Photograph Source: Gage Skidmore – CC BY -SA 2.0
When Kamala Harris lost her bid for the White House to Donald Trump, she quickly turned to Hillary Clinton for consolation. At one level, it made sense. Clinton, of course, knows a thing or two about under-performing as a feminist standard-bearer in the face of a thinly-veiled patriarchal onslaught. But the similarities between the two cases shouldn’t be overstated. Clinton was a well-established and popular candidate with a long history of government service and largely unconditional support from within her party. She’d already campaigned for the presidency eight years earlier and only a concerted push by top party officials on behalf of upstart Barack Obama derailed her 2008 party nomination bid. And her loss to Trump in 2016, when she’d been heavily favored, was exceedingly narrow. She crushed him in the popular vote while losing the electoral college by the slenderest of margins in just three key swing states. In fact, despite their outward confidence, Trump’s own campaign had not expected to win. “We got lucky,” top Trump campaign officials confessed later.
2024 couldn’t have been more different. Harris was a neophyte with uncertain support at the time she inherited her party’s nomination from Joe Biden. During her four years as vice president she never really distinguished herself or built widespread credibility as a prospective national leader. Many Democrats were horrified at the prospect of her succeeding Biden and had hoped that a new standard-bearer could be found. And despite massive billion dollar and a half funding and a concerted media and PR campaign on her behalf, Trump was probably ahead of her for most of the 90 days that the two competed head-to-head. While most national polls showed Harris in a dead heat with Trump, or even slightly ahead, her campaign’s own internal polling and the polling of some of the best survey organizations had her behind the entire time, which means, appearances to the contrary, she was never really in serious contention.
And in the end, her loss was crushing. Trump carried all seven swing states, some of them by a fairly wide margin. Even worse, she lost the popular vote – the first Democrat to do so in decades. And when you look at her losses among key demographics – especially Hispanics and youth, especially young men, including African-Americans, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that she’d suffered a near across-the-board repudiation from voters.
Still, there’s a precedent for her loss – it’s just not Clinton. If anyone can truly identify with a feminist political campaign that never quite lived up to its hype – and quickly fizzled after initially soaring like a comet – it would be another high-flying woman by the name of Wendy Davis, a Texas state senator who launched a long-shot bid for Texas governor in 2014. In 2013, Davis made her name by launching an unprecedented filibuster of a draconian Texas anti abortion measure, firing up the state’s Democratic party and garnering national headlines in the process. Davis held forth from her podium for 13 straight hours, refusing to yield, and the controversial abortion measure failed. Though it would later pass, Davis soon became an overnight sensation, much as Harris did. Democrats not just in Texas but nationally were jubilant about the Davis-led rebellion, and sensing an opportunity to finally make inroads in a state with the second-most electoral votes, they pushed her to run for governor against the outgoing incumbent Rick Perry, who had succeeded George W. Bush, and who by law, was term-limited.
Democrats had launched quixotic quests against Texas Republicans in the past. But typically their candidates never got closer than a dozen points in a statewide race. In fact, just four years earlier, Democrat Bill White, a popular Democrat and attractive politician, had lost to Perry by 12.7 points. It was a familiar pattern that also carried over to national elections. GOP presidential candidates – from Ronald Reagan to native son George W. Bush – had ruled the roost in Texas for years. The party’s long-standing dominance was rooted, in part, in demographics: the state’s White working class was unusually pro-Republican but the party was also unusually unified; even after hard-fought primaries, the Texas GOP set aside its internal differences rallied around a single standard-bearer, making Democratic “poaching” difficult. In addition, Hispanics, while 22% of the population, were largely Mexican-American, moderate-to-conservative, and a high percentage still didn’t vote. Even worse for Democratic prospects, the state by 2014 enjoyed a major fiscal surplus, giving Republicans the upper hand. In other words, the odds against Davis couldn’t have been more steep.
Still, when Davis announced with much fanfare that she was running for governor, Democrats in Texas flocked to her cause. It didn’t hurt that she was blonde, athletic, just 49 years old, and exuded a natural sex appeal, which some thought might increase her appeal to men. Her star power, much like Harris’, skyrocketed virtually overnight. Money poured into her campaign from all quarters and Davis received major celebrity endorsements. Hollywood actresses Jennifer Garner and Elizabeth Shue, and famed producers Norman Lear and Stephen Spielberg, co-hosted her California fundraisers and fawned over her publicly.
Her back story, that of a working class woman who had struggled to graduate from college, earn a law degree and run for political office seemed at first glance, compelling. Not surprisingly, her campaign was also eagerly embraced by Texas feminists and national women’s rights organizations alike, and young women in the state eagerly signed up as volunteers and canvassers. When Battleground Texas, a fledgling but powerful grassroots funding organization seeking to turn the state Blue, decided to merge its operation with the Davis campaign, Democrats throughout the country were jubilant. Riding a euphoric high of hope and expectation, Davis, much like Harris, seemed poised for lift-off.
And there was Obama, too. He’d recently won a commanding re-election and seemed eager to support the Davis campaign. He’d already tweeted his congratulations to Davis on her decision to run in late 2013, and in April 2014, while other Southern Democrats were largely running away from Obama, the re-elected president agreed to meet with her during a Texas fundraising swing, Obama had lost Texas to Mitt Romney by nearly 16 points (worse than his showing in 2008 against John McCain, when he’d lost by just 12) but Davis, like her fellow Texas Democrats, seemed undeterred, and felt that Obama’s unabashed support among Texas Democrats would boost her prospects.
Obama’s embrace wasn’t a full-throated one by any means. He was in Texas to dedicate the LBJ presidential library and was also attending two big fundraisers in Houston, which Davis avoided. Abbott had suggested that Davis was “too afraid” to meet with Obama and she decided to defy his claim. It seemed to some that Obama might have had more to gain politically from the meeting – which remained private, without media fanfare – than Davis did. But it certainly pointed to high-level national interest in her race, and seemed to portend a White House push on her behalf.
And early polling in the race was indeed promising. In November 2013, a year out from the balloting, Davids trailed her would-be opponent by just 6 points, with a quarter of the electorate still undecided. Many analysts noted that Greg Abbott, the state’s attorney general, unlike Perry and Bush, was not well known and still needed to introduce himself to the state electorate. Davis, by contrast, had become a household name. And the media buzz was growing. While many Texas voters might not naturally gravitate toward an outspoken feminist wearing her trademark pink running shoes, and spouting her support for a panoply of liberal policy positions, some analysts felt she might have a genuine opening – and that Democrats – and Davis – were right to seize it. Could Davis mobilize the Democratic base while defining Abbott and herself in a way that would sway Texas swing voters her way?
As soon became clear, Davis, much like Harris, wasn’t fully prepared – if at all – for the momentous challenge she faced. In fact, after the initial sugar high following her campaign announcement, things started to fall apart rather quickly. Her back story of overcoming personal hardship was soon damaged when it was revealed that her ex-husband – depicted as an ogre of sorts – had agreed to pay for her entire college and law school education. Like Harris, she had left many details of her campaign bio hazy, and when confronted, grew defensive.
Davis’ early campaign missteps would presage the Harris campaign in other ways. Her messaging was remarkably incoherent; she couldn’t seem to focus on a single compelling issue, not even the abortion issue that had first propelled her to stardom. Voters couldn’t figure out if she was a diehard progressive, as she’d long claimed, or possibly a moderate more in the mold of one-time Democratic governor Ann Richards. She pitched to the right, hoping to convince swing voters she could be trusted, but never shed her earlier positions, either. On abortion, she started to waffle, at one point suggesting she might support a 20-week ban on the procedure, which was anathema to her pro-choice supporters. But much like Harris, everything about Davis’ campaign profile, style, membership and outreach suggested that she was for and about women primarily. In the end, nobody was fooled by her feeble feints to the center.
She also blundered badly when it came to depicting her opponent, which she did with a series of negative attack ads aimed less at his record than his character. She falsely claimed that he’d supported a Texas Supreme Court decision on guns – when in fact, he’d dissented from that decision. Even worse, Davis used her war chest to launch a battery of widely-panned TV attack ads – even some supporters called them “grotesque” – that seemed to make fun of Abbort’s wheelchair-bound disability– which completely backfired. Much as Harris found when she went full-bore negative on Trump, the effect of this late-campaign shift was to cast doubt on the integrity of Davis’ own agenda, while driving more voters to Abbott, partly out of sympathy.
While few people expected Davis to win her race outright – given Texas’s conservative tilt – her campaign was supposed to help move the needle for Texas Democrats, setting the stage for progressive gains further down the road. Instead, it did just the opposite. In the end, Davis lost to Abbott by a whopping 21 points, and Democrats in down-ballot races across the state also lost badly. Instead of helping her fellow Democrats, her misbegotten campaign bruised and battered them. Davis herself lost across the board, earning just 47% of the women’s vote. And the ultimate indignity? A pro-life Tea Party conservative even managed to capture her old state senate seat.
This was a historic loss, much as the Democrats just suffered with Harris. And historic losses can be fatal for a party and for the candidate associated with them. Politically, Davis never recovered from her defeat. Five years later, in 2019, she ran for Texas’s 21st congressional district and lost the election to Republican Chip Roy, winning just two of the district’s ten counties. It was another humiliating loss but it reflected the new reality of Texas in the wake of her crushing defeat in 2014: Far from tilting Purple, much less Blue, the state, under Abbott, was becoming even more diehard Red. Uber-liberal Beto O-Rourke, who would make a quixotic bid for the Democratic party nomination for president in 2020, did come within 3 points of beating Ted Cruz for the US Senate in 2018, but it would prove to be the last hurrah for Texas Democrats. All told, they’ve been shut out of high-level state offices for the past 30 years, and there’s little sign of a fresh opening any time soon.
Of course, that’s just Texas, right? Well, yes, and no. There’s always a great risk in raising the stakes of an election so high and then performing so badly. It demoralizes your party and its base. It demobilizes your grassroots activists and generates confusion, cynicism and despair. It gives your opponents an opportunity to create a new electoral coalition based on fresh demographic breakthroughs, including defections from your traditional base. Biden only lost Texas by 5 points in 2020, but Harris lost by nearly 14. In Texas, meanwhile, Abbott has consolidated GOP support, winning a third term in office in 2022, beating Beto O’Rourke by 11 points, while making historic inroads into a number of major Hispanic counties. This was much narrower than Davis’ 21-point loss in 2014, but it’s indicative of how deep Red Texas has remained despite recurring Democratic efforts, cycle after cycle.
The upshot? While Texas isn’t the nation by a long shot, its persistent repudiation of the Democrats points to one possible future for the party nationally unless it adjusts to its loss last November. All major bodies in Texas are now controlled by the GOP, much as they are nationally under Trump. Abbott, who has emerged as a key Trump ally, shows no sign of weakening his hold on the Lone Star State, and indeed, his deepening alliance with Trump is likely to become a fulcrum of national policy-making on immigration and energy over the next four years. How will the Democrats respond, having found themselves unexpectedly vanquished? In Texas, liberal Democrats have been reeling in the decade since Davis’ crushing loss. Talk of turning the state Blue has all but subsided, and leading liberal Democrats like O’Rourke find themselves trying to carve out positions on energy and immigration more in keeping with the predilections of moderate voters, just to survive. There is little hope – in the short term at least – of shaking GOP dominance.
Can Democrats recognize the folly of having challenged Trump with such a flawed messenger and message, and set out on a genuine effort to rebrand the party for mainstream voters without simply conciliating the right? It’s a massive undertaking that will require a degree of soul-searching and humility that Democrats so far have seemed unwilling to contemplate. The full dimensions and potential implications of their shattering loss have yet to be appreciated. The party’s aging oligarchs are still clinging to their posts, reluctant to budge, but a number of candidates that did manage to prevail last November, have illustrated ways in which the party can embrace its heritage as a party of ordinary Americans in search of greater class equality and more dignity and rights for the disenfranchised. They don’t have to be men. Powerful examples exist at the local level, including Hispanic Marie Gluesenkamp Perez who won re-election in a Red district in Washington State by campaigning on kitchen table issues and demonstrating real empathy for voters. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer is another possible standard-bearer. Popular across the board, though somewhat tarnished now by her recent association with Harris.
Harris’ loss was a watershed and there should be no turning back. Make no mistake: Trump’s inroads among women, men, Hispanics and youth were no mere flash in the pan, but the GOP as a party has yet to consolidate them. If they do, and Republicans manage to remain unified through the post-Trump era, the fate of Texas after Wendy Davis could indeed become America’s after Harris. Years in the political wilderness, desperately trying to keep the Republican locomotive from steaming ahead It’s a chilling prospect.
