I doubt Wendy Davis can win the upcoming gubernatorial contest in Texas, but I think the result hinges a little less on who her allies are than on who her opponent winds up being and whether or not Davis can appeal to a sufficient number of white women. If her opponent is an imbecile, that’ll be worth a couple of points. But the real challenge is eating into the Republicans’ overwhelming advantage with white voters. I don’t think Davis can do much about her lack of appeal to conservative white men, but she just might be able to make a connection with a not insignificant number of white women.
She’ll start out with some support from younger women who are concerned about their reproductive rights and are less culturally conservative than their parents. But, to make meaningful inroads, she’ll need to connect with married white women. An insensitive male opponent would assist her in that effort.
Finally, she’ll have to have a great turnout operation and clean up with the Latino vote. All the stars would have to align, but it’s not out of the question.
I’ve been wondering the same thing. Regardless of whether she does win, I’m inclined to think her campaign will be a good thing for the Democrats overall.
My general theory of next year’s midterms is that the louder things get, the better the Democrats’ chances will be. The Republicans have fewer potential voters, but they tend to have an advantage in motivation, especially in midterms, so we’ll need something to get Democrats to the polls. And with Wendy Davis in the race, I suspect things are going to get pretty noisy in Texas.
Given that she came to national attention by fighting for abortion rights, we can expect quite a barrage of sexism and misogyny. It feels strange to be looking at this with anything like optimism, but of course the more rancid the right’s attacks on Davis get, the better the Democrats’ chances will be.
And of course the push for immigration reform isn’t going to go away just because John Boehner killed the bill, and Texas is one of the states where the issue will be most salient.
Her opponent is almost certain to be Greg Abbott, the state Attorney General. Abbott has wasted millions of Texas taxpayer dollars on frivolous lawsuits against the federal government to prove his conserativer-than-thou bona fides.
Abbott is no dummy, but he is an a-hole of the nth degree. He is almost certain to say something mean and misogynistic that will turn off women voters.
Given that she came to national attention by fighting for abortion rights, we can expect quite a barrage of sexism and misogyny. It feels strange to be looking at this with anything like optimism, but of course the more rancid the right’s attacks on Davis get, the better the Democrats’ chances will be.
That’s a good point. If you take the conservatives’ astonishing persistence in coming up with ever more insulting remarks about women and rape, and consider that in addition to the high national profile that Texas has earned in this last year in terms of hostility toward women as possessors of human rights (not to mention of course the same creeping trend at the state level throughout the US), you may be looking at a huge driver for women voters nationally.
It’s still way too early to make predictions, but 2014 may be shaping up to be an unusual midterm for high voter turnout.
Davis as a candidate does not impress me.
Yeah. She is pretty Blue-Doggy.
She’s running for statewide office in Texas…hope you weren’t expecting an unapologetic liberal.
Also, as long as she doesn’t spend the entire campaign criticizing Obama (which frankly I haven’t heard much, if any, of), I don’t care. Again, this is Texas…let’s be realistic about what can be accomplished.
You might be surprised. Republicans win down here because Dems don’t get excited enough to vote. And it’s gerrymandered within an inch of its life.
I like Leticia Van de Putte better. lol
I know. I kept re-reading booman’s post because if I had never seen a photo, I would assume from this post that she is not white. She’s not just white, she’s lily white, as I recall.
What about the star bursts vote? We can’t ignore that.
Can someone say more about this running away from the president?
The President was recently in Texas….
where the hell was Wendy Davis – candidate for Governor?
She wasn’t anywhere near the President.
You misunderstand the term “gender gap.” It’s simply a significant difference in the aggregate voting preference of women in comparison to men. It was first detected in the 1984 presidential election and has if anything become more pronounced since then. Until then the women’s vote didn’t differ from men’s by much and in 1960 Nixon won among women.
While non-white women have a much stronger preference for Democrats over Republicans; so too do non-white men. If the votes non-white women and men are similar, there is no gender gap within that sub-population. That, however, wasn’t true in any sub-population in 2012. All demonstrated a gender gap.
It was 7% among whites, 9% among blacks, and 11% among Latinos. Interesting that Latinas exhibited more independent thought from their men than white or black women.
And I am curious to see if disenfranchisement among married women might offend some Republican matrons. Dunno.
not a remote chance.
it will be hilarious watching white “progressives” blame non-white folks for the loss though.
Classic example of projection.
Thanks for the lesson!
Sheriff has one and only one comment on every blog on the internet.
Never say never. Not quite sure why I feel optimistic about this, maybe because the other presidential candidates from texas have been idiots, at least recently. She’s way smarter than they are.
Also, it was no accident that they chose Wendy Davis for the filibuster. They must have wanted her to get national attention, therefore I suspect they thought she had a lot of potential.
I should say, however, that I know nothing of what I speak, so I may be full of it.
Given the context, it’s pretty much guaranteed that she’ll get an insensitive male opponent.
Yes, a Texas Republican. What else could be expected?
DEPENDS:
Is the democratic party (DNC, DCCC) going to get off their dead asses and get the 2 Million unregistered Hispanic voters registered to vote?
if the answer is no, then I doubt Ms. Davis can win.
Wendy Davis’ latina running mate may do some of that heavy lifting with those potential 2 million votes.
Great, but one person cannot do it all.
again, the clowns at the DNC need to fund a major voter registration effort, or forget it.
There were also 750,000 registered Latinos that didn’t vote in 2012. (The Latino registration rate of eligible voters is 55%)
If Wendy Davis is running away from President Obama and his record, she certainly is not positioned to win. Compare Creigh Deeds and Terry McAuliffe’s runs in Virginia.
She made a good start based on the fame she got from her filibuster.
But conventional wisdom in the Democratic establishment has a habit of killing campaigns.
As rikyah says above, you don’t win even in Texas as a Democrat by starting out ignoring Barack Obama’s base. That is not a statement about African-American voters; it is a statement about Obama’s base, the folks black, Latino, white, Native American who have been there for him.
But…if she can repair any damage she has done and succeeds in winning in 2014, that will be the political story of the election. Even if it is the symbolic capstone. In the neo-Confederate war, that is the equivalent of Appomattox–taking back Texas.