Texas State Senator Wendy Davis is closing in on Attorney General Greg Abbott in the polls for the Texas governor's race, moving from an 18-point deficit to a 9-point deficit. It is a month before the election and people are now, at last, starting to listen. Her message is resonating as she is exposing the cronyism and corruption conducted in Austin, Texas, by a government under solid Republican control for decades.
The status quo is the status quo until it is not. Conventional wisdom has pundits dismissing the possibility of a strong Democratic performance at the top of the ticket in Texas because of the fallacy that Texas is a red state, a conservative state.
The reality is that the people in Texas have blue values, but they have bought into the narrative that the state is conservative. What is undeniably true is that conservatives vote, and liberals and moderates in Texas don't. They haven’t because for too long, too many Democrats have sounded like Republican lite, reinforcing the notion of Texas being a conservative state.
If Texans are given real choices that they believe, they will register. They will vote. In fact, Texans are looking for a reason to vote, and Wendy Davis is giving Texans that reason. She gave compelling reasons Texans needed a governor like her in a speech she gave at the National Press Club before she officially declared her run. Texans already knew she was willing to fight for positions she and many Texans believe in, based on her epic filibuster a couple of summers ago.
Please chip in $3 today to help Wendy Davis turn Texas blue.
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Over the last several months, many people have been worried about the direction of the Wendy Davis campaign. Was she being "handled" too tightly by her managers? The assertive woman who got things done seemed a bit too measured. While she held her own in the first debate with Greg Abbott, she seemed a bit too controlled and staged, resulting in a debate that wouldn't move the poll numbers.
The good news is, Davis knocked the second debate out of the park. She kept Abbott on the defensive from the beginning. She showed that she commanded issues most dear to the voters likely to vote for her, education and health care. Most importantly, she followed one of the most basic principles in politics, message personalization. Drew Westin talks about this in his book the The Political Brain. It is something Republicans have been doing for years—personalize the issue in a way that can be understood, personally, by the voter.
Davis was able to portray Abbott accurately as a candidate that would sacrifice the health of Texans for his own ideology, and she was able to do so by showing he was lying about the numbers. She used a message of fiscal responsibility as the reason she will accept the Medicaid expansion to Obamacare. She did not allow Abbott to make Obamacare the issue, and she forced him defend the reason for not bringing Texas dollars back home.
Davis' full-throated defense of women's reproductive rights, marriage equality, the Dream Act, driver's licenses for the undocumented, and many other progressive tenets were refreshing. She showed a stark contrast between candidates, definitely coming across as a proud Democrat, not one trying to appear as a lighter version of a Republican.
Debates notwithstanding, Davis, has been an unrelenting campaigner, criss-crossing the major population centers on a continuous basis. Harris, Dallas, Bear, and Tarrant counties, as well as the Texas Valley, is her stumping ground. Her volunteers are working in the very red counties as well, registering old-time Democrats (remember, Texas was a reliably Democratic state for a long time).
Time is running out. Voter ID laws are problematic. That said, if the activity and enthusiasm seen throughout the state is met with similar activity at the polls through early voting and in November, the status quo in Texas will be broken. Wendy Davis will win and a host of qualified Democratic statewide candidates down ballot will win as well. Texas will likely turn blue before it turns purple.
Let's help make that happen. Please chip in $3 today to help Wendy Davis turn Texas blue.