PrairiePundit

San Antonio Express-News: Wendy Davis gets Texas Monthly's 2014 'Bum Steer of the Year' It was a cow paddy worthy performance that made the cover of Texas Monthly .

National Journal: Battleground Texas is determined to make Texas a Democratic battleground, but the midterm elections prove Republicans aren't ceding Latino voters in Texas to Democrats without a fight. It's no surprise that Texas Republicans easily won statewide races in an election cycle when President Obama's approval rating was underwater and low turnout favored the GOP. But the highlight for Republicans is that statewide candidates gained ground with Hispanic voters, a group that Battleground Texas was counting on to turn Texas from red to blue. Battleground's founder and former Obama campaign operative Jeremy Bird had long pointed out that if the 4.2 million eligible Latino voters in Texas were all registered to vote, and the majority showed up to the polls, the demographic shift would be enough to empower Democrats in the state. That assumed, however, that Texas Republicans were not going to make a successful play for the Latino vote. The Republican Party of T...

Chris Cillizza: The worst candidate of 2014 THE FIX | The “award” goes to Iowa Democrat Bruce Braley, who lost a very winnable race — badly. Braley had a few gaffes, but Davis's campaign was an example of awful campaign plans and strategies peppered with a few gaffes.  Most of her mistakes were done with planning and forethought which makes them worse.

Leon Wolf: ... The mind boggles at the cocooned-from-reality worldview that treats results as secondary or even tertiary to how participating in the process causes one to feel. Sure, Wendy Davis turned national exposure and millions of dollars into an embarrassing and historic landslide loss, but the few dozen supporters who were with her to the bitter end had positive feelings about being on the campaign trail. Sure, she lost badly among every imaginable demographic (including women!) but a certain subset of those women can feel empowered about the prospect of wearing pink running shoes to their places of work and have hope that they, too, will find a man they can sucker into paying for several years of postgraduate education before leaving him. Even the narrative here either ignores or completely glosses over inconvenient facts. Such as the fact that she did not respond to pressure about her abortion convictions with “unflinching devotion” but rather instead with a convenient and t...

Breeanne Howe: Feminists Declare War on Texas White Women Where did the left get the idea that insulting those who oppose your candidate is a winning strategy?  They are angry because white women preferred Greg Abbot for Texas's governor.  BTW, Hispanic men also favored Abbott.

Kevin Williamson: Acknowledging the admittedly remote risk that I am giving a hostage to fate by writing these words, I note that the implosion of Wendy Davis’s ugly and vacuous gubernatorial campaign in Texas has been a satisfying spectacle. On Tuesday, it is all but inevitable that Greg Abbot’s campaign and Texas voters are going to beat Wendy Davis like a circus monkey, and it will be her second significant defeat in the campaign: She ran triumphantly unopposed in the New York Times primary, with Robert Draper all but kissing the hem of her garment , but she took a beating in the Rio Grande primary, with her penniless nobody opponent outperforming her in critical border counties that had gone heavily for Barack Obama in the presidential elections. Bipartisan lesson: If you are going to run a horsepucky media creation as a single-issue candidate, pick a single issue that doesn’t stack voters up against you four to one. Wendy Davis is a fanatic as Winston Churchill defined the word...

AP: It's a sunny afternoon just before the election and Wendy Davis isn't addressing an arena packed with adoring supporters, speaking on national television or working a hotel ballroom of top donors. Instead, the Democratic candidate for Texas governor is in a soldier's backyard in an especially conservative corner of the state that she has no hope of carrying, addressing 30 campaign volunteers as they slap at stinging fire ants. Davis' campaign, which began with sky-high hopes among Democrats nationwide, is nearing the finish line facing seemingly insurmountable odds. The state senator dares critics to count her out, but her well-funded and popular Republican opponent, state Attorney General Greg Abbott, looks so unstoppable that the question now looming over the race is whether defeat will reduce her to a spent political force. ... Addressing the crowd at Schuette's home, Davis spoke over the barking of a neighbor's dog and the squeaking of a trampoline f...

David Weigel: Bottles of beer cost $3 at the Hollywood Bar. After dark, bottles of very necessary mosquito repellant are passed around, gratis. It’s a hot night, fifty or so locals have come to talk and meet Republican candidates, and nobody’s got anything kind to say about the immigration detention center down the road. The Mexican border is just a few miles away. The reporters who trekked down to cover the late summer’s child migrant crisis? Long gone. Yet the building goes on. “They’re actually opening up stuff faster for them than they are for us,” says Jose Pena, who works at a local appraiser’s office. “Yeah, they put up a school for the immigrant kids like—whoosh—like that,” says Manny Rosales, a Navy veteran who’s still looking for work. “They took an old building, but they rebuilt it and got it up and running in a month. They couldn’t do it fast enough!” It’s early October, right before the start of early voting in Texas’s elections. Rosales, Pena, and a few dozen other peo...

Breitbart: Latest-Poll-Has-Wendy-Davis-Losing-By-12-Points-Among-Women Greg Abbott is leading Davis 49 to 37 in a NYT/CBS poll.  The only way these guys are going to turn Texas blue is by holding their breath.

William McGurn: Tale of two women: One Republican, One Democrat McGurn contrast the treatment of Wendy Davis as a rock star that is losing by double digits with that of a young woman running for Congress in New York who is ahead by eight points by running against Obamacare among other issues.  He also notes other Republican women who are doing well this cycle like Joni Ernst.

KHOU: As early voters head to the polls for a landmark election in Texas, a new survey conducted for KHOU-TV and Houston Public Media shows Republican Greg Abbott with a commanding lead over Democrat Wendy Davis in the race for governor. Abbott's supported by 47 percent of likely voters surveyed for the poll, compared to Davis' 32 percent. Another 15 percent were undecided. Green Party candidates Brandon Parmer carried 1.4 percent and Libertarian Kathie Glass .7 percent. About 2 percent of surveyed voters wouldn't say who they're supporting. This latest poll dovetails with other surveys conducted earlier this year showing Abbott with a double-digit lead over Davis, indicating few voters have changed their minds during the course of the campaign. "There always could be a crisis, a major gaffe, something like that," said Bob Stein, the Rice University political scientist and KHOU analyst who supervised the poll. "But it's very hard to imagine that you...

Breitbart: Underdog candidates often will make risky, long-shot strategic moves in the final weeks of a campaign, attempting one last "Hail Mary" pass to shake up the race, but Democrat Wendy Davis' latest ad attacking Republican Greg Abbott not only failed to score points, but drew swift and sharply negative reaction within hours of its release Friday, both across the state and around the country. As Breitbart Texas reported after the ad launched, it shows the image of an empty wheelchair as an ominous voice intones, "A tree fell on Greg Abbott. He sued and got millions." The ad then goes on to criticize rulings that Abbott issued as a judge or cases that his office handled as Attorney General. Abbott's campaign sent out a press release linking to several news articles from earlier this year that debunk the claims in the ad and condemned it as "a historic low for someone seeking to represent Texans," and "a disturbing lack of judgment f...

Wall Street Journal: Wendy Davis Struggles to Gain Traction in Texas Governor’s Race Polls Show Democratic Lawmaker Trailing Republican Greg Abbott With just a few weeks to go, the polls show she has not been able to build any momentum against Greg Abbott who has run a smart low key campaign.  Abbott has also made a strong play for the Hispanic vote which Democrats hoped to snare.

Observer/Guardian: Texas governor debate: Wendy Davis fails to land blows on Republican rival Davis, who staged an epic filibuster on abortion last year, is trying to upset the odds by beating attorney general Greg Abbott In the part I saw I thought she seemed stilted and too scripted.  Abbott came across as the smart unflappable guy he is.  He double digit lead is not in jeopardy after this event.

Heather Wilhelm: Wendy Davis and the Age of Over-Sharing This is one of the most devastatingly funny book review I have ever seen.  While some in the liberal media tried to promote the book, actually reading it was not much fun for Wilhelm, but reading her review is.

Red States: On the important matter of Wendy Davis and the Dallas Cowboys  If we can't trust her on football, can we trust her on anything? She has gone from being a New England Patriot fan while soliciting money in the Northeast to being all in on the Cowboys.  Where is the love for the Texans?  

Fox News: As a feisty state senator with pink sneakers and a fist in the air, Wendy Davis captured both the love and the ire of America last year when she pulled an 11-hour filibuster of anti-abortion measures in the Texas Capitol. But after using that star power to win her party's nomination for governor, Davis is still struggling to take a lead over Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott, and some say party confidence in her race is waning. "I think the frustration in some Democratic circles is that, despite her star power and substantial war chest, she has not been able to move the dial against Greg Abbott after a year on the campaign trail," Mark Jones, political science professor at Rice University in Houston, told FoxNews.com. Even the high-profile, abuse-of-power indictment of Republican Gov. Rick Perry, whom Davis hopes to replace, didn't seem to hurt Abbott or raise the Democrat's profile over the media din. Larry Sabato, director of the Univer...

Red States: Abortion Barbie Goes Full Harridan Davis has run a poor campaign and ads like this one are not likely to salvage it.

Daily Beast: As if things weren’t going badly enough for Wendy Davis, the Texas gubernatorial candidate got caught inflating her campaign’s finances this week by counting a Willie Nelson concert as a contribution. Davis, the Texas Democrat best known for her 2013 filibuster against an anti-abortion bill, is facing an uphill battle to beat state attorney general Greg Abbott to lead the Lone Star State in November. Polls have Davis consistently trailing by 10-15% and the erstwhile Democratic rock star, who is already on her second campaign manager, seems to be on course for an early election night and a big MSNBC contract. Briefly though, Davis had a bit of a bright spot this week when she announced that she had outraised Abbott in the most recent fundraising period. Then, the Texas Tribune revealed her campaign had “juked the numbers.” The $11.2 million that Davis had reported raising included $500,000 in in-kind donations, where a donor offers services instead of money, inclu...

The New Republic: Wendy Davis's Campaign Is Failing For One Very Simple Reason  And the media keeps ignoring it For a story in a liberal publication it is a pretty fair statement of her problems.  But she is also not that great a candidate with the exception of being good at hustling non Texas money.