Chad’s Morning Brief: Wendy Davis Still Struggling in Texas, Americans Not Sure if Government Can Protect Them, and Other Top Stories

The Wall Street Journal is taking a look at the Texas Elections and pointing out that for Wendy Davis, things still aren't going well.

Despite raising millions of dollars and attracting international media attention, Democrat Wendy Davis is struggling to make her campaign for Texas governor competitive.

Democrats had high hopes that the state senator, who became an overnight sensation among liberals last year with a marathon filibuster of an abortion bill, could turn the tide in Texas, where the party hasn’t won a statewide race in two decades. But Ms. Davis has failed to garner traction against Republican Greg Abbott, the state attorney general, damping Democrats’ hopes of loosening the GOP’s dominance in the state.

A poll released Wednesday by the Texas Lyceum, a nonpartisan public-policy group, showed Ms. Davis nine percentage points behind Mr. Abbott. The Rasmussen Reports, meanwhile, released a poll Friday showing Mr. Abbott 11 points ahead.

Ms. Davis, a 51-year-old who rose from teenage parenthood to attend Harvard Law School, faces a “Mount Everest” climb in the final month of her campaign, said Jim Riddlesperger, a political-science professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. She not only has to win over swing voters, he said, but also ensure that her supporters are inspired enough to head to the polls. That is a particular challenge given that Mr. Abbott has run a low-key campaign and avoided the sorts of gaffes that can inspire fevered opposition.

Wendy Davis' key spokesman remains confident that Wendy Davis will do fine.

Zac Petkanas, a spokesman for the Davis camp, said the team is feeling “exceedingly confident going into the home stretch,” noting that Ms. Davis has so far raised more than $30 million. Her contributors include Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand and Matt Damon.

Still, according to the latest campaign-finance reports, filed last week, Mr. Abbott had $30 million in cash, more than two times as much as the Davis campaign reported in its latest public filing, in July.

Mr. Petkanas said the campaign’s internal polling shows Ms. Davis has gone from 23 points down in January to seven points behind in the latest poll, last month. Public polls, he added, don’t accurately capture that the campaign has growing support among voters who don’t typically participate in midterm elections.

Political experts say the Davis campaign has launched an unusually large and aggressive get-out-the-vote effort. It is being led by Battleground Texas, a group formed last year by veterans of Mr. Obama’s campaigns who hope to eventually turn the state into a competitive arena for Democrats.

Even with Team Obama helping Davis, her campaign is a joke and one that will lose by double digits.

You can read the entire story by clicking the link above.

Can Government Protect Us?

A growing number of people have been counting on the government to protect them from the outside world and even those threats here at home. As the AP points out, a growing number of those Americans now wonder if the government can get the job done.

Americans lack confidence in the government's ability to protect their personal safety and economic security, a sign that their widespread unease about the state of the nation extends far beyond politics, according to the latest Associated Press-GfK poll.

With Election Day about a month away, more than half those in the survey said Washington can do little to effectively lessen threats such as climate change, mass shootings, racial tensions, economic uncertainty and an unstable job market.

"I think what we've got going on here in America is the perfect storm of not good things," said Joe Teasdale, 59, who lives in southwest Wisconsin and works as an assistant engineer at a casino.

For many of those questioned in the poll, conducted before doctors in Texas diagnosed a Liberian man with the Ebola virus, the concern starts with the economy.

The poll found that 9 in 10 of those most likely to vote in the Nov. 4 election call the economy an extremely or very important issue. Teasdale is among those who say the slow recovery from the recession is a top concern.

Not surprisingly, Democrats had more faith in government.

The poll found that Democrats tend to express more faith in the government's ability to protect them than do Republicans. Yet even among Democrats, just 27 percent are confident the government can keep them safe from terrorist attacks. Fewer than 1 in 5 say so on each of the other issues, including climate change.

"There's too many people who still don't believe that it's happening," bemoaned Felicia Duncan, 53, who lives in Sharonville, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati, and works as an office manager at a mechanical contracting company.

Urbanites tend to be more confident the government will keep them safe from terrorist threats than do people living in suburbs and rural areas. Younger Americans are more confident than older people that the government can minimize the threat of mass shootings. When it comes to quelling racial tensions, Hispanics are more confident than are blacks and whites.

Thirteen years after the Sept. 11 attacks, and as the Obama administration conducts airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq, only 1 in 5 in the poll say they are extremely or very confident the government can keep them safe from another terrorist attack. Four in 10 express moderate confidence.

While there has not been a large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, roughly one-third of Americans say they are not too confident or not confident at all in the government's ability to prevent another.

How confident are you in government?

You can read the full story by clicking on the link above.

Other Must Read Links:

Romo Calls Out Cowboys Fans 

Hispanics Won't Turn Texas Blue 

Teachers Take on Controversial Topics

Gay Marriage and the Supreme Court

Boehner Raises Cash for Gay Republican 

These and many more topics coming up on today’s edition of The Chad Hasty Show. Tune in mornings 8:30-11am on News/Talk 790 KFYO, streaming online at kfyo.com, and now on your iPhone and Android device with the radioPup App. All guest interviews can be heard online in our podcast section after the show at kfyo.com.