In a surprising turn of events, State Rep. Drew Darby gained a good victory in the GOP Primary Election of the Texas House despite facing a tough challenge.
With a victory, Darby opens up about his opponent Stormy Bradley, who struggled with public speaking and heavily relied on scripted notes during the campaign.
Darby claimed that around $2 million was spent on different campaign strategies, such as mailings, text messages, and videos, to try to oust him from his role as the State Representative for Texas House District 72.
Despite Darby’s incumbency and ample campaign funds, Bradley still got 43% of the vote against a nine-term incumbent with an $850,000 campaign war chest, which shows she was a strong competitor.
Bradley talked a lot about border security, while Governor Abbott criticized Darby mainly because he didn’t support a bill called HB1.
This bill was about giving money to private schools from the state. Abbott’s campaign said Darby wasn’t good at protecting the border, which made voters think differently about him.
A significant revelation brought forward by Scott Braddock, a correspondent for the Quorum Report, shedding light on Governor Abbott’s campaign strategies and messaging tactics.
Braddock alleges that during a conference call with donors, Governor Abbott’s chief strategist and campaign manager, Dave Carney, admitted that the messaging directed at rural Republican state representatives, particularly concerning border security and anti-school voucher positions, was fundamentally untrue.
Stormy Bradley, backed by Governor Abbott, also launched the campaign to challenge Drew Darby.
Bradley’s team wasted no time in targeting Darby’s credibility, releasing an ad titled ‘Disgusted with Drew Darby’ on Jan. 24.
The ad portrays Darby as an ‘establishment Republican’ who’s aligned with liberal interests in Austin and accuses him of supporting ‘radical transgenderism’ due to his stance on a 2017 bill regarding transgender students and bathrooms.
Bradley, a sixth-generation Texan, entrepreneur, and member of the Coahoma Independent School District board, echoes Abbott’s border policies and emphasizes the need for vocational education programs to better equip high school graduates for the workforce.
During the period, Abbott also met with San Angelo at 10:30 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 9, to express his support for Bradley through a rally as part of a barnstorming campaign spanning several of Texas’ rural communities.
According to the Texas Tribune, there was a “$7.6 billion boost that Abbott had made conditional on the approval of vouchers.”
Braddock claimed that some have “recalled that Carney has said on at least one conference call with some donors that Abbott’s border-themed attacks on anti-school voucher Republicans were based on untrue ‘bullshit.’”
Greg Abbott plans to persist with these tactics against four candidates in the upcoming runoffs scheduled for May 28.
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