West Texas GOP candidate poses semi-nude, taking 'guerilla-style marketing' to the next level

Sarah Stogner was struggling last year to call attention to leaking oil wells near her home in West Texas when some friends suggested she try TikTok, the video sharing platform popular with teens and young adults. “I started doing a little digging and was like, wow, this is great,” the 37-year-old Republican lawyer said. “This is how I’m going to communicate to the masses about what’s happening out here, because people are visual.” Her footage of rusted wellheads and murky groundwater, often set against playful music and the occasional provocative dance, were popular enough to convince Stogner she could unseat the state’s top oil and gas regulator, and do so without the hundreds of thousands of dollars a statewide campaign typically takes. But what started as a lighthearted digital approach is turning away some supporters after Stogner posted a five-second clip last week of herself semi-nude atop a pump jack.

“They said I needed money,” she wrote in the post, with a laughing face emoji. “I have other assets.” Fellow Republicans criticized the move and the San Antonio Express News has since pulled Stogner’s lone endorsement, calling it “disgraceful.” “We expect candidates for public office to model civil discourse and decorum worthy of the public’s trust,” the paper’s editorial board wrote. “This was neither.” Stogner, however, has no regrets, insisting that while the video was a joke, her candidacy for Railroad Commission is not. “We have confirmed radium 226 and 228 in our groundwater and people are more concerned that I got up on a pump jack in pasties last weekend to call attention to it,” she told a group of Republican Women in Ector County this week, to light applause. “Y’all, I will use what I got. I’m not accepting money.” Stogner said the clip was shot in November by a documentary crew she had hired to chronicle the campaign. She hadn’t planned to release it, she said, but with early voting starting this week and a University of Houston poll showing her only a few points behind the frontrunner, incumbent Wayne Christian, the risk seemed worth it. Christian has far outraised his Republican opponents and has been bankrolled in the past by oil and gas interests.