by Wendy Davis
Jeff and I weathered many outside storms together and we were each other’s closest friend. When Jeff began to become more interested in playing golf, he encouraged me to learn to play as well, signing me up for lessons from a former golf professional so that we could share in that hobby together. When time and our obligations to the children would allow it, Jeff and I would be on the golf course. He cheered my every good shot and soothed my angst when I would play poorly. We played in couples tournaments together, and when we would travel, we would always take our clubs and play while on vacation.
When I was elected to the Fort Worth City Council in 1999, and it would become a full-time job for me, we still made time for our rituals, our gatherings, our family time. When Dru was still in elementary school, I became her Girl Scout troop leader. Because I am not very good at arts and crafts, most of our time as a troop was spent picking areas where we could go and volunteer—from senior centers, singing and reading to the residents there, to homeless shelters, where we would help to serve food, or to a center for homeless children, where we would take crafts to work on with them. One year, I co-chaired the big annual fund-raising event at Dru’s school, giving me new admiration for the parents who had done it all those years before. And because Dru was always interested in playing sports, I signed her up for softball and basketball leagues and, along with Jeff and Amber, and Erik when he was in town, spent untold hours enjoying watching her as she participated in team sports. I worked to nurture Amber’s artistic talents—she was always the “entertainer” of the family, having clearly inherited that characteristic from my dad, and I happily shuttled her to her various interests, from gymnastics to horseback riding.
As Jeff worked to grow his title company’s share of business, I also began working to help in that regard, attending networking events as a representative of our company to help strengthen its presence. And Jeff gave me a formal role with the company as I came to do more of that.
We were, in all ways, a family.
But somewhere along the way, in the midst of all that we had going on, a fracture occurred. Watching the documentary on former Texas governor Ann Richards recently, I was struck when she talked about the fact that, though she and her husband, Dave, much like Jeff and I, had always been partners in all regards, it was her election to state treasurer that ultimately placed a strain on their marriage that it could not sustain. I suppose much of the same can be said of my time on the city council. Because somewhere in the midst of my service there, sadly, inexplicably, our marriage began to slowly unwind.
Even now, as hard as I try to put words to it, describing how our relationship came to fray is incredibly difficult. As I reflect over the unraveling of our marriage, I am reminded of something my dad said to me after my teenage breakup with my first real boyfriend. “As individuals,” he’d said, “we continue to grow and evolve. The best couples, the ones who succeed,” he added, “are the ones who evolve together.” From his own experiences, my dad could certainly speak to the fractures that could come from an evolution that was not complementary. And, up until I was several terms deep into my city council service, Jeff and I had always grown in ways that continued to sustain us.
But at its most basic point, our relationship had begun and been built upon a power differential. Jeff was the mentor, and I his mentee. And I began struggling with that. I grew to resent more and more Jeff’s well-meaning input on how I should handle issues that confronted me on the council. I had my own style, a style that better suited me in my public-service work. As I entered my late thirties, I could feel our roles shifting and I found myself trying to find my own footing outside his protective umbrella. I had begun to break from our long-shared pattern of mentor and mentee. I returned to the love of working out that I had discovered during law school, and through that, gained a new love of running and road-biking. These were hobbies that became more and more important to me, while Jeff’s love and passion for collecting wine was becoming more and more important to him. We developed new, more separate circles of friends. We weren’t communicating as we once had been.
And then I turned forty. As I faced the fact that I was likely at the midpoint of my life, what started as a quiet little voice in my subconscious became louder. I found myself longing to discover more about who I was capable of becoming. I had been with Jeff since I was twenty-one. I had, quite literally, grown up under his care and guidance. I was struggling with a need to forge my own way for a while, to get to know who I could be separate and apart from him. At some point during that year, we took a trip to Napa Valley, just the two of us. It was becoming painfully clear that, other than talking about our children, we had little to say to each other. I recall a particular evening at dinner at a very posh restaurant while on that trip where we barely spoke. Not because we were mad, but because we had become so disconnected.
Through months of counseling on my own, in hopes of quieting that inner voice that was speaking to me, it instead became louder, clearer. And, ultimately, I asked Jeff to join me in my counselor’s office on the eve of Thanksgiving to talk constructively about how we might approach a separation. I had hoped we would jointly devise a plan about how to talk to the girls about it and that we would wait until their Christmas break to do so in order to give them time to process and to express their sadness outside the demands of being in school. Understandably upset, Jeff left the counseling session abruptly. And when I came home that evening, my hands full of bags of groceries for our Thanksgiving meal, he met me at the door with a document already in his hand. He had filed for divorce. Thus began a very painful chapter in our long shared history.
In the dark quiet of many nights, I have since visited and revisited my memories of that time. Both Jeff and I could likely tell stories about things we did during that journey that we look back on with remorse. For my part, I cannot escape the regrettable responsibility of having caused hurt to the people that I loved most in the world. But nor can I escape the understanding of a responsibility that I owed to be true to myself. As I came to adapt to the person I would become during the time and distance of my separation from Jeff, my life journey took an entirely different turn than it otherwise would have taken had we remained married. I feel sure that, had Jeff and I stayed together, I would have settled into the comfort of a life that was on its way to becoming easy. I would not have pushed myself into continuing on the path that became such an important part of defining who I have since become. As theater was to my father, public service has become my life’s calling—a calling that, while arduous in contrast to the comfortable life I could have owned, has brought a personal fulfillment that has been worth the costs I’ve paid. And, like the traveler in my dad’s riddle, I believe that my inner voice ultimately demanded of me that it be heard when the question was presented about which path was the right one for me to take, leading to the path I was meant to travel.
Ultimately, Jeff and the girls and I came through that very tough time relatively healthy and whole, though Jeff and I were not able to put the pieces of our relationship back together sufficiently to find a renewed bond. I still hold out hope that we will find our way to a true friendship again. But regardless of whether that happens, I am grateful to look back on the years that Jeff and I spent together as some of the happiest, most formative, and most fulfilling times of my life. I am grateful to have had Jeff as my partner, my invaluable friend, on my journey. Both of us grew, were shaped as people, as a result of the almost seventeen years that we lived together during our marriage. I know without question that I wouldn’t be the person I am today without his influence, his help, and his love. And for that, I will always be indebted to him.
SEVENTEEN
Do right, and risk the consequences.
—SAM HOUSTON, seventh governor of Texas
IN THE SUMMER OF 2007, the idea of running for a seat in the Texas state senate in the November 2008 election was first presented to me. Several minority community l
eaders approached me, and then political strategists Matt Angle and Lisa Turner, with the Lone Star Project, a Democratic political research and strategic communications organization, and J. D. Angle, Matt’s brother, my longtime political strategist and friend, came to me with a road map for how we could win the race. They’d done a poll and felt that even though the district had just been redrawn a few years before to the advantage of Republicans and was represented by an entrenched Republican incumbent, minority growth in the district was robust enough that if we could capture that vote, we could win. They also believed, and presented me with information to back it up, that my would-be opponent was neither well known nor well liked in the district. And, they told me, he was ethically flawed—he’d used campaign money to buy a condominium in Austin and he’d done it by using a loophole in the law that he himself had created, by putting the property in his wife’s name rather than his own.
My hackles were raised. I kept listening.
Next, a Texas organization committed to the elections of pro-choice, progressive female candidates came to call on me. Annie’s List, founded in 2003 and named for Dr. Annie Webb Blanton, the first woman elected to statewide office in Texas, had been in existence for only four years, but had already successfully worked to elect twenty-two women to the Texas legislature by creating an infrastructure of donors whose resources they would draw upon to help fund competitive races and by inserting trained campaign staff into these campaigns to make them successful ones.
Even with all the encouragement, and my interest piqued, I was resistant. Besides, I’d already decided to serve my final term on the Fort Worth City Council. It was time for fresh representation, and I needed to find my next growth opportunity. I had not considered that running for a higher political office would be my next step. But taking on an entrenched Republican in a Republican district? I knew it would be a battle—and a bloody one. Was I up for that kind of fight? Would I be able to raise the $2–$2.5 million that J.D. and Matt were telling me I would need?
After a couple of months of thinking it over, I decided I would do it. My girls were supportive of the idea, though neither they nor I fully understood the battle that lay ahead. What the hell? I thought. I’ll give this my all. The worst thing that could happen was that I would lose. But I’d already learned that I could survive losing a tough race. And I believed, deep in my heart, that this senate district needed representation that reflected the entirety of the district, not just the powers-that-be, which had been the case under the incumbent’s tenure. He had settled into that comfortable place that a lot of longtime legislators do, where they believe the seat belongs to them and they forget it actually belongs to the people.
Big, cigar-smoking, with a full shock of white hair and an intimidating LBJ-like presence, Kenneth “Kim” Brimer had a reputation for being quite a bully in the legislature. I knew that the path to winning would involve getting people to understand that he wasn’t doing a good job for them, which meant that we’d have to adopt an almost entirely negative strategy—I didn’t have enough funding to paint a positive picture of myself and a negative picture of him. Given my unpleasant experience going negative in my first city council race, and the fact that I knew it would be a very tough battle to take on someone as established and feared as Brimer was, it took my team a lot of work to get me to come around and agree to enter the fray. They’d convinced me that Brimer was unacceptable and that the necessary task of educating voters about why he was unacceptable could be done in a way that hit above, not below, the belt. The negatives would deal directly with his actions as a state senator and his capacity to serve.
So, I took a deep breath. And dove in.
In August of 2007, as soon as I decided to run, I resigned my city council seat. I filed for the senate seat on the deadline day, and immediately there was talk that the county Democratic chair was going to find fault with—and possibly reject—my application to be on the ballot because he wasn’t happy about my candidacy. Though he has long since become one of my biggest supporters, at the time he knew me only through my voting history and he wasn’t exactly enamored of it. Because I’d voted in Republican primaries (as many Democratic lawyers do in Fort Worth because our judicial candidates are almost always all Republicans) and contributed to a Republican congressional candidate, he clearly felt I hadn’t earned my stripes to become the Democratic nominee. I remember making very sure that we dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s and submitted a perfect application to be on the ballot right before the deadline in order to prevent its rejection.
The application was accepted, but immediately afterward, I was sued by a group of firefighters for whom Brimer had helped pass a piece of legislation and who, as a result, were very loyal to him. They were trying to remove me from the ballot by claiming that when I’d filed my application, I wasn’t qualified because I was technically still a city councilperson—that is, even though I had resigned, I had not yet been replaced. Therefore, they argued, I was in violation of a holdover provision in state law that required me to maintain the seat until I was replaced.
We won in district court, and then we won again in the appellate court, which ruled that the firefighters didn’t have standing to bring their claim and that the only person who did have standing was Brimer himself. We all assumed that he wouldn’t refile the suit, since trying to knock your opponent off the ballot on technicalities makes you look afraid and as if you’re not playing fair—which voters never like—but sure enough he filed it, this time in his own name, involving us in more expensive and lengthy litigation. We won again in the district court—even though the front row of the courtroom was full of some of the leading Republican Party officials who were there to make sure that the Republican-elected judge knew they were watching what he was doing. That judge was strong enough to do the right thing and rule in my favor, but it took a lot of courage on his part.
Brimer appealed the decision to the circuit court of appeals in Tarrant County, and literally the day before we were supposed to have our hearing, the chief judge filed an application with the state supreme court, asking to have the case sent to another appeals court, in Dallas, because he felt that their judicial objectivity had been compromised. He wouldn’t say why, but we could certainly imagine the reason. We believed that someone had tried to exert influence directly on at least one of those judges who were to be on our panel. Because of that, the supreme court granted them the right to transfer it to the Dallas court of appeals.
With all the delays, it wasn’t until the spring of 2008 that I even knew for sure that I was on the ballot, but that purgatory hadn’t stopped us. We’d ramped up our campaign in the meantime, put our heads down, and plotted our strategy. Again, because of our financial limitations, we would need to focus on our opponent’s negative job performance, a plan I’d finally and reluctantly agreed to after hearing my team’s convincing argument:
You’re asking the voters to fire someone from his job, and they’re not going to fire someone, no matter how great you are, unless they have a reason to do that. And you have to tell them what those reasons are.
I am not embarrassed to admit that I actually cried over that decision. It took my team a great deal of strong-arming to get me there. In the end, though, I trusted them. And my gut told me it was the right thing to do. The voters deserved to know, and this time, unlike in my first city council race, I knew that our negative attacks were justified. But not everyone agreed. My close friends were absolutely certain this was the wrong approach:
Why aren’t you telling people about you?
Why aren’t you telling people about all the things you’ve done and that you can do?
Their agony over our strategy made my own agony about it even worse, but I remain convinced that if we hadn’t made voters understand why Brimer needed to go, he’d still be there and the district would continue to be woefully underserved because of it.
The other compelling reas
on for the strategy was money. We were in one of the most expensive media markets in the country. Senate districts are incredibly large in Texas, bigger even than our congressional districts: in a state of almost 270,000 square miles, there are only thirty-one of them. As our population has increased, they’ve gotten bigger and bigger—the number of people that candidates need to reach is huge. The Dallas–Fort Worth media market is also one of the most expensive ones in the country, in part because it requires advertisers to buy the whole market, not just segments of it.
Once again, as I’d seen happen before, my opponent didn’t take us seriously until late into the campaign—too late for him to catch up. Like Jeff Davis did to his opponent in his first campaign, I snuck up on Brimer. I had spent hour upon hour knocking on doors in targeted swing neighborhoods in the district. And, like Jeff’s opponent in that first campaign of his, by the time Brimer realized how much ground I was covering and decided he would really try to engage, our momentum had already gained too much steam. We built a strong ground game of getting base voters to turn out, and because of our financial limitations, we targeted only a small group of potential swing voters—about 40,000 people out of a district of about 750,000—with mail, and phone calling, and door-to-door knocking efforts. With the help of third parties and house races going on within the district, we were able to communicate with and turn out our base vote.