A winning Scenario for Wendy Davis-TX Governor's Race

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

I think a good Davis map would be the usual Democratic strongholds (Mexico border, San Antonio, Austin, Urban Dallas) plus a stronger margin in Houston County than other Democrats have gotten. Plus I'd expect her to do better in Tarrant Co. and the Corpus Cristi area.


Tarrant County is a good bellweather for the state as a whole, so I'd expect her to need to do well there in order to have a ghost of a chance.

I assume that by Houston County you mean Harris County, since Houston County is a small East Texas county with relatively few people and generally votes safely Republican. Harris County is generally a 50/50 county, so it's not going to do much more for her than cancel out the votes that Abbott gets there.

I expect her to do better in Tarrant County than previous statewide candidates. Bill White got 41% of the vote there in 2010; Barack Obama got 41% of the vote there in 2012. She'll need to do two things: (1) Make herself acceptable to white suburban women; or, making Greg Abbott seem completely unacceptable to them depending on how he behaves during the campaign. (2) Get Hispanics to vote...period. Regarding the first, she ought to borrow heavily from the playbook of Laura Miller, the liberal newspaper columnist who was elected mayor of Dallas in the early 2000s with a coalition that depended unusually heavily on moderate Republican women.

The Coastal Bend area has been trending Republican over the past few cycles, so Corpus Christi is not a given for the Democrats.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

Harris, Dallas, Tarrant, Bexar and Travis cast 42% of the votes in 2010. White won those 51-47. Assuming that there is normal third party strength (2-3%) Davis would need to be beating Abbott there 59-39 will holding him to something like 56-41 everywhere else. 'Tough math.

Ain't gonna happen. The only counties of those where she could potentially get over 60 percent are Dallas and Travis. Judging by their behavior lately, Bexar and Harris will go Democratic by something like 51-to-49, basically a wash. She will overperform in Tarrant County but I honestly doubt she will win it outright.

Sure, she can easily get 70% of the vote in Webb, Hidalgo and El Paso, but 70% of only 25% of eligible voters doesn't do you much good.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

Part of the problem is that the Democrats literally have nothing but Wendy. There is no "Dream Team" like 2002.

The LiteGuv candidate is Maria Alvarado, who ran in '06 and has never held any elected office.

For AgComm, they have Kinky Friedman. Rural voters might actually be offended that the Democrats have such a flippant nominee.

The closest thing to an actual candidate is the outgoing mayor of El Paso running for land commish.

[Indy Texas 🇺🇦🇵🇸]

These are the figures for the Libertarians in previous races:
2010: 2.19%
2006: 0.60%
2002: 1.46%
1998: 0.55%
1994: 0.64%
1990: 3.32%

In 1990, you could argue that the Libertarian was a spoiler, given the vote total exceeded the margin between Richards and Williams. That race was an early predecessor to races like Missouri and Indiana in 2012 and Virginia in 2013, where a Republican with repulsive social issues views incited many people to vote for the Libertarian. I'm not sure what to attribute the relatively strong 2010 performance to.

It's also worth pointing out that the Texas Libertarian Party relatively moderate compared to some other state parties. It draws a lot of its votes from Travis County and their 2006 candidate for US Senate actually supported an ACA-style insurance mandate, which already puts them to the left of the state Republican Party.