How I Came Back Stronger After Losing a Major Election

Wendy Davis, as told to Emily C. Johnson

Tue, October 10, 2017 at 11:01 AM UTC

9 min read

Most people know about my gubernatorial loss, but I also lost my first-ever race: for my local city council.

I was 33. I worked so hard on that race, and I wanted so badly for voters to see that I was a person who really cared about issues that directly impact their lives. When you’re running for office, you have to believe you’re going to win—if you go into a race thinking you’re not going to win, then you really should maybe not be running. On election night, it went into a runoff between me and another woman, and I lost by 90 votes. I just remember feeling kind of shell-shocked by it and confused and hurt. It’s a feeling of personal rejection, especially when you’re running for local office. In Texas, you don’t have a partisan label next to your name [for a city council race]. You can’t chalk things up to people just defaulting to their part of the cabinet. It just seems to be 100 percent about you.

I remember the morning after, sitting out on my front porch with a cup of coffee, and I didn’t even know what to do. Honestly, it just took time to heal emotionally. After a while, I pivoted to more constructive thinking about why I felt I might have lost and what I could do better if I ran again. I realized that you cannot assume people will trust good things about you. People need to see that you’ve been out there working for those things.

I became a member of the League of Neighborhoods, I became president of my own neighborhood association, I got involved with our community policing efforts and an economic revitalization project in a suppressed area of the district. I got involved with a big transportation project that’s going to have an impact on the quality of life for some of our neighborhoods. People got to work beside me and see who I really was and what I really cared about and that kind of stuff.

Three years later, I wound up running again, and I won the second time. I honestly think it made me a better city councilperson than I would have been if I’d won right away. There’s value in forming those bonds with voters. Then you can build upon those the next time around.

I was a Texas state senator by the time I filibustered the abortion bill that made national news in 2013. I had no intention of that filibuster going viral. Two years prior to that, I had a filibuster to try to stop $5.5 billion in cuts to our public schools, and that didn’t get any national attention. For me, it was just another day of standing up and doing battle in the Texas Senate. It ended up being a blessing and a curse.

I knew that I had a moment to seize upon, so I decided to run for governor. I felt like with a much wider name ID, not just in the state but around the country, I would have a better chance of raising money. The problem was that I didn’t get to control the message of who I was. I didn’t get to talk to people as someone who had worked on funding public education and fighting to end practices that take advantage of consumers. I was only introduced as someone who fought for abortion rights. Which I never wanted to shy away from—that was absolutely a very important part of who I am and what I stand for—but I didn’t ever really get beyond that with a lot of people.

And my Republican opponents took advantage of that. It was not by accident—it was very strategic that they began referring to me as “Abortion Barbie.”

I knew going into my race to be the governor of Texas that the worst thing that could happen is that I would lose—but I’d lose fighting for something that really mattered to me. If you have something to say that adds value to the conversation, you’ll represent constituents in a way that they’re not currently being represented.

By the time we got to the end of that race, honestly, I wasn’t feeling optimistic about the fact that we would win. What was really hard was how badly we lost. Since 2010, we [Texas Democrats] had been able to show that our state was on track to turn blue. So it wasn’t just hard as a candidate to lose and it wasn’t just hard knowing that we were going to turn the state in a direction that I felt was going to be very bad, but it was that I feared we were going to send a message that Texas wasn’t really ready yet. But I really don’t think 2014 was an indicator of whether Texas is or is not ready to turn blue. I think 2014 was just a horrific year for Democratic candidates all over the country, and unfortunately that became part of our story.

The biggest struggle, for me, was not on the night I lost—it was actually dealing with the loss over the next few weeks and even months. I knew that the state was going to go in two very different directions, depending on the outcome. Looking at where we are in Texas right now is proof positive of that. We’ve continued to see a stripping of women’s reproductive rights, we’ve continued to see a decline in support for health care. We see the effect on our transgender community because of the bathroom bill [which failed in a special session in August 2017], and we see a continued defunding of public education. So while that race didn’t hurt me as much personally, it mattered so much more.

I had booked a vacation for after the election, knowing that whether I won or lost, I was going to go on this trip with my two daughters to spend a week in Costa Rica and we were either going to be celebrating and having some margaritas or we were going to be crying in our margaritas. But it was such an important and healing moment for me because when you’re running statewide, you don’t have a lot of time with your family. And to just spend a concentrated week of time with my two favorite people in the world, it reminded me that I lead a very blessed life. I was also really encouraged by my favorite quote by Teddy Roosevelt, about being in the arena: We just have to put ourselves out there, we have to try, and if we fail, we can fail with the pride that we got in the ring and we gave ourselves up to something and that we’re not one of those meek people who just stands on the sidelines. That the agony of defeat is something to take pride in. That whole trip, my daughters just conveyed their pride in me. And then they made sure I had something with alcohol in it in my hand pretty much the whole time. And we actually had fun! I look back on the pictures and we were laughing and we had a great time together. There’s life after loss, for sure.

It was tough for me to decide what my next job would be. It was the first time in 15 years that I was no longer a public servant. And that kind of job is really in my heart, so I was trying to figure out, How do I still matter? Will my voice be as valuable? Can I actually have the impact that I once had?

Then I realized that the benefit of having run statewide is that I’d created relationships all over the state and the country, and that provided me with a platform to keep fighting for what matters to me—issues like education, health care, and women’s rights. I think that’s true for any office you run for—you come away from it with an extraordinary education and a new audience who you can continue to speak with, even if you’re not the one elected to serve a particular district or state. Now I try to keep my voice out there and help other young women do the same thing.

Hillary Clinton is a great example of this. When I think about her loss—which, to be honest, I felt more deeply than either of my two political losses just because the stakes were so high—I know that she’s inspired so many people to continue to fight on behalf of the things she was championing. Even though she and Bernie Sanders both lost their races, he in the primary and she in the general election, they still keep inspiring people all over the country—their values were lifted up.

Now I have my own organization, Deeds Not Words, which helps women make changes in their community. And as part of that, I want to help connect women who are considering running for office with our allies like Ignite and She Should Run. We need more women in politics, and no one really knows how to be a candidate the first time, so it’s important to lend support.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to run again myself someday. Once you’ve run for office once, you no longer suffer any romantic ideas about it. You know how hard it is. It takes a lot out of you, especially when you lose and you can feel like you let yourself or other people down. Honestly, more often than not, you can come out feeling bloodied and sweaty and scarred—even though you know that was all on behalf of something that really mattered. When you do run, you have to be ready to give it your all again. You have to ask yourself, Am I there yet? Are there conditions in the electoral climate that might make things turn out differently this time? I’m trying to figure out when I should put myself back out there and when the electoral climate in Texas will be right for me. I want to serve this state. I see so much that needs to be done, and I want to play a role in helping making it happen. So I’ll keep asking myself these important questions until I figure it out.

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