Democrat Wendy Davis isn’t having a good run for governor. That’s to be expected. Texas is as red as California is blue. Democrats haven’t won statewide here in a generation. One will, at some point, eventually, but so far it doesn’t like Wendy Davis will be that one. She doesn’t seem to know what she’s doing.
Davis became famous taking an extreme position against the majority of the state on abortion. That’s a strike against her. She became a mainstream media darling. Another strike against her. She sued a newspaper, because it hurt her feelings. Another strike. Her bootstrappy origins story turns out not to be true, and the facts of it suggest bad things — using a man’s money to get ahead and then abandoning him, leaving her kids behind to pursue her career. Two more strikes. How many strikes does it take before we call her out and send her back to the dugout?
Then Davis hired some far lefties to run her campaign. That hasn’t worked out so well either. Her message is by turns erratic, shrill and way off to the left. They have one setting in the Davis shop — ATTACK! Davis goes out of state to raise a huge portion of her campaign money. When she leaves the state, she says terrible things about it. Strike, strike, strike.
Her lack of campaign skill is showing up in the polls. Head over to The Grid to see just how far behind she currently is.
But this week, it looked like Davis might have finally figured out that sticking to the far left wasn’t helping her. She jettisoned a far-left campaign manager and replaced her with a more centrist one. Many pundits, myself included, thought that might signal a shift to the center. Maybe she’ll even try picking up a gun again. That would be fun.
We were wrong. With the Cantor loss, it’s been that kind of a week in punditry.
We’re coming up on the anniversary of Davis’ famous (or infamous) pink-shoed filibuster. Davis had run away from that a little bit, even claiming that she’s “pro-life” during a trip to the heavily Catholic Rio Grande Valley.
Well, even that unconvincing move is out. Now, she’s running a contest to give away a pair of her pink filibuster sneakers. That’s not running away from her extremism on abortion. She’s running straight for it.
She’s hosting a party on the filibuster’s first birthday.
Davis is jumping high for the gay rights movement.
That’s not really a priority for most Texans. Jobs, the economy, education, stopping Obamacare, keeping government in check — these are priorities. Davis is not in line with the majority of Texans on any of these issues.
Instead of paying even lip service to those issues, just to show a centrist streak even if it’s fake, Davis is prioritizing running to the far left.
Does Wendy Davis think losing by more than 20 points is within reach? She may get there, if she’ll just try hard enough.
So our exit question: Has Wendy Davis given up, and decided to just let her leftism rip? Is she really angling for a gig on MSNBC?
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