Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [57]
“What do you think?” Gabby asked me as we sat together in the car. “Should I run?”
“Well, you never expected you’d have this opportunity to run in your home district,” I told her. “You thought you’d have to wait ten or twenty years for Kolbe to retire. You have this opportunity, you should take it.”
“Will you support me?” she asked.
“Of course,” I told her.
“Will you support me to the maximum?” she asked, and I saw a devilish smile forming on her face.
“I’ll support you completely,” I said.
“Good,” she said, “then get out your checkbook. You can donate a maximum of twenty-one hundred dollars for the primary and twenty-one hundred dollars for the general election. That’s forty-two hundred.”
I was still just her boyfriend at the time. We weren’t yet engaged. And as an astronaut, I was living on the salary of a civil servant, so $4,200 was not inconsequential to me. But I saw that if I wanted to show Gabby that I truly loved her, I’d be smart to become the first contributor to her newborn congressional campaign. I obediently took out my checkbook and wrote the check.
Gabby sat in the car, on the phone, for the next three hours, picking the brains and the purses of everyone she knew in political circles. Within a week, just calling the names in her cell-phone address book, she had raised $200,000 from more than four hundred contributors.
She wrestled with the question of whether to leave her job as a state senator to make the run for Congress. If she stayed on just one more month, Gabby would have served five years in office and been entitled to a state pension. But in the end, she decided she couldn’t serve her constituents well if she was busy traveling the campaign trail in a district that stretched nine thousand square miles. She resigned on December 1, which allowed a replacement to be selected before the legislative session began in January. She will never see a penny in pension money, but she knew she’d done the right thing.
Gabby formally announced her candidacy at the landmark Arizona Inn, which was built by Isabella Greenway, Arizona’s first female congresswoman. Greenway won the seat in 1932, and only one other woman in Arizona was elected in all the years since; Karan English served one term, from 1993 to 1995. Launching her “cactus roots campaign,” Gabby hoped to be the third female congresswoman in state history.
Among those there to support her that day was Dorothy Finley, the octogenarian beer magnate who mentored Gabby during her El Campo years. Dorothy was active and powerful in Republican circles, and her endorsement reminded voters that Gabby was working to be a candidate who transcended party labels. (Dorothy frequently invited us to join her at the Mountain Oyster Club. It’s a private facility devoted to supporting Southwestern heritage, including the consumption of bull testicles, which are known as Rocky Mountain oysters. Dorothy loved that place and Gabby loved Dorothy. I went, too, but took no pleasure in eating “cow balls.”)
In the primary, Gabby ran against five candidates, including Patty Weiss, a former TV news anchorwoman with almost 100-percent name recognition. Yes, some voters recognized Gabby from her 10-and 15-second El Campo commericals, but she was considered a long-shot underdog compared to Patty, a well-regarded TV journalist who had anchored newscasts in Tucson for more than three decades. Gabby hustled day and night—meeting voters, raising money, and convening twenty-three policy roundtables with a diverse group of local experts.
Gabby ended up winning the election easily, with 54 percent of the vote, 23 percent higher than Patty, the second-place finisher. The Democrats united behind Gabby very quickly. Patty very generously came over to her headquarters on election night and publicly pinned a “Giffords for Congress” campaign button on her suit.
The general election was far more combative. Gabby’s opponent was Randy Graf, a former state representative. He was a far-right conservative; it was Randy who had introduced that bill seeking to