Wendy Davis For WHAT??

Wendy Davis is not going to be elected the 48th governor of Texas in November.

Texas gubernatorial elections are held in congressional midterm years, when those in traditional Democratic constituencies tend to show up at the polls in smaller numbers.  Also, Republicans in Texas have been working overtime to ensure that those Democrats who do show up can't vote for lack of a valid ID.  A gun license is valid.  A student identification card is rot.

But mostly, she's going to lose the election because . . . it's Texas.

Texas is a very conservative state, given its abortion restrictions, lax gun laws, and cowboy mentality.  Wendy Davis' liberal politics have much more in common with her native Rhode Island than with the Lone Star State.

Then there's her life story, which she made a part of her political self-definition.  It seems that parts of Davis' life story, which she had used to define herself politically, were inaccurate or incomplete. She couldn't come up with an exact timeline for her first marriage and divorce, and she hadn't talked much about how her second husband helped pay for her college education.  Republicans are already licking their chops.  To her credit, though, Davis acknowledged the mistakes, adding,  "My language should be tighter. I’m learning about using broader, looser language. I need to be more focused on the detail."

Let's focus on these details: Her Republican opponent for the governorship, Texas Attorney General Gregory Abbott, won the Republican gubernatorial nomination on March 4 with 1,219,903 votes.  That's more votes for Abbott than the votes for Davis and her opponent for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in the Democratic primary put together.  Also, it's been reported that she needs to get 61 percent of the women's vote and get a large chunk of Hispanics to turn out on November 4 to get her over the threshold of victory.  Not too many people think she can do any of that.  (By the way, Hispanics are expected to become the majority in Texas by 2030, another gubernatorial election year in that state.  Count on the Republicans to win that election, too; they're very good at defying demographics.)  

Some people see in Wendy Davis a Democratic rising star in 2014.  I see a name in the Where Are They Now? file in 2015.  But if she loses, at least she'll still be a state senator; her seat isn't up until 2016.

(Oh, yeah, Alex Sink in the special U.S. House election in Florida . . . she has two chances to win - slim and fat.)