The Lies of Texas

The price sign at a truck stop changes overnight and nobody ever sees it happen. You pull in, and there it is. A number that means an 18-wheeler will likely need over $ 1,000 of gas for a fill-up. On Monday, the average gallon of diesel in Texas cost $5.67. In early February it cost $3.30. It is $2.51 more than it was a year ago. And everybody knows the damn reason.

Everything in this state that gets grown, built or sold rides on that number. The cattle headed to the sale barn. The module truck in the cotton field. The reefer hauling Valley produce north on 281. A farmer pays for diesel at planting and again at harvest, and then he pays for it a third time at the grocery store, where it has been folded into the price of everything he did not grow himself.

Regular unleaded is $3.82, which is $1.15 more than this time last year. Texas just recorded the most expensive September for gasoline in its history. Nobody has to explain any of this to the people standing at the pump. They know what it costs. What they may not have noticed is that the two Republicans at the top of the Texas ballot have decided to spend the last weeks of this election talking about anything else.

Those prices have an address. At the end of February the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran, and the oil coming out of the Persian Gulf stopped moving in our direction. The Strait of Hormuz closed and Russia banned diesel exports. American refineries were already running flat out. In April the president told Americans to expect higher prices as the war went on. It is about the only promise he has kept.

Texans are not grading the war on a curve. A UMass Lowell and YouGov poll released last week found 47 percent of likely Texas voters approve of the job Donald Trump is doing and 53 percent disapprove. He carried this state by double digits two years ago, and his numbers are much worse nationally. The same survey has James Talarico and Ken Paxton tied at 45 percent in the Senate race, and Abbott ahead of Gina Hinojosa 48 to 44, inside the margin of error. Abbott spent most of this year refusing to say Hinojosa’s name. He says it plenty now.

When the gas pump runs against you, you change the subject. Both Abbott and Paxton have.

Abbott’s campaign has spent $12 million putting one claim on Texas television. Gina Hinojosa, it says, voted 40 different times in the Legislature to raise your property taxes, except the Legislature does not levy property taxes. Cities, counties and school districts do. If we didn’t know this basic tent of Texas government, we would quickly learn it because Greg Abbott tells us so in another ad he has been running at the same time, the one about wasteful local spending, in which he explains that the state of Texas does not impose the property tax. One ad says the Legislature cannot raise your property taxes. The other says Hinojosa did it 40 times. The same man paid for both. He is asking you to believe each of them on alternating commercial breaks. It is an epic level of cynicism that disrespects the intellect of every Texas taxpayer and voter.

The Houston Chronicle went through the list of 40 votes the campaign supplied. Many were votes against Republican bills that would have limited how fast local governments could grow their property tax revenue, which they often need to do because the governor and state legislature keep reducing the amount of money the state disburses for public schools. Several Republicans voted against some of the same bills. The total is padded with repeats. On one measure alone she voted five times. None of the 40 votes raised anyone’s taxes. Abbott’s campaign argues that opposing a cap is the same as wanting higher taxes. That is a specious policy argument but is damn sure not a vote. Hinojosa’s lawyers have sent cease-and-desist letters to the stations airing the ad, and Abbott’s campaign calls that lawfare, which is what Republicans call it when somebody reads the fine print back to them.

Then there is the income tax. Abbott says Hinojosa voted for one. He said it again on CBS this weekend and added that she thought it out and wanted to impose it. What she voted on, in May 2019, was HJR 38, a constitutional amendment to ban a personal income tax. She voted no. It passed the House 100 to 42 and voters approved it that November. Texas had no income tax before that vote and none after it. Since 1993 the constitution had already required a statewide vote of the people before one could be imposed, and opponents of the 2019 amendment, according to the House Research Organization, called it unnecessary for exactly that reason. So why would Hinojosa vote for it?

There is a germ of something here and it needs to be clarified. In 2016, running for the House, Hinojosa told KXAN that Texas leans too heavily on property taxes because it is missing the third leg of the stool, an income tax. That is an argument about how a state pays its bills. She made it ten years ago as a candidate. She has not proposed an income tax. She says she opposes one. The only vote Abbott can point to is a vote against an amendment that did not change a dime of what any Texan pays.

When lying and distorting information doesn’t work, Abbott turned to Photoshop. Last month the Texas governor shared an image taken from a Hinojosa campaign video in which she talks with a second grader whose school is closing. In his version the American flag in the frame had been turned into a transgender pride flag. The original was about a little girl and her school. The edited one was about whatever Abbott needed that day. This man deserves overwhelming disdain; not your vote.

Ken Paxton’s method is simpler. He does not need a graphic designer. He just needs scissors.

The day after he beat John Cornyn in the May runoff, Paxton released an ad stringing together six clips of Talarico under the verdict that he is not Texan. In one, Talarico says the southern border should be like a front porch, with a giant welcome mat out front. That is where the ad stops. What Talarico said next was that there should also be a lock on the door, so we can keep out people who mean to do us harm. The half Paxton cut is the Republican position. That is why he cut it.

The other clips are built the same way. Talarico, preaching in 2019, calls the American flag a complicated symbol. The ad drops his next thought, that the flag, like the cross, has been co-opted and its meaning betrayed. On primary night Talarico warns that his opponents are going to call him a radical leftist. The ad plays the warning as a confession and then spends thirty seconds proving him right. On a 2023 podcast Talarico says he loves the trans children. The ad leaves out that he was talking about particular kids who had come to the Capitol the day before to testify.

On the night he won the nomination, Paxton told a crowd that Talarico is a vegan and called him Tofu Talarico. PolitiFact rated it False. Talarico has been photographed working on a turkey leg at the State Fair. He says he has been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment, which is a joke with a date attached. A grand jury indicted Paxton on securities fraud charges in 2015. In 2023, the Texas House, run by his own party, impeached him. The Senate acquitted him after two major donors sent $3 million dollars to the Lieutenant Governor, who presided over the trial and controlled witnesses and evidence.

In September, Paxton put the scissors down and picked up a computer. His ad “King James” features an artificial intelligence version of Talarico, built to look like the man, writing in crayon in a fake King James Talarico Bible and reciting a monologue the real Talarico never delivered. A disclaimer in tiny type appears about twenty seconds into a thirty-second spot. FactCheck.org traced every line. Some are real sentences pulled from sermons and floor speeches years apart. Some of the framing was invented. “God is not a Christian” was the title of a 2023 sermon against Christian nationalism, about God being larger than any one religion. The ad welded it to a 2021 floor speech and handed both to a synthetic Talarico as a single creed. His line about being a Christian who hates Christianity is real, from a 2021 podcast. The sentence that followed it, in which he said he keeps coming back because nothing else he has found is as radical as the teachings of Jesus, did not make the edit. Funny, that.

Here is what Paxton did not need to make excisions and additions for. Talarico really did say in a 2021 hearing that there are six biological sexes and he did vote against the bills limiting school sports teams by birth sex. He has since said he missed the mark on the first, and that he now opposes trans athletes in girls’ sports when safety or fairness is at stake. Voters are entitled to weigh all of that, the walk-back included. Paxton had real material and still could not resist improving it. That says something about the material but a hell of a lot more about Paxton.

Paxton’s campaign is, at bottom, an endorsement. Trump endorsed him late in the runoff and has stayed close since. At the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, the president called him the single greatest attorney general in the state. Well, yea, because he is the only one in the state. Last week Trump flew to San Antonio to rally with him at the Freeman Coliseum. When Talarico came down with the flu and left the trail, Trump declared him missing in action, and the Paxton campaign printed missing-person posters and demanded proof of life. Then Trump called for a debate. Oops. Talarico said yes. Paxton, who has resisted previous calls to debate, now has to find out whether the president meant it, and almost certainly hopes he did not.

That is the bargain Paxton made. He has fastened himself to a president who is underwater in Texas, whose needles war is on the price sign for diesel and gasoline, and whose tariffs 54 percent of likely Texas voters strongly disapprove of, according to the University of Texas Texas Politics Project.

Abbott’s bargain is harder to read because he keeps renegotiating it. He built a national name on the border, with Operation Lone Star and buses of migrants sent to northern cities. With Trump back in the White House, the border belongs to Washington and the enforcement is happening in Texas neighborhoods as masked men with guns invade cul-de-sacs. Early this year Abbott called on the Trump administration to recalibrate its approach, as tepid a critique as could be articulated. The same University of Texas polling finds Texans evenly split on Trump’s handling of immigration, which in this state used to be the safest ground a Republican could stand on. Abbott’s campaign still says Hinojosa supports open borders. The governor who asked the president to ease up is running against a woman he says wants no border at all.

On data centers, he has managed to stand on both sides of the issue and opposite the president inside of a single year. Last November he stood beside a $40 billion Google investment and called Texas the epicenter of AI development. By summer, rural Texas had worked out how much water and power a data center consumes, and in August Abbott paused new grid approvals. Sniffing the wind has always been his most cultivated skill. Trump called the pause a mistake and said the industry could be bigger than oil. On September 21 Abbott ordered the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to stop issuing permits to data center projects altogether. The only fixed point in the whole sequence is the election calendar. Data centers will come roaring back into Abbott’s economic engine on Nov. 4, if he wins the election.

Abbott has been governor since 2015 and wants a fourth term. He debated his opponents in each of his three previous campaigns. This year he will not, and it is not hard to see why. A debate is a place where someone can ask about the record, which he and his party own after complete control of state government since 1994, and the story they wrote is heart-wrenching.

The record is 1.1 million uninsured children, nearly a quarter of all the uninsured children in the United States, living in one state. It is also roughly five million uninsured Texans in all, the worst rate in the country, and a Legislature that has turned down Medicaid expansion again and again while the state sat on a surplus measured in tens of billions. In a $338 billion budget, the governor found exactly one line item he could not abide, $60 million that would have let roughly 3.75 million Texas children get help buying food in the summer. He vetoed it but has funded a billion-dollar voucher program in which about 70 percent of the families collecting the money already had their children in private school.

His record also is in the gas tax. In April, Hinojosa asked Abbott to suspend the state’s 20-cent-a-gallon tax on gasoline and diesel. A month later, Trump said he would support suspending the federal one. Republican governors in Georgia and Indiana suspended their states’ gas taxes. Abbott’s campaign called the idea political theater and said Democrats calling for it show a fundamental ignorance of Texas law. On September 28, he declared a statewide disaster over diesel prices, loosened the rules on dyed diesel and raised weight limits for fuel, farm and timber loads. That was real help to farmers and haulers, but he left the 20 cents where it was.

West Texas sits on the floor of a sea that dried up a quarter of a billion years ago. The reefs and the plankton of that sea are what come up out of the Permian Basin now, and they are why Texas pumps more oil than any other state in the union. It takes a particular kind of governance for the people living on top of all that to pay record prices for diesel because of a war of choice on the other side of the world.

None of this is in the ads. They are about forty votes that raised nobody’s taxes, an income tax vote that never happened, a flag that was never in the room, a vegan who eats brisket, and a preacher who never sat at that desk with that crayon. Talarico said the border should have a welcome mat and a lock on the door. Paxton kept the mat, threw away the lock. Abbott said the state does not raise property taxes and then said Hinojosa raised them forty times. You only run campaigns like these if you have decided the people watching will not notice. They notice. They notice every week at the pump.

The sign at the truck stop will change again tonight. Nobody will see it happen. But every time it goes up, Abbott and Paxton’s chances to win go down.