By the 1970s, Richards was an accomplished political worker, having worked to elect liberal Democrats Sarah Weddington and Wilhelmina Delco to the Texas Legislature and having presented training sessions throughout the state on campaign techniques for women candidates and managers. She supported ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (The amendment was never ratified by enough states to become part of the Constitution.) In 1976, Richards ran against and defeated a three-term incumbent on the four-member Travis County, Texas Commissioners' Court; she took 81.4 percent of the vote against Libertarian challenger Laurel Freeman to win re-election in 1980. During this time, her marriage ended, in part because of the strain of politics on the relationship. Richards' drinking became more pronounced and she sought and completed treatment for alcoholism in 1980. David Richards is a prominent civil rights attorney in California.

After the incumbent state treasurer, Warren G. Harding (no relation to the former U.S. president of the same name) became mired in legal troubles in 1982, Richards won the Democratic nomination for that post. Winning election against a Republican challenger in November that year, Richards became the first woman elected to statewide office in more than fifty years. In 1986, she was re-elected treasurer without opposition.



Richards's keynote address to the 1988 Democratic National Convention put her in the national spotlight when she uttered the famous line, about the wealthy, then-Vice President George H. W. Bush, "Poor George, he can't help it...He was born with a silver foot in his mouth."

The speech set the tone for her political future; she was a real Texan who established herself as a candidate who appealed to suburban voters as well as to the traditional Democratic base that included African Americans and Hispanics. In 1989, with co-author Peter Knobler, she wrote her autobiography, Straight from the Heart: My Life in Politics and Other Places.

In 1990, Texas' Republican governor, Bill Clements, decided not to run for re-election. Richards painted herself as a sensible progressive, and won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination against Attorney General (and former congressman) James Albon "Jim" Mattox of Dallas and former Governor Mark White. Mattox ran a particularly abrasive campaign against Richards, accusing her of having had drug problems beyond alcoholism. The Republicans nominated multi-millionaire rancher Clayton Wheat Williams, Jr. After a brutal campaign, Richards narrowly won the election on November 6 1990 by a margin of 49-47 percent, and was inaugurated governor the following January. She was a "minority governor" because her popular vote was below 50 percent. Although officially she was the second woman to hold Texas's top office, Richards is considered the first woman elected governor in her own right, since twice-elected Miriam A. Ferguson is often discounted as having been a proxy for impeached governor James E. Ferguson, her husband.

The Texas economy had been in a slump since the mid-1980s, compounded by a downturn in the U.S. economy. Richards responded with a program of economic revitalization, yielding growth in 1991 of 2 percent when the U.S. economy as a whole shrank. Richards also attempted to streamline Texas's government and regulatory institutions for business and the public; her efforts in the former helped to revitalize Texas's corporate infrastructure for its explosive economic growth later in the decade, and her audits on the state bureaucracy saved $6 billion.



As governor, Richards reformed the Texas prison system, establishing a substance abuse program for inmates, reducing the number of violent offenders released, and increasing prison space to deal with a growing prison population (from less than 60,000 in 1992 to more than 80,000 in 1994). She backed proposals to reduce the sale of semi-automatic firearms and "cop-killer" bullets in the state.

During her first term, she signed into law the amendment of the Texas Financial Responsibility Law where renewal of a motor vehicle's registration (also covers initial registration of a motor vehicle), safety inspection sticker, driver's license, and/or obtaining new license plates require that a motorist must have a valid auto insurance policy. The law, which passed on September 1, 1991, broadens the 1982 law where a police officer will request a driver's license and proof of insurance during a traffic stop.



The Texas Lottery was also instituted during her governorship - advocated as a means of supplementing school finances; Ann Richards purchased the first lotto ticket on May 29, 1992, in Oak Hill, Texas.


School finance remained one of the key issues of Richards' governorship and of those succeeding hers; the famous Robin Hood plan was launched in the 1992-1993 biennium which attempted to make school funding more equitable across school districts. Richards also sought to decentralize control over education policy to districts and individual campuses; she instituted "site-based management" to this end.

She was unexpectedly defeated in 1994 by George W. Bush, winning 46 percent of the vote to Bush's 53 percent, even after having outspent the Bush campaign by $2.6 million. *. The Richards campaign had hoped for a misstep from the relatively inexperienced Republican candidate, but none appeared, and Richards created one of her own in calling Bush "some jerk," recalling missteps that cost Clayton Williams the election in 1990. Richards would later commend Bush's oratory and attributed her loss in 1994 to Bush's ability to "stay on message." * Other people attribute her loss to the fact that she vetoed the Concealed Carry Bill that would have allowed licensed citizens to carry guns for self-defense inside public establishments without the owner's permission (see Gun politics in the United States). This veto may have cost Richards the 1994 election *. The key campaign issues in the Texas gubernatorial election were crime and gun control; Richards suffered when her stances on both issues became viewed as weak. Others have attributed her loss to the rise in power of the Republican Party nationwide that year, when the GOP took both houses in Congress and when many other Texas lawmakers lost their jobs. The year 1994 was the last year any Democrat won a statewide office in the Lone Star State, with the exception of one judge in 1996.

Ann Richards had taught social studies and history at Fulmore Junior High School in Austin (1955-1956). She continued teaching in later years.

Richards served at Brandeis University as the Fred and Rita Richman Distinguished Visiting Professor of Politics from 1997 to 1998. In 1998 she was elected as a trustee of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, she was reelected in 2004, and continued to hold the position until her death.

She was diagnosed with osteoporosis in 1996, having lost 3/4 inch in height and broken her hand and ankle. She changed her diet and lifestyle, and then her bone density stabilized. She spoke frequently about this experience, teaching or advocating a healthier lifestyle for women at risk of the disease. In 2004, she authored I'm Not Slowing Down, with Dr. Richard U. Levine (M.D.), which describes her own battle with osteoporosis and offers guidance to others with the disease.

In the fall of 2005, she taught a class called "Women and Leadership" at the University of Texas at Austin: twenty-one female students were selected for that class.