Weird GOP mailer launches a wild 2024 campaign: ‘It’s like one-party rule on Red Bull’ | Opinion

The political silly season started early this year.

Warning: Don’t open your mailbox from now through March 5 and Super Tuesday.

Otherwise, you risk getting sucked in by one of the big, slick mailers full of lies from somebody with millions to spend. Maybe billions.

Seven months before voting begins in the 2024 party primaries, the state Republican Party is already dizzy in a haze thicker than a West Texas dust storm.

The party is swept up in disputes over whether to keep or remove finagling Attorney General Ken Paxton, over whether Gov. Greg Abbott is tough enough on border crossers, and over whether to put money into public schools or pry Texas children out.

The first mailbox mud of the 2024 campaign arrived last week. An unsigned Dallas mailer to Republican voters across much of the state showed a child’s photo and warned “OUR SCHOOLS ARE UNDER ATTACK.”

Republican school board members should stop voting with Democrats and “the left,” it said, because Democrats differ on gender issues and are “ashamed of America.”

Never mind that most school board votes are unanimous.

So unless there’s a controversy, the Republican majority and Democratic minority inevitably vote together.

For that matter, when Democrats vote with Republicans, that is not bad news for Republicans.

The mailer is both poisonous and poisonous. It’s signed only by the phantom “Texans for Conservative School Values,” who appear to be Mysterious Texas Millionaires With Beaucoup Bucks.

In Fort Worth and points west, the mailers raised doubts about Texas State Board of Education member Pat Hardy, a 20-year incumbent facing re-election in 2024 who often bridges the conservative and even-more-conservative Republicans on the board.

Five other Republican board members across Texas were targeted by the same expensive, unsigned ads.

“We are totally baffled that we were selected and wrongly criticized,” Hardy said Friday. “When you start with a lie — saying it’s from an organization that doesn’t exist — what kind of truth are you going to get? The most surprising thing is that anybody would read a pamphlet in the mail and believe it.”

Amen to that.

Frisco Republican Evelyn Brooks was also singled out. She represents outlying counties around Fort Worth from Wichita Falls to Waco.

“There is a total lack of transparency,” she said. “I can’t find anyone who owns up to sending this. There’s no email. There’s no website. There’s no contact info. And they make these huge accusations.”

The mailer’s message is absurd.

It warns that “the left” promotes gender issues and is “ashamed of America,” then complains that Republicans vote with Democrats “96% of the time.”

In other words, the board votes together on noncontroversial votes.

“My core values do not change,” Brooks said. “I support faith, family and this nation.”

She’s not even up for re-election until 2026.

Brooks said voters’ questions for school boards should begin with: “How do we raise these test scores? How do we do a better job of teaching reading and math?”

On Facebook, Dallas Democrat Aicha Davis called the Republican mailer an “absolute joke.”

For example, Hardy pushed hard to eliminate critical race theory from Texas schools, Davis wrote, and “definitely doesn’t deserve this” from fellow conservatives.

It’s all only the beginning of a seven-month-long bucking-bronc ride toward the 2024 primary.

“This is about as tumultuous a period in Texas political history as we’ve seen,” University of Houston professor Brandon Rottinghaus wrote by email.

With former President Donald Trump renewing his now-11-year-long MAGA campaign, Rottinghaus compared current party infighting to when Democrats split over the 1972 Sharpstown banking scandal and the when the anti-establishment tea party movement rose in 2009.

“Texas has certainly been here before,” he wrote. “But this time, it’s different. It’s like one-party rule on Red Bull.”

The mail definitely is all bull.