It’s the election stretch in 2020, but the new attack ad on Democratic congressional candidate Wendy Davis that began airing in Austin and San Antonio on Tuesday had a strong whiff of 2014.
That’s when then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott issued the same criticism of Davis, then his Democratic rival for governor, for the “questionable ethics” of profiting from legal work for public entities even as she represented Fort Worth in the state Senate.
“Davis attacked lobbyists’ conflicts of interest, but when she had the chance to cash in herself, Davis set up a law firm that grabbed hundreds of thousands of dollars in government contracts, even while Davis was still in office. Wendy Davis, just another self-serving politician,” says the narrator of Club for Growth Action’s second anti-Davis ad.
It’s part of a $3 million spending binge, mostly on TV in Austin and San Antonio, that will saturate the market for the 21st Congressional District, which runs from Central Austin to the north side of San Antonio and includes six Hill Country counties.
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Club for Growth Action, devoted to low taxes and limited government, spent a lot to help get Davis’ competition, Republican U.S. Rep Chip Roy, through the runoff and a 2.6 percentage point general election victory in 2018, and it has made his reelection its top House priority nationally.
But both sides agree the race is up for grabs.
“The Davis-Roy match-up continues to be extremely competitive and likely to remain a dead-heat,” Fred Yang, of Garin-Hart-Yang Research, wrote in a memo on the group’s latest poll for the Davis campaign — a representative sample of 401 likely general election voters conducted between Aug. 31 and Sept. 4. Davis was leading 48 to 47, while in July, Roy was leading by a point.
“One important finding is that despite several weeks of Club for Growth negative TV ads, Wendy’s initial TV ads emphasizing her inspiring personal story and bipartisan work in the Texas Senate are resonating with voters,” Yang wrote in the memo.
“I’m Wendy Davis,” the 30-second bio ad begins. “My parents divorced when I was 13. I got a job at 14 to help mom and at 19 I became a mom. I lived in a trailer park for a while, holding down two jobs. Got the opportunity to go to community college, then TCU, Harvard Law. As a state senator, I put Texas over party because everyone deserves a fair shot. I approved this message because now I’m a grandmother and we owe them the same opportunities we had.”
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It’s a stripped down version of the bio she unveiled when she launched her campaign for governor in 2013. It was a bio that got some small facts wrong, making her difficult road appear the slightest bit more dire, and more importantly left out the roles played by her father and her second husband in her life story.
“Disputing the details of Wendy Davis’ life is especially offensive to the many Texas women who can relate to her story,” Grace Garcia, head of Annie’s List, which recruits, trains and funds female Democratic candidates in Texas, said at the time.
But it got the campaign off to a rocky start from which it never really recovered, despite extraordinarily strong fundraising numbers that gave Texas Democrats reason to dream.
“I thought it was a terrific ad,” Matt Angle, head of the Lone Star Project and a close adviser to Davis in her run for governor, said of her new bio ad. “She was much more careful.”
And, Angle said, if you had told him back then that Davis “would be competing to win Congressional District 21 and the Republicans would be spending $3 million dollars to defend it, I would have said you were crazy.”
“It tells you what Donald Trump has done to their party,” Angle said. “If the only thing that they’ve got is to go and consult Greg Abbott’s oppo book from 2014, Wendy’s in pretty good shape.”
Gold Star attack
After losing to Abbott by more than 20 points in a very bad year nationally for Democrats, Davis moved to Austin and now lives in the district that U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, a powerful congressman from San Antonio, relinquished in 2018 after 16 terms.
Unlike Smith, an inside player in Washington, Roy revels in being a lonely vote for Constitutional principle.
On Wednesday, the House Majority, a super PAC working to maintain Democratic control of the U.S. House, launched a $336,000 ad buy in the San Antonio market, reprising previous attacks on Roy for being one of three members of the House to vote against tax relief for Gold Star families.
But Roy said he co-sponsored the Gold Star Family Relief Act, and then voted against it because it had been stripped of language “that would have allowed spending from parents’ 529 (college savings) accounts to pay for apprenticeships, homeschooling, and other educational programs.”
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Club for Growth ads
The first Club for Growth Action ad attacked Davis for spending campaign money on nice digs in Austin while serving in the Legislature, which is neither illegal nor uncommon.
The second ad refers to the bigger money Davis, an attorney, made in partnership with Bryan Newby, a former chief of staff to Gov. Rick Perry, while doing business with public entities like the North Texas Tollway Authority.
In a part-time Legislature, it is the kind of murky business that the many attorneys who serve there sometimes find themselves engaging in without raising much more than an eyebrow or a political attack ad.
It was the kind of attack that Democratic U.S. Senate candidate MJ Hegar leveled against attorney and state Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, at their Senate runoff debate at the end of June, without citing any specifics.
“We have corruption, we have money in politics, we have politicians, frankly like you, Royce, who become millionaires in office and have spent their time legislating in their own best interest instead of the interests of their constituents,” Hegar said. “I’m done with it. I’m tired of it. And so is Texas.”
