“I’m running for our children and grandchildren,” Wendy Davis concludes at the end of her campaign launch video, “so they can live and love.” Er … who wants to tell her? The woman who temporarily blocked the Texas state legislature to protect late term abortion will run for Congress next year, hoping to unseat freshman Republican Chip Roy:
Early Monday morning, Davis announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination in Central Texas’ 21st District. She is challenging U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, a freshman Republican from Austin.
She made her intentions known in a biographical video, narrated in part with archival footage from her late father, Jerry Russell.
“I’m running for Congress because people’s voices are still being silenced,” she said. “I’m running for our children and grandchildren, so they can live and love and fight for change themselves.”
The potential Davis-Roy matchup is likely to be among the most polarizing races the state has seen in recent years. Davis is a fierce national advocate for abortion rights, while Roy has built his reputation in his first six months in Congress as a conservative firebrand.
You know what allows more children to “live and love and to fight for change themselves”? Being born! That’s especially true when those children reach the gestational stage of survival. Make no mistake about it — Davis is running to ensure that fewer children live even before they get to the stage of loving and “fighting for change.”
Does she have a chance against Roy? Maybe, but it will be a long shot. Trump won this district by ten points in 2016, which is the same gap seen in its Cook index (R+10). Roy only edged out his Democratic opponent by three points in the next election, underperforming Trump’s 2016 result, but he was also a non-incumbent running against a middling Democratic wave. (He was also best known at that time as Ted Cruz’ chief of staff at a point when Cruz wasn’t terribly popular, edging out Beto O’Rourke for re-election.) Furthermore, Davis showed herself to be a rather incompetent candidate outside of her state-legislative district, with Greg Abbott sailing to victory while Davis drowned.
Here’s the campaign launch video, which seems odd in concept and execution. Davis ran for governor five years ago; does she really need to go the autobiographical route by this time? And as for having her deceased dad introduce her (via archive footage), it’s sweet — and then it gets weird when she interjects about her struggle over her parents’ divorce. What the hell …
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