Wendy Davis has built her campaign around a provably false story of poverty and struggle as a single mother. Adding to the growing sense that she is not who she is selling herself to voters as, a report by the Washington Free Beacon reveals that Davis has spent upwards of $131,000 of campaign funds on Austin luxury suites since elected to the Texas Senate.
Davis, who has been in the Texas Senate since 2008, is from the Fort Worth area and required amenities to live in Austin while she was serving in the Senate. The apartments and suites she chose to live in between 2008 and 2014 took from the campaign fund monthly rents comparable to apartments in central Manhattan, as well as use of services like maids. Rents increased over time as Davis upgraded from a $2,000-a-month suite at the Monarch in 2008 to an apartment costing her campaign more than $3,000 a month by 2011, at which time Davis moved to an apartment at the Ashton in Austin.
Despite her significant salary as an attorney, which the Free Beacon estimates as just over $275,000 in 2012, Davis did not pay for any of her accommodations or the maid service at the Monarch. All expenses were paid by her campaign–from donations and assorted funds meant to keep her in office.
The Beacon posits that such a life of luxury directly contradicts the image that Davis is trying to sell Texans in her gubernatorial campaign. Davis claimed that she was a single teen mother at 19 and lived for an extended time in her mother’s trailer, working several jobs to pay her way through law school and community college. The Dallas Morning News disclosed that the details of her life were far from accurate: Davis divorced at 21, only lived in her mother’s trailer for about a month, and she had her second husband take out a loan and cash out his 401(k) to pay for her education.
A life of $3,000-a-month apartments expensed to someone else is far from the single teen mom drama at the center of her campaign, as is the life revealed in last year’s Vogue profile of the Texas Senator: a politician who roots for the football team her best friend’s family owns and who “spent their evenings mingling with Fort Worth’s political set” at the young age of 25.
In a review of her campaign funding, National Review uncovered that Davis has already spent around $5,000 in campaign funds traveling outside Texas for gubernatorial campaign events.
Davis’s attempt to focus the entirety of her campaign away from issues and towards her life story is spiraling out of control. With stories of Democrats themselves distrusting Davis, a media team that has been described by one veteran campaign reporter as “the worst I’ve ever seen,” and the abrupt pivots to issues about which she has no credibility–like gun rights–one cannot expect her campaign to successfully diffuse this new bombshell.
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