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March 5, 2014      3:06 PM

SILLS: WENDY DAVIS’S PRIMARY RESULT STRONGER THAN SOME REALIZE

Parsing out the Davis numbers

The Democratic Primary of 2014 was an inauspicious beginning to what is going to be a white-hot November election. The former has little to do with the latter.

I’m not going to do the election post mortems here, but will instead attack a couple of memes that have developed around Wendy Davis’s performance. (Full disclosure: I’m Texas AFL-CIO communications director and a Democrat, with the bruises on my forehead from banging my head against the wall to prove it. The Texas AFL-CIO COPE endorsed Davis for governor.)

Some analysts have suggested that Davis’s performance was weak because Reynaldo “Ray” Madrigal got 20.94 percent of the vote. Also, they suggest an “excitement deficit” for Democrats, as Davis got only 432,000 votes, compared to 517,487 for gubernatorial candidate Bill White in the 2010 Democratic primary.

Turnout was light, in part because of bad weather, a lost day of early voting on Presidents Day and voter procrastination. But in larger part, turnout was light because the statewide Democratic matchups were so low on the marquee that they had to be squeezed in with tweezers. Republicans were on TV, it seemed, more than erectile dysfunction ads. Even Democrats’ attention was distracted in the fashion of spectators witnessing a car wreck.

The rest of Ed Sills column can be found in today's R&D Department.

By Ed Sills