Davey Edwards

William David "Davey" Edwards (Land surveyor; one of three unsuccessful opponents of Land Commissioner George P. Bush in the primary election held on March 6, 2018)
Born	November 10, 1970 Fort Worth, Texas Resident of Alvord in Wise County, Texas
Political Party	Republican
Spouse	Sonja Suzann South Edwards Three sons
Religion	Christian

William David Edwards, known as Davey Edwards (born November 10, 1970), is a land surveyor from Decatur in Wise County, Texas, who ran an unsuccessful conservative Republican campaign for commissioner of the state General Land Office in the party primary held on March 6, 2018. Early returns showed the incumbent commissioner, George P. Bush, son of former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, grandson of former U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush, and nephew of former President George W. Bush, leading with nearly 57 percent of the primary ballots tabulated.

Also in the running was Bush's predecessor in the office, former three-term Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson, a Republican from Houston and Austin, Texas, who gave up the office to run in 2014, unsuccessfully, for lieutenant governor in a four-candidate field dominated by conservative Dan Patrick, who went on to win the nomination and the general election.

Edwards received both Bachelor of Science (1993) and Master of Science degrees from Texas A&M University in College Station and a Ph.D. in geosciences from the University of Texas at Dallas. A sixth-generation Texan and a native of Fort Worth, he is the vice president of Edwards Surveying in Decatur. His father, Tommy Troy Edwards (born January 30, 1946), is the company president. Edwards is also an adjunct professor of geology at Weatherford College in Parker County west of Fort Worth. He is an authority on boundaries changed by rivers altering their course. He is the chairman of the Decatur Planning and Zoning  Commission, in which capacity he has defended private property rights against involuntary annexation. This was prior to legislative passage in 2017 of the new state annexation law. In 2017, Edwards successfully defended property rights along the Red River in a showdown in Washington, D.C., with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. 

He has based his campaign not only on his experience in land management but as a defender of Texas history and culture, specifically the Alamo, which will be renovated under the "Re-imagine" plans formulated by Commissioner Bush. Those plans include the removal of the cenotaph dedicated to Alamo defenders from the battle on March 6, 1836. (Coincidentally, March 6 is also the day of the Texas primary.) Edwards opposes the Bush plan for the former Roman Catholic mission in downtown San Antonio which was toppled by Mexicans, with the loss of all 187 defenders. Edwards instead favors only needed maintenance of the structure.

Edwards announced his candidacy in March 2017, but few Texans apparently knew he was running for land commissioner. Edwards questioned why George P. Bush went to Coral Gables, Florida, for a fund-raiser when Edwards relied only on Texan donors for his campaign. Edwards said that he believes Bush considers the land commissioner's post a stepping-stone to higher office, whereas Edwards said he would remain land commissioner if he is nominated and elected.

Complicating Edwards' prospects were two other intra-party candidates, former Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Richard Lynn "Rick" Range, a retired educator and firefighter from Garland in Dallas County, who has spent twenty years in research on The Alamo and is writing a book on the topic. Range also opposes Bush's "re-imagine" campaign.

Edwards finished the race with 101,071 votes (6.8 percent), to 58 percent for Bush, nearly 30 percent for Patterson, and 5 percent for Range. Bush is now expected to face the Democrat choice, Miguel Suazo, an energy-industry lawyer who led in his primary race as well. Like Edwards and Range, Patterson indicated that he too considers the status of the Alamo the centerpiece of his campaign.

Edwards and his wife, the former Sonja Suzann South (born 1972), who married while both were TAMU students, actually reside in rural Alvord, eleven miles northwest of Decatur, where Edwards was reared. The couple has three sons, the oldest of whom, Ryan, is adopted and is a student of marine biology at the Texas A&M campus in Galveston.