As Texas barrels toward another election season, voters are being given a revealing preview of what some of the state’s most powerful Republicans think the real threat is.
Not rising healthcare costs.
Not overcrowded classrooms or underpaid teachers.
Not housing affordability, property taxes, or grid reliability.
Not corporate price-gouging, inflation, or tariffs.
Not election integrity failures or aggressive gerrymandering.
Not even abortion, the issue Republicans have milked for decades.
Instead, Rep. Chip Roy and Sen. John Cornyn are spending campaign dollars warning Texans about Sharia Law.
What to Know…
Campaign priorities reveal disconnect – The focus on preventing Sharia Law highlights how some incumbents are avoiding real, measurable problems Texans face daily, like healthcare, education, and infrastructure.
Fear-based messaging replaces policy debate – Targeting an imaginary threat allows campaigns to energize voters emotionally without defending records or proposing solutions.
Voters are being asked to choose substance over symbolism – The election centers on whether Texans want leaders focused on governance or continued culture-war distractions.
Yes. Sharia Law. In Texas. In 2026.
This is not subtle messaging or coded language; it’s full-throated culture-war theater aimed at a threat that does not exist in any meaningful legal, political, or demographic sense. There is no movement to replace Texas law with Islamic religious law. No Sharia courts are vying for authority in Austin. There is no ballot initiative, judicial strategy, or legislative push anywhere near the Texas Capitol attempting this.
Which makes the ads revealing in a way their authors probably didn’t intend.
When incumbents with decades of power choose imaginary enemies over real problems, it’s usually because addressing the real ones would require explaining their own record.
Healthcare remains unaffordable.
Public schools are being hollowed out.
Teachers are leaving the profession.
The grid is still fragile.
Property taxes keep climbing.
Corporate consolidation keeps squeezing consumers.
And despite constant rhetoric, Republican-drawn maps have entrenched political power rather than voter representation.
Those issues are complicated. They involve budgets, tradeoffs, accountability, and, most dangerously, facts.
Sharia Law, on the other hand, is easy. It’s a cultural scarecrow. A moral panic button. A way to signal identity and loyalty without offering solutions, results, or even coherence. It plays on fear of the “other,” not on policy competence.
That’s what makes the messaging feel less like governing and more like nostalgia for an uglier political era, one where voters were mobilized not by shared goals, but by shared anxieties. Strip away the branding and the tactic isn’t new. The target just changes.
For politicians who have held power this long, running on phantom threats is an admission. It says: we don’t want this election to be about what we’ve done, or failed to do, while in charge.
Texas voters are being asked a simple question this cycle, whether the campaigns say it out loud or not, which is do they want leaders focused on solving the problems they actually live with, or leaders who’d rather fight shadows because shadows never ask for receipts?
If the best argument for re-election is stopping something that isn’t happening, that may be the clearest sign yet of just how out of touch these campaigns have become.