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.)