The One Republican Lawmaker in Texas Who Supports Abortion Rights – By Renuka Rayasam (Politico) / April 14 2020
State Representative Sarah Davis has defied her party while holding onto her seat for 10 years. Is she the last of her kind, or a model?
AUSTIN, Texas—State Representative Sarah Davis has been rankling her fellow Republicans for years. When the state GOP banned the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay rights group, from its annual convention, Davis publicly admonished the party. She has steadfastly advocated for vaccination, when some in the GOP opposed it. And she is the only Republican lawmaker in the entire state of Texas who supports abortion rights, having consistently voted against the party’s perennial efforts to limit them.
For these views, she has earned endorsements from the likes of the Human Rights Campaign and Planned Parenthood. She has also earned rebukes from the leaders of her own party. In the lead-up to the 2018 elections, Republican Governor Greg Abbott endorsed her primary challenger, who opposed abortion rights and mandatory vaccination requirements. Davis overwhelmingly won the primary anyway—and the election—handing the popular Texas governor, whose campaign fund spent a quarter-million dollars trying to oust her, a rare defeat.
“I believe that my job is to represent everyone in the district, not just the Republicans in the district. And I’ve always tried to act that way,” Davis says. “My election and electability is in no way related to whether or not Greg Abbott supports me.”
Although Texas is growing increasingly purple, its state policies on abortion have only hardened in recent years, as they have in Republican-dominated capitals across the country. And Texas is now back at the center of the national story: As the state began to battle the coronavirus last month, Abbott became one of the first of a handful of red-state governors to declare most abortions nonessential medical procedures, which Texas is putting on hold. On Saturday, abortion providers asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn parts of the ban, which Davis opposes.
Davis, who represents Houston’s Westside, is part of a small, shrinking group of pro-abortion rights Republicans across the country, many of whom have lost similar intraparty primary fights or flailed in general elections. Congress is down to just half a dozen lawmakers who cross party lines on abortion, one of whom recently lost a primary. Yet even though her district has increasingly drifted toward Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and Beto O’Rourke, Davis’ constituents have supported her for five election cycles, since she first won in 2010.
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