The Houston Chronicle reported yesterday that Republicans who voted to oppose Governor Greg Abbott’s voucher program are being bombarded with fake ads, distorting their support for their local public schools. Governor Abbott received a gift of $6 million from Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass to advance vouchers, as well as more from billionaire oil tycoons Wilks, Dunn, and Farris. Clearly he’s putting this bonanza into a campaign of lies. Abbott says that polls show that Texans want vouchers. If that were true (it’s not), Abbott should run honest ads saying, “Don’t vote for this guy because he opposes vouchers.”
During the regular session and four special sessions, Abbott held public school funding and teacher pay hostage. He said he would not give a penny to public schools or their teachers unless he got vouchers. Twenty-one Republicans opposed vouchers, so now Abbott accuses them of sabotaging the funding of public schools and teacher pay.
Abbott won’t run honest ads because he knows that Texans don’t want to spend their taxes to pay for religious schools and to subsidize the tuition of rich kids in private schools. His ads lie because the Governor knows vouchers are unpopular. They have been voted down in every state that has put them on the ballot.
Reporter Jason Scherer writes:
The ad opens with a dramatic message: “Steve Allison failed our teachers and kids.”
It says the San Antonio Republican stopped a bill in the Texas House last year that would have raised teacher pay, ended STAAR testing and poured more than $200 million into public schools in his district. “You deserve better,” the narrator concludes.
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What the ad, from the Family Empowerment Coalition PAC, fails to mention is that Allison supported all of those measures. Gov. Greg Abbott refused to sign a package that included them into law unless it included private school vouchers, which Allison opposed.
The PAC is using similarly misleading online ads to target at least a dozen Republican state House members who voted to strip the voucher proposalfrom a $7 billion education funding bill in November. The PAC is one of several groups that have worked in conjunction with Abbott ahead of the March primaries to unseat GOP lawmakers who rejected the governor’s push last year to give parents taxpayer dollars to send their kids to private schools.
Twenty-one House Republicans joined with every Democrat in the chamber to strike vouchers from the bill. The GOP author then withdrew the entire package, citing Abbott’s threat to veto any education funding that did not come with vouchers.
Allison, a former Alamo Heights ISD board president who has long pushed for Texas to bolster school funding, said the ad’s claims are a “flat-out falsehood.”
BACKGROUND: Texas House rejects school voucher proposal, dealing blow to Abbott, private school advocates
“There was absolutely no reason in the world why the rest of that bill couldn’t have gone forward — and I think we would have passed it,” Allison said, adding that he supported the rest of the $7 billion measure. If anything, he argued, it did not go far enough to boost education funding.
Leo Linbeck, a leader and co-founder of the Family Empowerment Coalition PAC, has contended that “anti-voucher extremists” were responsible for the bill’s demise, arguing that they received major concessions and were only asked to approve a limited voucher program “that would have served 1% of kids, all poor.”
“(W)hen you strip out a major part of a compromise bill, it dies,” Linbeck wrote on X last month.
Linbeck did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
The ads are just one example of how Abbott and the cadre of pro-voucher political groups have made only sparing reference to vouchers, instead focusing on teacher pay raises, border security and abortion in their political ads.
The Family Empowerment Coalition has been among the most active players in the state House primaries, spending some $762,000 through late January to attack anti-voucher Republicans and support their primary challengers. Other founding members include Doug Deason, a prominent Dallas GOP donor, and former state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., a Democrat who supported vouchers in the Legislature.
Beyond attacks on school funding, they have also accused GOP members of being “weak on the border” and promoted their challengers as stronger advocates for border security — a topic that carries far more weight among GOP primary voters than vouchers, according to a recent statewide poll.
State Rep. Ernest Bailes, a Shepherd Republican who opposes school vouchers, is another of the group’s targets. His main rival is Janis Holt, a school board trustee and owner of an air purification company who also challenged Bailes in 2022.
More than three-quarters of Holt’s campaign funding has come from the Family Empowerment Coalition PAC and Abbott, who endorsed her in January.
“Governor Abbott needs an ally to fight with him for a secure border,” one of the Family Empowerment Coalition PAC’s ads reads. “That’s why he has endorsed Janis Holt for HD 18.”
The PAC ran another ad accusing Allison of bragging “that he helped close the border, even though he didn’t. That’s why Gov. Abbott didn’t endorse him.”
But the ad leaves out that every Republican in the Texas House, including Allison and Bailes, supported a far-reaching new law that empowers state officials to essentially deport people who are suspected of crossing the border illegally. They also backed a contentious bill that establishes stiffer penalties for human smuggling and approved more than $6.5 billion for border security over the next two years, including $1.5 billion to continue building a wall along Texas’ southern border.
Allison called the border-focused ads “outrageous,” pointing to his votes for the slate of GOP immigration bills.
“I’d like to see them point to one border bill that I didn’t vote for, or show anything that I’ve ever done except being 100% behind border security,” Allison said. “I’ve been down there three times. I have voted for every appropriation — I was on (the House) Appropriations (Committee) — and voted for every request the governor has made.”
Abbott is running a digital ad promoting Allison’s main challenger, attorney and former Bexar County district attorney GOP nominee Marc LaHood, as an ally in his fight to “stop the flow of illegal immigrants, crime and drugs into Texas.” The governor has run the same version of the ad for several other candidates running to unseat anti-voucher Republicans.
The governor also invited 20 Republican House members to the border last week for a press conference where he touted their bona fides on border legislation. Abbott did not invite any voucher opponents to the press conference.
