A confident fighter, Wendy Davis enters a new chapter in her political life: state senator

Twelve years ago, a Fort Worth City Council candidate named Wendy Davis started her first political race with a bang.

She alleged that she had been turned down for a job at a downtown law firm because she opposed a plan to turn a park field near the Fort Worth Zoo into a parking lot.

The firm, Kelly Hart & Hallman, did legal work for the Fort Worth Zoological Association and for the Bass family, who are among the zoo’s biggest supporters. At age 33, Davis had attacked one of Fort Worth’s most-beloved institutions, along with a couple of bastions of the business establishment.

Even then, in her first political fight, she was supremely confident.

"I have the intelligence to understand issues on a detailed level and the sense of fairness to do what’s right," she said at the time.

She lost that first race, but it’s been her only loss at a ballot box. She won the council seat in 1999.

In the years since then, Davis has made a habit of picking fights with the boys clubs: land developers, police and firefighters associations, gas-drilling companies, even the Star-Telegram. Some of them she has turned into allies. Some of them still don’t like her.

Now she’s headed to the Texas Senate, another clubby institution, after beating Republican incumbent Kim Brimer. The stakes are higher than ever. And Davis is still confident.

Single mom

Vicki Bargas, president of the Worth Heights Neighborhood Association and a longtime friend, said Davis’ roots make her different from other politicians.

"She has a lot of empathy for people that are perhaps not as well off or don’t have the opportunity that others do — she’s been there, she knows how difficult it can be," Bargas said.

Davis’ parents were divorced when she was young, and her mother worked low-wage jobs to support four children. Davis herself went to work at the age of 14, according to her campaign biography.

She graduated from Richland High School in 1981 and got married instead of going to college. She was divorced a short time later and found herself supporting an infant daughter while attending Tarrant County College.

She transferred to Texas Christian University, where she met her second husband, Jeff Davis, who had served on the Fort Worth City Council in the 1970s. Jeff Davis was on the board of Stage West, where Wendy Davis’ father worked.

After graduating first in her class at TCU, Wendy Davis went to Harvard Law School. She and Jeff Davis divorced in 2003.

During law school, Davis worked summers at Kelly Hart & Hallman, and, after graduating, she landed a prestigious job as a law clerk for a federal judge in Dallas.

But she was turned down for a full-time job at Kelly Hart. Davis said early in her first campaign that she thought it was because of her outspoken opposition to the zoo’s parking plan. Her implication was that the firm was trying to silence one of the zoo’s critics rather than debate the issue.

In a recent interview, Davis said she brought up the issue with the firm in 1996 to make a point that the city needed more "process," her watchword for getting input from neighborhoods on big decisions.

"I would articulate it a little more carefully today," she said.

In that first campaign, Davis faced Cathy Hirt, Lee Saldivar and Jenny Phillipson. She made it into a runoff against Hirt, but lost by 90 votes. One of the keys was turnout in Ryan Place, the neighborhood where Hirt lived.

Davis later sued the Star-Telegram and former Publisher Richard L. Connor, alleging that the paper ran a series of "false and defamatory" articles to keep the zoo issue alive, including an editorial that ran the day of the runoff. A Dallas district judge threw out the suit on free-speech grounds, and Davis never got to prove those allegations in court.

Davis, now the CEO of Republic Title’s Fort Worth office, said last week that she learned a lot from her first campaign, including the need to "walk the path."