Wendy Davis was well on her way to losing the race for governor in Texas by the time her campaign ran the instantly infamous wheelchair ad earlier this month.
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The tasteless attempt to use Greg Abbott’s disability as a jumping-off point for a political attack was widely condemned. What was the Davis campaign thinking?
Dave Weigel offered the most plausible theory: A shrill attack on Abbott for being unfriendly to plantiffs in lawsuits leaves Davis poised to “lose on an issue that attracts Democratic donors but lacks a proud defender.”
In other words, the ad isn’t a pitch for votes in this election, it’s a fundraising pitch for future campaigns.
“I’ve been seeing the Wendy Davis criticism of Abbott from trial lawyers, who take tort reform personally, for a decade,” Texas-based attorney and Center for Class Action Fairness founder Ted Frank noted on Twitter.
“Davis’s trial-lawyer funders are in such a bubble that they assume yelling “tort reform” discredits politicians,” he added.
Pandering to the eccentric sensibilities of the plantiffs’ bar won’t change things for Davis in Texas this cycle, but it is costing Bruce Braley dearly in Iowa’s Senate race.
Video of Braley at a fundraiser full of trial lawyers warning them that a Republican Senate would mean a “farmer from Iowa who never went to law school” would head the judiciary committee was one of the rare gaffes that completely reset the race. Braley was the frontrunner before the video, but as election day draws near, he looks likely to lose.
The video of Braley was discovered and circulated by Republican opposition researchers, but it was actually recorded and uploaded by a supporter at the fundraiser who was evidently too tone-deaf to notice that there was anything damaging in it.
Frank wasn’t kidding about the trial lawyers’ bubble.
Appealing to the donor class or the activist base without handing a gift to the opposition is a perrenial problem for politicians. In recent years it’s more often been a problem for Republicans (think of Mitt Romney’s 47% comment), but it’s a bipartisan phenomenon.
Democrats concerned about maintaining broad electoral appeal must sometimes be tempted by the old Shakespearean revenge fantasy: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”