For Wendy Davis and Chip Roy, campaign styles point to divergent views of a pandemic

BUDA -- Last Sunday, Wendy Davis arrived, all by her lonesome, at the Gazebo in downtown Buda, a 22-minute drive from her home in Clarksville with a carful of blue campaign lawn signs to give away.

It was a notable if unheralded occasion -- the first in-person campaign event of any sort for Davis since March, with no others scheduled. For two early afternoon hours, she joined Democratic state Rep. Erin Zwiener of Driftwood, in distributing signs for their respective complementary campaigns, to a steady trickle of supporters who had gotten word of the occasion.

"This isn't what I expected, a couple of months ahead of the election. We'd normally be out knocking doors for months now," Davis, wearing a straw hat and National Democratic Party face mask, told Michael Kramm, an aspiring artist, who picked up signs for the lawns on either side of his corner lot in Buda. "And I still grapple with it ... would it be OK?"

"I think we're definitely going to do lit drops but we're probably not going to do classic door-knocking because we don't want our volunteers to feel unsafe, and we don't want people to feel unsafe if we knock on their door," Davis said.

This is the 21st Congressional District, one of the most prized, and in the less than two months remaining before the Nov. 3 election, sure to be one of the most fought-over pieces of political property in the nation.

Now represented by freshman Republican Chip Roy, who lives just outside Austin in Hays County, the seat is, political forecasters agree, a tossup.

Polling confirms it is a dead heat.

But if the 21st District is emerging as a kind of Gettysburg in an increasingly acrimonious electoral civil war being waged across the country, it is also a proving ground for the asymmetric warfare being waged by Democrats and Republicans, an outcome as novel as the coronavirus that led to it. In their choice of tactics, the parties and their candidates are communicating to voters, in words and deeds, their philosophical take on the dominating factor in the 2020 election.

"Part of the message of Democrats everywhere right now is that we are doing the thing that is harder but is morally right," said Michelle Hutchinson, organizing director for Davis' campaign, who was at the Gazebo Sunday. "My job is reimagining what that looks like and to me what it looks like is giving people tools to have those kinds of conversations with people that they already know and people that are in their communities that are already in their networks."

Roy refuses to concede the pandemic that much power, or yield the high ground to the virtual world.

"I mean I just disagree," Roy said at dusk four days earlier outside the KROC Center in Kerrville where he had just addressed the monthly meeting of the Hill Country Republican Club, capping 11 hours of in-person campaigning by sharing a maskless fist bump with former Kerrville Mayor Jack Pratt, club president.

"I think my general philosophy on it is kind of, `when in Rome,'" Roy said. "I just feel like whatever people are comfortable doing I'll go do. As a representative I feel kind of obliged to frankly go out and interface with them in whatever way that I can, that is both from the official standpoint as well as campaigning."

For those who consider that irresponsible, Roy replied, "It's extraordinary, people actually have self-interest in self preservation, and my view is most people know how to calculate risk."

It was Roy's first day back on the trail after a short hiatus to heal his back, aching after driving 1,500 miles across the district in nine days. Back behind the wheel of his Dodge Ram, sitting on a tennis ball to ease the strain, Roy was thriving on the energy of back-to-back campaign stops that bore remarkable resemblance to life before.

"It's a lot better than Zoom or phone calls," Roy said.

'Itching to get back to life'

Pratt limited attendance at the club meeting to 70, far fewer than wanted to come, he said; limited four people to a table, and required masks for entry, though they could be taken off once you sat down.

But, of the precautions, he said, "All of this, in my opinion, is nothing more than kill the economy to make Trump look bad. And then on Nov. 3, they'll say we don't need the mask any more."

Following the lead of governors elsewhere, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott mandated on July 2 masks be worn in public in counties with more than 20 positive cases, amid a rise in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations statewide. As those figures began to ebb by the end of July, Abbott and public health officials credited the progress to people wearing masks and following social distancing guidelines.

Roy, 48, started the day meeting over breakfast at Fredericksburg's Squeeze In with about 20 folks struggling to survive in tourism-related businesses seated around several long tables laid end to end. Masks were required to get in the restaurant -- the Squeeze In even provides masks to the maskless, but once seated, the masks came off. (Per Abbott's order masks are not required while eating, drinking or seated at a restaurant to eat or drink.)

With the addition of Roy's party, "we were slammed," said owner Christopher Moss, who was wearing a mask, and if on this occasion business exceeded the state mandated 50% limit, so be it.

"What he did was fine," Moss said of Roy's breakfast gathering. "If business was like this every day, I'd kiss you."

Same story at Buzzie's Bar-B-Q in Kerrville, where Roy held a lively late-afternoon town hall with about 70 people in the banquet room. Masks to get in, removable on seating. Caution tape identified off-limits tables, in order to control crowd size. But when folks started pouring in from the restaurant side, they threw caution tape to the wind.

"We're a small town, and we're just hanging on by a thread and I'm not turning anybody down that comes in my restaurant," said owner Brenda Hughes.

Roy addressed the claim lobbed at him that he thinks the virus is a hoax.

"I said that the virus has been politicized and that it was my firm belief that when we get around past the election, a lot of things are going to suddenly change," Roy said.

"That doesn't mean the virus is hoax," he said. "I didn't see my father or my mother from Christmas to July 4th. You think I want to go months without seeing them? No, but I wanted to protect them."

But Roy said he liked Trump listening to less orthodox voices.

"We need Scott Atlas from Stanford who is now advising the president, that's good," Roy said. (Atlas backs a "herd immunity" strategy of allowing the coronavirus to spread widely to build resistance to it.)

"We don't need just one voice or two. We don't need just Dr. (Anthony) Fauci or Dr.(Deborah) Birx. We need an array of voices. We need Professor (Harvey) Risch of Yale (a proponent of using hydroxychloroquine) and (John P.A.) Ioannidis of Stanford (who opposes lockdowns), and there were dozens of others," Roy said.

"How do I know all of this?" Roy said. "Because I spend all my day reading about this because I'm supposed to be leading this country as a member of Congress."

"People are itching to get back to life. I think people are recognizing the importance of social interaction for their own well being and health," Roy said that evening. "I'd be happy to debate Wendy or anybody else on these topics."

He said the campaign is doing door-knocking, and has been well-received.

But Joyce Humble, a Democratic precinct chair in Blanco County, who became politically active with the election of Trump, said Zoom meetings make perfect sense in rural areas where everything is an hour's drive, she preferred the virtual Democratic State Convention to the real deal, and she likes the consideration Democrats are displaying for one another and the community.

"I personally appreciate that everybody embraces it, that there is a feeling among us that we're all in it together, and why the other side doesn't feel that way I can't speak to, that I don't know," Humble said. "It's just right. It's not a political statement."

While in-person campaigning may be presumed to be more effective, perhaps in these new circumstances, the same brio that might work on a Republican voter would repel a Democrat, and the same caution a Democrat might appreciate might frustrate a Republican.

"Some of the Republican candidates are doing a lot of in person events. I don't agree with that. I think it's really good that the Democratic candidates have been trying to work really hard to get creative about how to engage people, how to engage volunteers and voters in this time," said Lauren Evans, 21, who grew up in New York but, after COVID-19 hit, moved to Round Mountain, where her parents retired, on the edge of Blanco County, to finish her degree at Oxford University remotely.

That done, she started volunteering for Davis and Zwiener.

"If Democratic candidates were to kind of flout a lot of these rules, like I think some of the Republican candidates seem to have been doing, it definitely would alienate their base," Evans said.

Narrow 2018 margin

The 21st District stretches from West Campus in Central Austin to Alamo Heights, just north of downtown San Antonio, and across the Hill Country to Camp Wood, not far from the headwaters of the Nueces River, 200 miles west of Austin.

The district had long been considered safe Republican territory, the reliably Democratic voters in Austin outnumbered by Republicans everywhere else.

When Lamar Smith announced he was retiring after 32 years in Congress, it set off a free for all with 18 Republican primary candidates in 2018. Roy prevailed in a runoff.

He had been vice president for strategy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, first assistant attorney general under Ken Paxton, ghostwriter of "Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington" with then-Gov. Rick Perry, served U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and most politically critical to his success, was chief of staff to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in the whirlwind early days of his tenure.

But Roy only defeated Joseph Kopser, an Army veteran and tech entrepreneur, by 2.6 percentage points. Kopser, in his first run for political office, won more votes than any Democratic congressional candidate in Texas in 2018.

The 21st District was growing by leaps and bounds, the district's citizen voting age population swelling by 20% between 2000 and 2018.

Buda has grown from about 3,000 people to almost 19,000 in the last 20 years. Kopser trounced Roy in the Travis County portion of the district, and won Hays County. Roy narrowly won the Bexar County portion of the district, and rolled up big margins in the Hill Country.

Club for Growth Action, a conservative political action committee that spent heavily to help Roy get elected in 2018, has committed to spending even more -- $3 million -- this time.

"He is our No. 1 incumbent that we want to make sure returns," PAC President David McIntosh said Thursday. "He has also drawn a really tough opponent in Wendy Davis who can and has raised money all over the country because of her pretty radical pro-abortion position."

"We don't get involved on that issue," said McIntosh, but the PAC's spending will help Roy keep pace with Davis, who as of June 30 had raised $4.5 million, more money than all but one Democratic challenger this year nationally, compared to Roy's $2.6 million.

On June 25, 2013, Davis successfully filibustered for nearly 13 hours a bill that would have banned abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy and shut down many of the state's abortion clinics.

Victory was shortlived. Perry immediately called another special session that passed much the same legislation, though the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately struck down key provisions in a victory for abortion rights activists.

The filibuster made Davis an overnight national political sensation among Democrats, catapulting her to the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2014. But amid hyped expectations in what would be a very bad year for Democrats nationally, Davis lost to then-Attorney General Greg Abbott by more than 20 points. She also was indelibly identified by conservative pundit and radio host Erick Erickson as "Abortion Barbie," simultaneously sexualizing and trivializing her.

But six years later, Davis, 57, is "bubbie" to her two granddaughters, Ellis, 4, and Sawyer, 2, a new role that she said has refocused her objectives both political and personal.

She decided not to run for Cornyn's U.S. Senate in 2020, deferring to U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio, who ultimately also did not seek the Democratic nomination, which was won by MJ Hegar.

"Running in Texas is like running a mini-presidential campaign. And I knew when I was thinking about the possibility of running for the U.S. Senate exactly what that looked like," Davis said. "When I ran for governor, I didn't know what I didn't know."

"Now I know and to be able to succeed, you have to be down for giving it 100%, every single day all the way through, which you do in a congressional race too but in this race, most nights I get to put my head on my own pillow. And in a statewide race that's not the case," Davis said.

A Senate race would have cut into her "bubbie time."

"I wouldn't have a Sunday, for example, to have Sawyer and Ellis come spend the day with me," she said. "So that's a big part of it too."

Kopser, who had decided not to run again, approached Davis about running in a district that she was already living in.

Since 2014, Davis said "women have stepped up and said we're not going to accept the way women have historically been treated, whether it's as political candidates, under a uniquely different microscope than male candidates might be under, or whether it's women in the workplace or on their college campuses, a real uniting of women and men around the idea that that disparate treatment should be called out, and that there should be appropriate push back on it."

But, at a Liberal Ladies of Blanco County lunch back in January at New Hope Lutheran Church, Karen Mangan told Davis, "My concern is how nasty (Roy) is going to get on your position on abortion. He's going to beat that one to death."

"I think it's really fascinating to see how public opinion in America is evolving on this issue as the threat of overturning Roe (v. Wade) becomes more and more real," Davis replied.

"Just a few years ago, polling Americans on the question of abortion demonstrated that a majority of Americans, a majority of Texans believe that women should have this choice in varying degrees. Now 70% of Americans are saying leave Roe alone," Davis said. "I think people are with us on this issue and there are probably not very many of us who can say our lives haven't been touched in some way by the legal right to access safe abortion care."

"We'll lean into that," she said. "That will be an attempt, there's no question, to define me not only aligned with that issue but as the sole issue that I care about and it will be our job to make sure people understand that, yes, I am proud to support a women's private right to make a decision as important as that on her own and access safe abortion care," Davis said.

'A stark contrast'

After breakfast at the Squeeze In, Roy met with faith leaders at Calvary Temple Church in Kerrville, where he was introduced by Pastor Rafael Cruz, father of Ted Cruz, appearing on two large video screens from a remote location.

"I have known Chip for almost 10 years. He was my son Ted's first chief of staff, and he was the driving force behind what he did when he got to the Senate," Cruz said. "Chip Roy is a man of principle. Chip Roy is a man of courage. Chip Roy is a man of conviction. Most of all, Chip Roy is a man that has surrendered his life totally to his Lord Jesus Christ, and everything Chip Roy does, he does first on his knees, seeking the will of his Father.

"And this fight, in which Chip Roy is involved right now, could not be more of a stark contrast," Cruz said. "If we look at his Democratic opponent, a woman that is one of the most vociferous, most stark proponents of abortion on demand, I still remember when she was screaming in the Capitol in Austin, Texas, for abortion on demand, while her supporters in the background were chanting, `Hail Satan.'"

Roy underscored Cruz's message.

"Remember that when people talk about it -- `Oh, she was just standing up for women's health' -- she was standing up for third trimester abortions, and I think that is directly out of sync with the values of this district," Roy said.

Kramm, the aspiring artist from Buda, thanked Davis for her filibuster when he picked up his signs Sunday. He told her how he took his young niece to the Capitol on the day of the filibuster to be a witness to history. They had a picnic on the Capitol grounds.

Kramm was preceded by Karan Shirk, a retired nurse from South Austin in a "Resist" mask, who just turned 65.

"I've been a supporter of Wendy's since she ran for governor," Shirk said.

"It is actually quite auspicious for me because this is the first time I've ventured out since March," said Shirk, who has only left home for curbside pickup. "I've been so terrified to come out, it really meant a lot to me to come and get a sign and show my support."

But despite her trepidation, Shirk, who since leaving nursing has been trained in campaign management and is fundraising for a Democratic state House candidate, said, "I think we'll probably have to wind up knocking on some doors at some point. There's just no substitute for face-to-face campaigning."

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