Wendy Davis Democratic for Texas Gubernatorial Races 2014

The gubernatorial election in Texas took place on 4th November 2014.The election was held to get a suitable candidate to replace Rick Perry. The candidates involved in the race included state Senator Wendy Davis, Kathie Glass, Greg Abbott and Brandon Parmer. Davis started her political career in 1996 when she first ran for the Fort Worth City Council. In 2008 she was elected as Texas senator and re-elected again in 2012.In 2014 Davis announced that she was going to run for the gubernatorial seat in Texas whereby Greg Abbott defeated her. The Democrats party believed that Davis was a candidate who would move the party forward with a well-funded turn out operation as since 1994 the party had not been in a position of winning a statewide election (Maxwell, Crain, & Santos, 2014, p. 27).

The main reason that contributed towards the defeat of Davis in the elections was that her campaign had not aired any English language TV advert to focus on the Fort Worth senators up from the trailer-park narrative that was once considered to be a thematic foundation for her campaign. During the final days of her campaign, Davis was not in a position of raising money that would be used for such adverts despite statics from her campaign showing that they had raised almost $40 million from their donors. Abbott stood at a better advantage since he had large amounts of money and hence could easily outdo Davis on TV. Rather than Davis using her money to promote her campaign she used it on other issues such as going on a week tour which focused on the abortion rights. Another mistake that Davis did during her advertising campaigns was airing of expensive TV adverts in the summer and also the running of the wheelchair advert which made voters question about her wisdom. The fact that Abbott campaign had committed itself to a big advertising budget became tough for Davis since Abbot used large sums of money to attack adverts and other issues.

Money plays a significant role towards ensuring that specific goals of the campaign are achieved. Politics in the United States have undergone an era of transformation from being labor intensive to being capital intensive which is mainly determined by the mode of mass communication and technology used. This has resulted in the rise of political campaigns budget and hence the need for more money to be used. Money plays an important role as it helps a candidate to be able to use the media to advertise him/her through paid adverts which tend to be expensive. The media helps the candidates to be in a position to take their message to the voters directly without encountering any media filter and hence money essential to be in a position to do that from the beginning to the end of the political campaign period. The money is also important to help the candidates be in a position of hiring staff and other campaign organizations who will help persuade the voters to support that particular candidate and also to mobilize the voters to go vote on the Election Day (Goff, 2004, p. 17).

In the State of Texas, the Federal Election Commission is in charge of enforcing and administering the federal campaign election laws. The Texas Campaign finance laws govern the amount of money that organizations, individuals, and political parties can contribute, the amount of money that the candidates should receive from organizations and individuals and how often they are required to report those contributions. According to the law, an individual is a federal candidate after she or he has spent or raised $5,000 for the campaign and therefore must start to report campaign finances. The Texas finance campaign law requires the candidate to register with the Federal Election Commission and form an official campaign committee. The committee is responsible for the expenditures incurred and the allocation of the funds. The committee is required to have a treasurer who is supposed to support the candidate who registered it and not any other candidate. The Texas State finance campaign laws require after the candidate is registered to have detailed financial reports submitted every financial quarter to the Federal Election Commission. The reports should also be submitted before primaries and as well as before the general election (Schultz, 2016, p. 29).

References

Goff, M. J. (2004). The money primary: The new politics of the early presidential nomination process. Lanham (Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.

Maxwell, W. E., Crain, E., & Santos, A. (2014). Texas politics today. Boston, MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Schultz, D. A. (2016). Election law and democratic theory: David Schultz. London: Routledge.