A longtime Texas newspaper says that it was "wrong" to endorse Texas Governor Greg Abbott 10 years ago, accusing him of "spewing lies and half-truths" and going after fellow Republicans who did not support his school vouchers initiative.
As well as being front and center on issues such as illegal immigration, Abbott—elected in 2015—has been on the campaign trail supporting Texas statewide candidates who are running against 16 current Republican lawmakers who last year voted against his voucher initiative, in which taxpayers' money would have been used to allow some students to attend private schools.
Last year, a total of 21 Republicans in the Texas Legislature voted against the initiative.
"A decade ago, we endorsed Greg Abbott, saying the then-Texas Attorney General was a man of good character who had 'the respect necessary to govern our state,'" reads a new editorial by the Daily Sentinel, which has covered the state's oldest town of Nacogdoches since 1899. "Our opinion of what makes a good governor hasn't changed, but Abbott has. He's become the Disrespecter-in-Chief of Texas.
"After listening to Abbott stoop to fear mongering, spewing lies and half-truths and twisting logic in contradictory and baffling ways, we believe he no longer respects the rural voters who have sent him to Austin for three terms."
Newsweek reached out to Abbott's office via email for comment.
In November, Abbott failed to muster enough support from his own party members to approve a bill including taxpayer subsidies of up to $10,000 per year, per student, to attend private and religious schools. Most Republicans who voted for the provision to remove vouchers from the state's education funding represent rural areas.
In his 2022 victory over Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke, Abbott claimed 886,166 votes, or about 79.35 percent, from rural counties across Texas, according to the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. It was an increase of about 2 percent and 4 percent from his 2018 and 2014 election victories, respectively.
Rural voters in the 2022 election accounted for approximately 13.37 percent of registered voters in the 2022 election and 13.84 percent of all votes cast.
Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, said Abbott's campaigning against voucher adversaries is surprising considering that the governor historically has rarely supported challengers to sitting Republican incumbents. Prior to the current election cycle, Abbott's most endorsements totaled three in 2020.
"For Abbott, endorsing these challengers has two principal goals: The first is to oust a significant proportion of the anti-school choice GOP incumbents to pave the way for the passage of school choice legislation during the 2025 regular legislation session that begins in January of 2025," Jones told Newsweek.
"The second is to signal to all state legislators that there are serious consequences if you defy Governor Abbott and block his priority legislation. In effect, if you mess with the bull, you get the horns."
The Sentinel editorial claims that Abbott has "put a target on the back" of State Representative Travis Clardy, one of the aforementioned conservatives who voted against Abbott's school voucher proposal. Clardy represents House District 11, which includes Cherokee, Nacogdoches and Rusk counties in East Texas.
The governor also publicly slammed State Representative DeWayne Burns, also a Republican, saying in a post on X (formerly Twitter) earlier this week that he doesn't "trust" Burns due to his school voucher vote. Abbott is campaigning on behalf of Helen Kerwin, Burns' Republican primary challenger for Texas' House District 58.
During Monday campaign events attended by Abbott, Kerwin's campaign rally included some 200 supporters while Burns attracted some 500 supporters, according to the Cleburne Times-Review.
The Daily Sentinel also criticized Abbott's recent remarks, in which he stated on Monday: "Some people get elected and they go to Austin, Texas, and they represent Austin values not Nacogdoches values."
They cited how Abbott may have been speaking about himself considering that Pennsylvania-based GOP mega-donor Jeff Yass gave Abbott $250,000 in October and another $6 million in December, according to Houston Public Media.
"This election cycle, he wants to buy the votes of rural Texans with a campaign of lies financed by billionaires from out of state, and he's confident we're dumb enough to believe him," the editorial reads, describing the efforts of Abbott and his "billionaire buddies" as a widespread propaganda campaign.
It adds: "Were Abbott a sitting member of the Texas House, waging such a campaign could get him kicked out of the Republican Party, per caucus rules. We expected the standard-bearer of the Texas Republican Party to follow the same rules as the House members he wishes so desperately to control."
In his third term, Abbott has become one of the most polarizing figures across the nation since he started busing migrants to Democratic sanctuary cities beginning in 2022, leading to a larger ideological battle between the state of Texas and the federal government. A record influx of illegal migrants into Texas led to razor wire being set up along the U.S.-Mexico border, in addition to constructing an 80-acre camp housing thousands of Texas National Guard soldiers for years to come.
Update 02/22/24, 2 p.m. ET: This story was updated with comment from Mark Jones.
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