Why Matthew Dowd is on this page

Heritage: Dowd-surname carrier in American political and media life; the cited Wikipedia article does not document Irish ancestry.

Matthew J. Dowd (born 1961) is an American political consultant, author and television commentator who served as chief strategist for George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign and subsequently became a long-time on-air contributor to ABC News. He began his political career as a Democrat — staffer to Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen, including on Bentsen’s Senate and presidential campaigns, and to Texas Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock — before switching parties in 1999 to work for the Republican Bush operation in Texas. After the 2004 campaign, Dowd publicly broke with the Bush administration over the Iraq war and became one of the highest-profile former Republican strategists to do so. In December 2007 ABC News introduced him as a political contributor on *Good Morning America* and *This Week with George Stephanopoulos*. He has co-authored the New York Times bestseller *Applebee’s America: How Successful Political, Business and Religious Leaders Connect with the New American Community*, and has taught at the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Heritage notes

Family root: United States — diaspora-unconfirmed-surname-only.

The directory threads Matthew Dowd back to the O'Dubhda clan story via the surname-variants reality — the same family carried these spellings as it scattered. See the septs and the diaspora for the wider pattern, or the Clan DNA Project for the genetic connections being mapped now.