Now that she's running, Davis will have to talk about abortion - Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN — Wendy Davis talked a lot Thursday about the issues she wants to emphasize in her race for governor: public education (she’s for it) and hyper-partisanship and political cronyism in Austin (she’s against it).

But the one thing she didn’t talk about — the very thing that has made her suddenly a viable statewide candidate — was conspicuously absent.

Davis’ claim to fame was an 11-hour filibuster in June against a bill about abortion and women’s health. Her headline-grabbing opposition has won her a passionate army of abortion-rights supporters and an equally passionate army of opponents.

Thursday’s kickoff announcement was not the place to discuss abortion or women’s health care. But because those issues will most certainly be a subtext of her opponent’s attacks against her, Davis is going to have to find a way to talk about them.

Democratic primary voters have no problem with her advocacy of abortion rights. But Texas is a conservative state, and polls show that a majority of Texans support the 20-week abortion ban in the bill Davis filibustered. Many of those are moderate voters that she will need to win in November 2014.

“The same dilemma faces tea party candidates,” said political scientist Matthew Wilson of Southern Methodist University. “The very issues that get them so much traction in the primaries and really fire up the activists and donor base within their party are exactly the things that can be liabilities with the larger electorate.”

At Thursday’s event, abortion protesters were outside waving placards and shouting slogans. One protester stretched a sign along a fence on his property, adjacent to a street leading to the coliseum.

“Wendy Baby Killer,” it read.

Davis’ political advisers would prefer that she talk about anything but abortion. But that’s the issue that catapulted her to political celebrity.

Whether in the context of health care or women’s rights or opposition to intrusive government, she’ll have to talk about it.

Follow Wayne Slater on Twitter at @wayneslater.