Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa is out with a new ad recruiting an unlikely ally to her cause: a woman who attended the "Stop the Steal" rally on January 6 that immediately preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
"Greg Abbott is messing with Texas," said the woman, self-described MAGA conservative Lynn Davenport. "I was at the January 6th rally. I'm a staunch conservative, but I cannot support Governor Greg Abbott. Greg Abbott is bought and paid for by the billionaires and the corporations. Those are his donors, that's who he listens to. No more."
The ad stunned Jonathan Last and Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who tried to make some sense of it on their latest podcast.
"I don't know who Lynn is," said Jonathan Last. "I don't know if she's a real human being or not — maybe she's AI, maybe she's a real person who was at January 6th and is just worried about Ken Paxton and corruption. Pretty interesting ad, though, from Gina."
Longwell, a Republican pollster who has opposed Trump for years, expressed some discomfort with the whole enterprise.
"I have this problem, everyone's yelling at me because I criticized Mamdani on doing the — what do they call it — the press conference with Trump afterward, which he didn't need to do but decided to do," said Longwell. "This is sort of the same thing, where it ends up validating — is being at January 6th now the way we're going to validate somebody's level of commitment to Trump and conservatism?"
Last, though, had a more open take on the subject.
"I think it's going to get a ton of earned media," he said. The key takeaway voters will hear, he said, is "Some hardcore MAGA types don't like Greg Abbott ... Gina Hinojosa is saying Greg Abbott's been here so long, he's the establishment, he's not looking out for you. And this ad is about that — that idea — and that's probably going to play again with some horseshoe voters, and she's in Texas, and she's looking for horseshoe voters."