Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales and his Republican challenger, Marc LaHood, have each spent months presenting diametrically different versions of how crimes are currently being prosecuted.
In the final days of the campaign, those fights are now playing out in sharply negative ads that have drawn challenges from both candidates to the TV stations and social media platforms running them.
In emails shared with the San Antonio Report, the campaigns have fleshed out details behind their claims to the TV stations and social media companies running their ads.
So far detailed rebuttals from both campaigns have had little impact on what’s being run, thanks to rules governing political advertising. TV stations are bound by strict censorship policies that force them to run ads paid for by political candidates even if they makes claims that are false or defamatory.
“A TV station could get taken to court if they reject a candidate’s ad without just cause,” LaHood’s campaign consultant Craig Murphy, wrote in an email. “It is very hard to get a candidate’s ad pulled.”
This week LaHood began running a TV ad attacking Gonzales for allegedly refusing to prosecute low-level crimes, along with crimes such as possession of heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl. The ad is backed by a $350,000 media buy across local television stations WOAI, KABB, KENS and KSAT, according to the LaHood campaign.
Gonzales’ campaign has written the TV stations asking them to cease running the ads on the grounds that they inaccurately represent his office’s work prosecuting crimes like theft and possession of hard drugs.
“I think they’re very deceptive,” Gonzales said in an interview. “… I’ve already complained about them.”
To make that case to the TV stations, his campaign submitted a list of successful convictions his office has made for various nonviolent offenses between January 2019 and August 2022. It also provided several cases in which LaHood defended a client facing charges for possession of methamphetamine, heroin and other drugs.
“[LaHood] has said that we don’t prosecute property crimes. We’ve prosecuted over 10,000 property crimes since I’ve been in office,” Gonzales said in an interview.
“He also said that we don’t prosecute drug offenses and that’s not true,” said Gonzales. “We have prosecuted over 8,000 drug offenses, and the reason that he knows that is because he’s been the lawyer on some of those cases.”
The LaHood campaign defended the ad’s claims to the TV stations, saying Gonzales’ former cite-and-release policy and his office’s midterm report outline plans to “decline to prosecute possession” of Penalty Group 1 controlled substances in amounts less than .25 grams. Penalty Group 1 drugs include methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, oxycodone, opium, methadone, ketamine, hydrocodone and various forms of fentanyl, according to state law.
As of Thursday afternoon, one station, WOAI, had responded to Gonzales’ campaign.
“We have been advised by legal that because the spot is a candidate ‘use,’ the station has no right to censor and it needs to run as-is, per federal law,” wrote Paul Schoen-Kiewert, a regional sales manager for Sinclair Broadcast Group, in an email that was shared with the San Antonio Report.
Ads run by outside groups are more easily challenged because the stations can be held liable for their claims.
This week a political action committee supporting Gonzales also launched an attack ad saying LaHood “celebrated taking away a women’s right to choose” whether to have an abortion. LaHood’s campaign is challenging the ad and asked for it to be removed from Facebook, saying the Gonzales campaign has no proof of the allegation.
“I’m against abortion. Was I sad about [Roe v. Wade] being overturned? No I wasn’t,” LaHood said.
He added that he has “never used this position or this campaign for my personal beliefs or my personal agenda. If Joe wants to make [abortion] his crusade he needs to run for [the state Legislature].”
As of Thursday afternoon, the ad was still running on Facebook.
The ad ran briefly on KENS-TV, according to the LaHood campaign’s media trackers, as part of the pro-Gonzales Texas Justice & Public Safety PAC’s $350,000 TV buy. It was later swapped out with an ad promoting Gonzales’ work fighting violent crime, reducing prosecutions for small amounts of marijuana and his plans not to prosecute women seeking an abortion.
The Texas Justice & Public Safety PAC is funded primarily by George Soros, a billionaire businessman known for supporting liberal causes including criminal justice reform. It spent roughly $1 million to help Gonzales in his 2018 race, as well as funding the campaigns of progressive district attorneys in Dallas and Travis counties. The PAC’s president, Whitney Tymas, did not respond to an email request for comment.
Gonzales’s campaign manager, Laura Barberena, said she was aware of the ads being run by the PAC, and that the Gonzales campaign had provided footage for its ad.
