A Republican woman running for Texas Railroad Commissioner received the endorsement of the San Antonio Express-News editorial board. The editorial board has rescinded its endorsement after she published a controversial Tik Tok video in which she sits seminude atop a pump jack. File this story under Things I Have Never Seen Before in Texas Politics.

Sarah Stogner is an oil and gas attorney with 15 years of experience. She is challenging the incumbent, Wayne Christian in the Republican primary. He was elected in November 2016 and elected commission chairman by his two colleagues, both Republicans. Christian’s background is in financial planning. For reference, the Railroad Commission of Texas stopped regulating railroads in 2005. The name of the agency has not changed but today it regulates the oil and gas industry, gas utilities, pipeline safety, safety in the liquefied petroleum gas industry, and surface coal and uranium mining. A background in the industry seems like a no-brainer qualification.

Ms. Stogner divides her time between a home in Houston and a ranch in Ward County, Texas. She posted the Tik Tok as a campaign ad on Super Bowl Sunday, February 13. The pump jack is on her ranch property. The video wasn’t filmed for her campaign, though, it was filmed “on a lark” in November 2021 during shooting of a documentary about the oil and gas industry.

They said I needed money. 🤣 I have other assets. pic.twitter.com/OI9z9EDRRG

— Sarah Stogner (@Sarah4RRC) February 14, 2022

As you can see, she’s in panties and pasties. Is she being “slut-shamed” now? Is the newspaper pulling its endorsement out of response to misogyny in the oil industry? She thinks so.

“It feels very much like slut-shaming,” Stogner said. “We were just goofing off. We had the footage from last year and I said, ‘I’m going to make my own Super Bowl commercial.’ If I had gone off and shot machine guns and screamed about the border, they wouldn’t have had a problem with it.”

The longtime oil and gas lawyer said the incident is another example of preconceptions of how women are forced to fit into a male-dominated industry. “If me and a middle-aged dude walk on a location in field equipment, they’re going to assume he works there and I’m along for the ride,” Stogner said.

The San Antonio Express News’ editorial page editor Josh Brodesky contacted Sarah through Facebook before pulling the endorsement. He asked if she had been hacked. She said no, she posted the Tik Tok video. So, he told her of the board’s decision to rescind the endorsement, saying if they had seen it prior to the endorsement, it would not have been made.

“We were disappointed to see a disgraceful TikTok video posted Sunday from Sarah Stogner, whom we recently recommended in the Republican primary for railroad commissioner,” the paper’s editorial board wrote, later specifically noting that the video’s accompanying comment made it worse. “We rescind our recommendation.”

“This is an opportunity to reaffirm our principles and expectations,” the editorial board wrote. “We expect candidates for public office to model civil discourse and decorum worthy of the public’s trust. This was neither. Instead, it’s an indictment of these times that a candidate, even a marginal one, would appeal to potential voters in such way via social media…this was an embarrassing failure.”

Her response to that was one of surprise that he didn’t bother to hear her out. “Wow ok. I wish you would wait and hear what I have to say before making that decision,” Stogner said on Facebook in response. “We have radiation in our water. But me scantily clad is where the line is drawn.” This wasn’t the first video of Ms. Stogner where she is not fully clothed. She questioned the newspaper’s vetting process because in June 2021 she posted a picture of herself facing away from the camera on Instagram and Twitter. She’s nude in the sand hills.

“They said they did their homework on me,” Stogner said. “Ask them if they saw my picture from last summer. It’s on Instagram. I’m naked, bare butt in the sand hills, raising awareness. It’s not sexual. But if female nudity isn’t for sexual use, I guess it’s a no-go.”

The San Antonio Express-News now endorses Dawayne Tipton in the Republican primary.

Stogner’s platform centers around the rights of Texas landowners and focuses on byproducts of the industry like pollutants left behind by well blowouts. She is self-funding her campaign. She sounds a little Erin Brockovich-ish. “Let’s talk about Radium 226, Radium 228. Let’s talk about people dying in the freeze,” Stogner said. “Where did we go wrong in society that we’ve sexualized women to the point we can’t talk about what matters?” She is a conservative lawyer who says she got into the race when an oil well blew out near her house.

She says the railroad commissioners let oil companies abandon their wells, mistreat landowners and damage groundwater. She represented landowners before the commission on Aug. 24, asking for help with a blown-out well spewing contaminated, radioactive water across the landscape.

“We have an active landowner who is trying to be involved, and we’ve been blocked by the railroad commissioner from having access to their internal people who are working with Chevron to determine the plugging procedures,” she testified. “The landowners are being left out.”

It must be a blow to Texas Democrats that a Republican candidate is speaking out about issues concerning land owners, since their assertation is that Republicans don’t care about clean water and air, right? Let’s be honest, her video was meant to create attention to her campaign. The Texas Railroad Commission race is not something that normally gets the attention of the public. This year, though, you can be sure that Democrats are putting a spotlight on the office in the aftermath of the Big Freeze in 2021. The Texas power grid failed and many of us were trying to not freeze to death. I wish that was an exaggeration but it is not. The Railroad Commission is the agency that works with the legislature on the issue.

Twitter friend Professor and Department Chair Jon Taylor of the Department of Political Science and Geography at the University of Texas at San Antonio, says we aren’t quite an idiocracy yet but this kind of stunt for attention is something not seen previously. A voter may question if she is to be taken seriously or not.

“As a political scientist, I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Jon Taylor, a professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

But the video is working as intended, Taylor says. More than 50,000 people watched the post in its first 48 hours on Twitter.

“There’s something to be said for the hucksterism,” Taylor added. “We’re not in an ‘idiocracy’ yet, but it sometimes makes you wonder when you see stuff like this.”

“You could make the argument that she’s not serious,” he continued. “If she’s not serious, she’s not to be taken seriously as a candidate who could hold one of the most important offices in Texas.”

She stands by a Lady Godiva analogy

“I won’t sit quietly while our current regulators take money in exchange for favors (ahem toxic waste permits),” she tweeted. “We are not protecting our groundwater. We must be stewards of all natural resources.”

She calls herself an ally of other Republican challengers of incumbents – Allen West, who is running for governor; Daniel Miller, who is running for lt. governor; and Rep. Louie Gohmert, who is running for attorney general. She will be defeated by Christian in the primary on March 1 but in the meantime it makes for interesting stories. Early voting is now underway in Texas. Texas has the first primary of the 2022 midterm cycle.