David Lowe, in his second attempt to unseat Republican Stephanie Klick, won convincingly on May 28th in a hotly contested runoff. Klick, the champion of the Texas Heartbeat bill, and the chair of the committee that killed the 2021 Texas abolition bill (HB 3326), outspent David in the primary 4:1 when he spent only about $53,000 to come within 310 votes of her total. Since he kept her under 50%, by Texas law, he forced this runoff.
I met David in 2021 after he contacted me through a Facebook page called, “Replace Stephanie Klick.” His first message was something along the lines of, “Are you serious about this?”. I assured him I was as serious as a heart attack, and we met for the first time at an IHOP restaurant to talk about abolition.
David was a quick study and has been a wonderful friend since then.
Her campaign lies over the years are infamous. In 2022 in a ridiculous piece of campaign PR, they took a quote out of context from the Abolitionists Rising podcast and claimed that David Lowe was pro-choice! In that same campaign they sent out a mailer featuring an image of an electric chair and claimed that he wanted the death penalty for every woman who ever had an abortion (perhaps the source for Seth Gruber’s misinformation? Who knows?).
This year she claimed David had no leadership experience despite his experience leading troops as a combat veteran. Her campaign ignored the issues, made slander the chief tool in her belt and leaned heavily on Texas Governor Greg Abbott (four visits and lots of campaign donations).
In this 2024 campaign, David had solid support from Abolish Abortion Texas and great boots on the ground work from Paul Brown. New abolitionist Michelle Martens put in many hours of text banking, phone banking, poll greeting and block walking. The Davison family and the Sims family did all the same and Renee was at the polls every day but Sunday during the primary.
The takeaway?
David Lowe's decisive win proves once and for all that if you're willing to do the hard work of educating the voters on abolition, you can win and REJECT the pro-life label. He did the hard work; he won the voters over in spite of a slander campaign and he won the election.
If you tell me that you must run as a pro-lifer to win, albeit a principled pro-lifer or “uncompromised pro-lifer” or whatever, I will probably laugh in your face. Do the hard work and tell them you’re an abolitionist and explain the difference.
You can do it at doors, you can do it on the phone, and you can do it at the polls. You can do it when Texas Right to Life, Texas Alliance for Life, the Governor of Texas, every RINO legislator, and the Fort Worth Star Telegram all endorse your opponent, the pro-life hero. You can force them to outspend you, but they should not outwork you.
Get to work. And do the hard work of messaging your campaign accurately and in a way that can win with clarity.
