Why did Mike Collier preform so well in rural Texas?

[Canis]

https://twitter.com/MaronAoriak/status/1093662861799424000?s=09
Title

[lfromnj]

Dan Patrick sh**ts on public schools a lot and a lot of rural areas depend on this. In general he has a lot of economically conservative ideas.
 
Ask @Alabama Indy who I am pretty sure would have been a Collier Cruz voter.

[Adam Griffin]

Obviously Beto's strongest & most improved areas were suburban and urban enclaves, congressional candidates & those with Latino surnames more or less usually overperform in the RGV, and it was unlikely that Valdez was going to be the strongest performing candidate anywhere in an election with both Abbott & Beto's dynamics.

That leaves the great empty expanse of Rural TX, which I think can be explained by a combination of there not being much Beto or congressional Dem appeal there, the Lt Gov being the first state race on the ballot that wasn't a joke contest and/or involving Abbott, and the usual drop-off patterns among rural Democrats, low-information voters and/or Latinos (who do have a tendency to drop-off in much larger numbers, but who don't have as large of a white Beto or Solid D base to offset this trend as in urban or even some suburban TX areas, as weird as that sounds).

[DINGO Joe]

Be interesting if they could aggregate the total vote by color.  I'm guessing there are plenty of precincts where the Lt Gov got 10 votes in a precinct and the next guy got 9.  Just not many D voters in those blue (linked map) precincts. I'd guess maybe 5% of the overall D vote.  Maybe less.

[Indy Texas]

Dan Patrick is obsessed with taking a hatchet to public schools in favor of charter schools and private schools, and in reforming the property tax structure to be less redistributive.

Rural areas don't benefit from school choice because they have no private schools or charter schools. In small towns in Texas, the public school system is often the largest employer in the area, and one of the few avenues for getting a college-educated middle class job. Teachers and coaches are community civic leaders and school events like football games and plays are often one of the few things there is to do. Small towns are in secular population decline and consequentially need tax revenue to be "redistributed" to them from the growing cities and suburbs.