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.
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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.
As partisan divides harden, the politicians who straddle those divides become more interesting to study. Davis, 43, who is up for reelection this fall, owes part of her survival to her district, which includes the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical complex in the world, and where voters tend to cross party lines and consistently show up to the polls. Her constituents lean fiscally conservative and socially liberal, so they welcome her willingness to oppose her party on abortion, gay rights and vaccines.
In 2018, I blogged about the antivaxxers' unsuccessful campaign to unseat her:
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