a real-estate firm together before she ran in 2018. In the House she co-wrote the 2019 school-finance overhaul and the bill that raised retired teachers' pensions, passed a child-drowning-prevention law and a domestic-violence protection law named for the women they're meant to save, and filed universal background checks for gun buyers. She sits on Appropriations — the committee that writes the budget — rare for a Democrat. Patrick has $30 million; the latest poll has him at 49 to her 44, with more than half of voters saying they don't know enough about her yet.
