Something Stinks in Texas: The Politics of Fear Just Landed in Your Mailbox

On the first day of early voting, Texas families opened their mailboxes to find a “transgender student guide” addressed to the kids in the house. The group that sent it is a Wyoming shell company formed six weeks earlier. Nobody will admit sending it, and nobody will say how they got your address. Welcome to the politics of fear, where both parties keep you scared of each other so you never look past them.

I’ve written a lot lately about what I call the Uniparty: two political parties that fight loudly in public and agree quietly on the things that fund them. This week, Texas got a look at the other half of the playbook, the part that keeps you too scared to notice.

Politics of fear: a campaign strategy that drives turnout by convincing voters the other side is a threat to their family, their faith or their country, rather than persuading them on the merits.

Editorial: This Dispatch contains my opinion, clearly marked as such, alongside sourced reporting.

The Mailer

On Monday and Tuesday, October 19 and 20, the first two days of early voting, mailers began showing up in Texas homes. They were titled “LGBTQ+ Student Resource Guide” and addressed to “the student” of the household. According to the Texas Tribune and the Daily Signal, they:

told kids to find a “safe adult,” like a teacher or counselor, if their parents don’t support their identity;
said parents don’t need to be involved;
included a section on how 16- and 17-year-olds can emancipate from their parents;
covered hormones and traveling out of state for gender-affirming care.

The week before, Texans had received text messages with similar content.

NBC DFW reported that the mailers reached many Republican and Hispanic households. Republicans called the content predatory. A Republican state lawmaker asked the attorney general’s office to investigate. Democrats called it an obvious ploy to rally conservative voters.

The Group That Doesn’t Exist

The return address said “Texas Transgender Student Union.” Here’s what reporters have found about it:

It’s a Wyoming shell company. State records show a Wyoming LLC by that name formed on September 2, 2026. Its address is a registered-agent address shared by nearly 300,000 other Wyoming companies, according to CBS News Texas. The records don’t say who created it.
The return address doesn’t check out. CBS News Texas found the listed address in Meadows Place doesn’t appear valid; a nearly identical one leads to a UPS Store mailbox.
No website, no social media, no history. The “union” has no known online presence at all.
The real trans group says it’s fake. Every online resource in the pamphlet links to the Transgender Education Network of Texas. That group says the texts and mailers “were not authored, authorized, approved, or distributed” by it, called them impersonations, and said it has received threats of violence since they went out.
Neither Senate campaign will claim it. Both Ken Paxton’s and James Talarico’s campaigns told CBS News Texas they had no involvement.

There’s one thread reporters are pulling. The Texas Tribune traced the tracking codes on two of the mailers to SnailWorks, a Maryland mail-tracking company. Federal records show the National Republican Congressional Committee has paid SnailWorks $57,300 for “list rental” over two years. The Tribune was careful to say that doesn’t connect the committee to these mailers, and SnailWorks didn’t respond. Neither should you assume it. But it’s worth watching.

Editorial: Think about who gains. A real transgender advocacy group gets threats. Parents get scared. And a scared voter, two weeks before the election, is a voter who shows up. SMU political scientist Cal Jillson said, “I can only imagine that it was sent out by conservative groups to fire up their conservative base.” I don’t know who sent it. Neither does anyone else, yet. That’s the point of a Wyoming LLC.

How Did They Get Your Address?

This is the part that should bother every Texan, whatever your politics.

Your name and address are public. Under Texas law, anyone can request the list of registered voters from a county registrar. Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and the addresses of certain protected people are kept confidential. Your name and home address are not. Using the list to sell commercial products is a crime in Texas. Using it for politics is legal.

Your phone number came from somewhere else. Texas registrars aren’t allowed to record the phone number you put on your voter application. So how did the texts find you? According to the San Antonio Report, both parties keep a voter file built from public registration records, your voting history, and the primary you picked. Then data vendors add the rest: phone numbers, email addresses, income range, home value, and ethnicity. Your cell number is one of the most valuable things in that file, because it can be used again and again.

Someone guessed there’s a kid in your house. A voter list doesn’t say whether you have children. A mailer addressed to “the student” means someone was using a list that does, which points to commercial consumer data bought from brokers and matched to your voter record.

And nobody has to tell you who paid. Anna Massoglia, a campaign finance expert at MuckRock, told NBC DFW that the mailers fall into a legal gray area because they don’t mention a candidate. Wyoming and Delaware are popular with shell companies and dark money groups precisely because they don’t make you disclose much. And the Federal Election Commission, the agency that would hear a complaint, currently lacks a quorum.

So a group with no name behind it can buy your address, your phone number, and a guess about your children, send your kids a mailer timed to the election, and face no one. That’s not a loophole. That’s the system.

Both Parties Sell Fear

The mailer is the ugliest example this week, but the same strategy runs from the top of the Texas ballot down. Here’s what each side says, and what the record actually shows.

The governor’s race. Gov. Greg Abbott is in the closest race of his three terms; the Texas Tribune counts five public polls showing him trailing Democrat Gina Hinojosa, while Marist’s October poll has him up four. Abbott has spent nearly $100 million on ads, outspending her more than six-to-one, according to the Tribune, citing AdImpact.

Abbott’s claim: “Gender Bender Gina” wants to turn schools into “a gender transition camp.”
In September, Abbott posted a screenshot of a Hinojosa campaign video in which the American flag had been altered into a transgender pride flag, captioned: “Gina wants to turn your local public school into a gender transition camp.” The original video was about a second grader whose school was closing.
The facts: Texas has banned gender-transition medical treatment for minors since 2023, under a law Abbott signed. Hinojosa voted against that law. I found no reporting that she has proposed any program for schools to transition students. Abbott’s campaign says she supports schools socially transitioning children without parents’ knowledge, but no reporting I found has verified that.

Abbott’s claim: Hinojosa voted “more than 40 times for higher property taxes.”
His campaign’s $12 million ad buy is built on this, and it calls her “Tax Hiker Hinojosa.”
The facts: Abbott’s campaign lists the 40 votes by bill number. The biggest batch, 11 votes, came on 2019’s Senate Bill 2, the law that cut the cap on how much cities and counties can raise property tax revenue without voter approval from 8% to 3.5% a year. The Legislature doesn’t set city, county, or school tax rates; local governments do. By the Abbott campaign’s own description, the votes “gave local officials more room to raise taxes.” That makes them votes against limits on local tax increases, not votes to raise a tax.

Hinojosa’s response: “I have never, not once, voted to increase property taxes, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.”
The facts: That’s technically accurate, since none of the votes raised a tax rate. It skips the fact that she opposed limits on how fast local taxes can grow.

Abbott’s claim: Hinojosa voted against banning a state income tax.
The facts: That’s true. In 2019, she voted against HJR 38, the constitutional amendment that made it far harder to create a state income tax. Voters approved it 76% to 24%. When CBS News Texas asked her about the vote this month, she first said “Nope, not true,” then said she had voted against “a repeal of a constitutional ban on an income tax.” The record contradicts her first answer. But Texas already required voter approval for any income tax before 2019; HJR 38 raised the bar further. And Hinojosa says she opposes a state income tax. Abbott’s suggestion that she wants one isn’t supported by anything she has proposed.

Hinojosa’s claim: Texans are paying a “Greg Abbott Corruption Tax,” and Abbott sold out to Big Tech and data centers.
The facts: Texas property tax levies, the total collected by all local governments, grew from about $51 billion in 2015, Abbott’s first year in office, to about $89 billion in 2025, according to the state comptroller. That’s while the state spent billions on relief: voters raised the school homestead exemption from $40,000 to $100,000 in 2023 and to $140,000 in 2025, and levy growth nearly stopped in 2023. Governors don’t set local tax rates, but the trend happened on his watch. Regarding data centers, Abbott ordered state regulators in August to audit data center projects, including their tax incentives and water and power use, before any more could connect to the grid. Hinojosa called that “political theater.” Her campaign’s claim that top Abbott donors are profiting from the data center boom comes from her campaign, and I haven’t independently verified it.

The Senate race. The race between Ken Paxton and James Talarico has seen roughly half a billion dollars in spending.

Paxton’s claim: Talarico holds radical views on faith and gender.
In September, Paxton released an ad using an AI-generated Talarico reading from a “King James Talarico” Bible, built around his past comments on God and gender.
The facts: The ad puts words in an AI version of Talarico’s mouth. Asked whether it reflected his actual statements, Talarico said, “Not all of those statements,” meaning some were his. The voice and image weren’t.

Talarico’s claim: “Ken Paxton is the most corrupt politician in Texas.”
The facts: The Republican-led Texas House impeached Paxton in 2023 on charges including bribery and abuse of office; the Texas Senate acquitted him on all counts. Separately, his nearly decade-old felony securities fraud case ended in 2024 with a pretrial agreement: he paid about $271,000 in restitution, did 100 hours of community service, and, with no admission of guilt, the charges were dismissed. Whether that makes him “the most corrupt” is a matter of opinion. The record behind it is real.

Run down the list. Most of these attacks contain a grain of truth, stretched until it’s scary. One side says the other is coming for your children. The other side says the other is a crook. And the facts, which are messier and less frightening, rarely make it into the ads.

Editorial: I call it fear porn: content designed to make you angry and scared enough to stop thinking. Notice what’s missing from almost all of it. Not one of these attacks tells you how anyone will lower your property taxes, your electric bill, your insurance premium, or the price of gas. Fear doesn’t have to explain anything. It just has to make sure you hate the other team enough to vote for yours.

The Property Tax Shell Game

Every Texas politician promises property tax relief. Here’s how the system lets them promise it forever without fixing it.

The state says it isn’t responsible. The Texas comptroller’s own website says it plainly: “The Texas Legislature does not set the amount of your local taxes.” Texas has no state property tax, so every bill you get is technically local.

But the state writes every rule. State law requires your county appraisal district to value your home at full market value every January, and lets a homestead’s taxable value climb up to 10% a year. State law allows cities and counties to increase property tax revenue by up to 3.5% per year without asking voters.

And the state saves money when your appraisal goes up. Under the state’s school funding formula, when property values rise, school districts collect more locally, and the state cuts its own share to match. In the words of Texas Policy Research, “Because local revenue increases when property values rise, the state reduces its share of funding accordingly.” Your appraisal goes up, your bill goes up, and the state’s school budget goes down. No legislator ever has to vote for a tax increase.

The relief only reaches part of your bill. Voters raised the homestead exemption to $100,000 in 2023 and $140,000 in 2025. It’s real relief: 39% of Texas homesteads now owe no school property tax at all. But the exemption applies only to school taxes. Your city, county, hospital district, and other local taxes don’t get it. And the relief isn’t permanent; each Legislature has to find the money to keep paying for it.

The result: Total property taxes collected in Texas rose from about $51 billion in 2015 to about $89 billion in 2025.

Editorial: That’s the shell game. The Legislature writes the appraisal rules, writes the school formula that benefits from rising values, and writes the limits on local increases. Then it points at your city council and says it doesn’t set your taxes. Republicans have controlled every piece of that machine for more than twenty years. When their own party’s delegates are still demanding an end to property taxes in 2026, the problem isn’t that nobody in Austin can fix it. It’s that the system works fine for the people running it.

Your Ballot Has More Than Two Names on It

Here’s the thing both parties would rather you didn’t notice: you have other choices this year.

For governor:

Pat Dixon, Libertarian, on the ballot. A former Lago Vista city council member, Dixon wants to cut programs that subsidize corporate growth, calls data centers an example of unsustainable growth that strains water and energy, and supports a “digital bill of rights” to limit government use of license plate cameras. He says he wants less personal attacking and more cooperation.
Jenn Mack, independent, certified write-in. A self-described “100 percent constitutionalist” and seventh-generation Texan, Mack Raphoon wants to phase out homestead property taxes, end taxpayer-funded lobbying, redirect data center tax breaks to farmers and ranchers, and tighten border security. She has built a following on X and is endorsed by the Constitution Party of Texas. Her name won’t be printed on the ballot; she’s certified by the Secretary of State as “Jenn Mack,” so a write-in for her will be counted.
Three other certified write-in candidates are also running for governor.

For U.S. Senate:

Ted Brown, Libertarian, on the ballot. He drew about 267,000 votes in his 2024 Senate run and calls his campaign an alternative to a “corrupt two-party system.”
Four certified write-in candidates: Avery Ayers, Bradford “Brad” Hall, Zul Mohamed, and Jade Simmons.

The Fixes Republicans Keep Promising

Republicans have held the governor’s office, the Texas House and the Texas Senate together since 2003. That’s more than twenty years of total control. So it’s fair to ask: what have Republican voters been asking for that they still don’t have?

The Republican Party of Texas answered that itself in June, when its convention delegates picked their top priorities for the 2027 session. Among them:

Eliminate all property taxes. Total property taxes collected in Texas grew from about $51 billion in 2015 to about $89 billion in 2025, according to state comptroller data, despite rounds of relief.
Ban taxpayer-funded lobbying, meaning cities, counties, and school districts using public money to hire lobbyists in Austin. The party has listed it as a top priority since at least 2020, and nearly 95% of Republican primary voters backed it on the 2020 ballot. The Texas Senate has passed versions of it. It died in the Republican-controlled Texas House in 2019, 2021, 2023, and 2025. Senate Democrats voted against it as a bloc in 2025. And the House speaker who presided over its latest death, Dustin Burrows, won the job in 2025 with 49 Democratic votes and 36 Republican votes, over the candidate the Republican caucus had picked.
Secure the grid, water, and energy, including oversight of data centers.
Border enforcement.
Protect Texas kids, including enforcing the ban on gender-transition procedures for minors.

Now compare that list with the platform of a candidate Republican voters keep being told is a “spoiler.”

Jenn Mack’s platform reads like that priority list. She would phase out homestead property taxes within three to five years, end taxpayer-funded lobbying, redirect data center tax breaks to farmers and ranchers, push small-scale nuclear power for the grid, tighten border security, and oppose gender-related medical procedures for minors. Nearly every item the party’s own delegates say still needs fixing is on her platform.

Editorial: Here’s what that tells me. For more than twenty years, Republican voters have sent Republican majorities to Austin with the same set of demands, and some of the biggest items are still on it. The taxpayer-funded lobbying ban didn’t die at the hands of Democrats. It died in a House Republicans control, four sessions running, under a speaker Democrats helped elect. Meanwhile, the candidate actually running on those demands is being called a spoiler. If a party keeps promising your priorities and keeps not delivering them, the spoiler isn’t the candidate who would. It’s the party that won’t.

Disclosure: I’ve endorsed Jenn Mack for governor, and I’ll be voting Libertarian in the other races on my ballot. I’m telling you so you can weigh what I’ve written with that in mind. My point isn’t that you should vote the way I do. It’s that you should know every name on your ballot before you decide.

You’ll hear it from both parties in the next two weeks: a vote for any of them is “wasted,” a “spoiler,” a vote for the other guy. Mack has an answer for that: “I’m an effect of the vote splitting, not the cause of it.”

Editorial: I’ve told you who I’m voting for. I’m not asking you to do the same. I’m asking you to stop letting fear make the decision for you. A vote doesn’t belong to either party. Nobody “steals” a vote that was never theirs. If a party is losing voters to someone else, the problem isn’t the voter. It’s the party.

We’ve spent decades being split into two teams, red and blue, told every election that this one is the most important of our lives, and that the other side will destroy everything if they win. And after all those elections, what’s changed? Prices keep climbing. Insurance keeps climbing. The same donors fund both sides, and the same problems never get fixed.

That’s not an accident. A divided public is a distracted public. As long as you’re afraid of the other team, you’ll never ask why your own team keeps delivering the same results. The only way anything changes is if voters start using their heads instead of their fear: read the platforms, look at every name on the ballot, and decide for yourself who actually represents you. That might be a Republican. It might be a Democrat. It might be someone neither party wants you to know exists.

Call to Action

Read your whole ballot before you vote. Look up every candidate, including Libertarians and certified write-ins. The Secretary of State lists certified write-ins, and your county elections office has your sample ballot.
Don’t let the mailbox vote for you. If a mailer or text makes you angry or afraid, ask who sent it and who gains. If you can’t find out, that’s your answer.
Report it. If you got one of these mailers or texts, save it. The postal service and the Texas Attorney General’s office accept complaints.
Cut off the texts. Reply “STOP” to opt out of each sender. Know that your number stays in the voter file other groups can buy.
Ask your legislators one question. Why can anyone with a Wyoming LLC buy your voter record, match it to your kids, and never disclose who they are? Texas can require disclosure on mass political mail, whether or not it names a candidate.
Read the background. Meet the Uniparty covers how both parties fight in public and protect each other in private.

Fear is cheap, and it works. A full-color mailer costs pennies. A text costs about a cent. Your anger costs them nothing. The only thing that beats it is a voter who stops, thinks, and looks past the two names they were told were the only options.

V64OTD // IF THEY HAVE TO SCARE YOU, ASK WHY.

Sources

Texas Tribune, “Texas trans rights group blames backlash on false mailers,” Oct. 20, 2026 — https://www.texastribune.org/2026/10/20/texas-transgender-pamphlets-tent-student-union/
CBS News Texas, “Who is behind the transgender mailers flooding Texas mailboxes?,” Oct. 2026 — https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/transgender-mailers-flood-texas-2026-midterms/
NBC DFW, “Mystery transgender mailers raise questions in Texas,” Oct. 20, 2026 — https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/politics/lone-star-politics/mystery-mailers-targeting-texas-voters-raise-questions-during-early-voting/4093567/
The Daily Signal, “LGBTQ Student Guide Mailers Sent to Texas Families Raise Questions,” Oct. 19, 2026 — https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/10/19/texas-families-lgbt-student-resource-guide-mailers/
Texas Secretary of State, “Public Information and Voter Privacy,” 2025 Election Law Seminar — https://www.sos.texas.gov/elections/forms/seminar/2025/37th-annual-election-law-seminar-for-cities-schools-and-other-political-subdivisions/public-info-and-voter-privacy.pdf
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