‘It’s HIGH Time for Change in Texas’ Says Sally Duval, Democratic Candidate for HD 73

Austin Democrat Sally Duval estimated she needs $100,000 to wage political war against her better-known opponent, incumbent Republican Carrie Isaac, in the race to represent Canyon Lake voters in Texas House District 73.

With the Nov. 5 election looming, she wanted to attract the attention of potential donors who could help pay for postcards and provide other resources to raise awareness about who she is and what she stands for.

So Duval hired a video production company, lit a joint, and sat down in a lawn chair in her mother’s backyard to talk to voters about reasons to legalize marijuana and protect the sale of hemp products in Texas.

The trademark cough and laugh of a marijuana smoker exhaling after their first hit on a bong were not edited out at the end of the video.

“You might already know what’s in this,” she says in the video, lighting and holding up a joint, “but do you know who has no idea and no way to test it? Law enforcement. They arrest people every day for marijuana possession but they don’t have the funding to test if it’s illegal marijuana or a federally legal hemp product. Our laws are confusing and unclear. While marijuana remains illegal for most Texans, hemp products, they can get you high, like Delta 8, Delta 9 and THCA, are being sold at more than 7,000 retailers statewide. Our lieutenant governor (Republican Dan Patrick) wants to regulate and ban these products. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that you can’t do both of these things. Fortunately, we don’t have to choose between safety and legalization. We can and should have both. But it’s going to take leaders who know enough and care enough to do what’s right. My opponent doesn’t, which is a real shame. Not only will legalization and regulation help support our small farmers and medically complex Texans, but the tax revenue could be used to help fund education, public health and mental-health services. So here’s the bottom line: Texans should have the freedom to consume these products if they want to…I’m Sally Duvall and I believe it’s high time for change in Texas.”

Duval said the video, funded by her credit card and researched and scripted with the help of consultant Cat Kaminsky, cost around $6,000 to produce.

She got the idea from Kaminsky, who recalled a January 2022 video by progressive Democrat Gary Chambers Jr., an American civil rights activist who ran unsuccessfully in Louisiana for the U.S. Senate.

He lit a joint and spoke to a camera for 37 seconds because that’s the amount of time that, on average, an American is arrested for the possession of marijuana.

“In just 37 seconds, Democrat Gary Chambers lit up Louisiana’s race for the U.S. Senate,” National Public Radio reported.

Since Duval’s new video was released on social media Monday, it’s gone viral, too, racking up 850,000 views on Twitter and 30,000 on Instagram as of mid-Tuesday, according to 30-year-old Trevor Zajac, who produced the one-minute, 30-second clip for Buda Treehouse Studio.

He expects views to top one million by the end of the week. By contrast, a YouTube video Duval posted three weeks ago introducing herself to voters had only 25 views.

“It’s kind of fun to watch these things explode,” Zajac said, adding that when he heard Duval wanted to shoot a video focusing on legalizing weed, he thought, “Oh hell yeah, that is so punk rock, I am so down.”

Within hours of its release, Republican-leaning news sites like Newsmax, The Hill and Drudge Report hyperlinked to the video. An article about it appeared in the UK tabloid The Daily Mail with the headline “Texas Democrat candidate Sally Duval smokes a joint and hits a bong in pot-filled campaign ad.”

Publicity continues to grow as more media outlets pay attention, attracting the kind of “earned media” most political consultants can only dream of.

Not so down with the concept, though, are local Democrats. Comal County Party Chair Marilyn Aden declined to comment, along with several other Democrats and a veterans advocacy group contacted for this story.

Before the video was released, Democratic Women of Comal County sent Duval a $1,750 campaign contribution.

Legalizing marijuana isn’t even on the Democratic party’s official state platform.

Lynn Silver, a liberal, Democratic columnist for the New Braunfels Herald-Zeitung, was willing to weigh in on what some view as a political stunt. She said she supports the legalization of marijuana because of the millions of dollars in tax revenue it would generate to pay for things like education.

“We need smart leaders who are educated on the benefits of legalization of marijuana, both monetary and healthwise,” she said.

Area resident Margaret Green, a former owner of a CBD business who has been involved in the hemp industry since 2021, said she would love to elect a pro-cannabis politician who might actually make things happen.

“(Attorney General) Ken Paxton and Dan Patrick are blocking every attempt made to pass new laws in favor of cannabis reform,” she said.

(Click here to learn more in a Texas Tribune article about Texas leaders zeroing in on the exploding hemp market.)

Duval said she’s unperturbed by Democrats’ overall lack of reaction. She didn’t consult with party officials anyway before signing on with Buda Treehouse Studios, which also works with Hays County politicians like County Judge Ruben Becerra, a Democrat.

“I’m pretty much a lone wolf,” she said. “I’m an old lady right now and I just don’t care. I’ve got my issues and I want to fund public schools. I want to stop private school vouchers and I want to legalize marijuana, and I want to fight climate change, reduce our emissions and do everything I can to save our environment.”

She describes herself as a true conservative who is focused on getting the Texas legislature out of the hair of voters who believe in public education and oppose Gov. Greg Abbott’s voucher system for private schools.

She wants constituents to have more say so over the unfettered, rapid growth that is sucking up the Texas Hill Country’s dwindling water supplies and destroying the quality of life for many.

Also listed as priorities on sallyfortexas.com are restoring reproductive rights, extending Medicaid coverage, raising the minimum wage, making college affordable, reducing gun violence and “treating everyone with dignity.”

Duval opposes the Vulcan Quarry project, which was greenlit earlier this year by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). The quarry will turn an old ranch in central Comal County into a 1,500-acre open-pit limestone quarry.

“One man’s property rights get to override everybody else’s property rights,” she said. “There’s something wrong with that. There should be a way for a local government who is accountable to the people to say ‘no, we’re not going to put a quarry in the middle of the Edwards Aquifer recharge zone.’ They moved out there for peace and quiet in their retirement and now they’re being told that they’re going to have an ugly, potentially dangerous thing for a neighbor whether they like it or not. It just rubs me the wrong way. I would love to find a way to allow local governments to have more control over what happens in their area.”

The legislature’s underfunding of Texas schools is another “conservative” issue Duval wants to tackle.

“Texas is an extremely wealthy state,” she said. “Every year we hear about surplus. Why are we below the median, why are we below average anything, especially schools? It’s not just right…the disrespect being shown to our public school employees is beyond anything I would ever have imagined possible, and I don’t see why people are putting up with it. And I don’t intend on putting up with it. It’s just wrong. Our kids are the future. They deserve the best education they can get.”

As a college student, Duval once thought, “if I could ever do anything about this and have marked on my tombstone that I helped legalize marijuana, then that would be really cool.”

Legalizing marijuana might pale in comparison to bigger issues like reproductive rights, but smoking weed and eating gummies are also about pleasure.

“Those of us who like getting high should have the same rights and responsibilities as people who like getting drunk,” she said.

Duval was born in Kingsville and raised in Clear Lake City near NASA. She graduated from the University of Texas with a bachelor’s degree in finance in 1986.

Over the course of her lengthy career, she raised two children and worked in a variety of jobs in banking, finance, and accounting.

Early on, she worked for the state, auditing small banks in “podunk” towns, eating in greasy spoon diners, staying in local hotels, and learning about the small businesses that drove local economies.

“I learned how to analyze financial statements quite well,” Duval said. She and her first husband decided to move to San Francisco, then a big financial center.

After three years of working in the treasury department of a Fortune 500 company, learning about institutional investing and reporting on the performance of employee benefit plans worth millions of dollars, she decided to come back to Austin and raise a family.

She had two children and worked for an Austin homebuilder that was a subsidiary of the largest homebuilder in the world.

“It was a good, steady job but nothing terribly stimulating,” Duval said. She needed benefits and a steady income.

Things got interesting, though, after she amicably divorced her husband and remarried a Frenchman in 2006, “a very brilliant mathematician who got into computer science because mathematics didn’t pay anything.”

While in the process of getting the paperwork needed to work in the United States, he accepted a job offer in information technology in Toulouse, France.

The family decamped to Europe, living in France and the United Kingdom for the next 17 years. Duval learned to speak French fluently. She returned to Austin on Jan. 6, 2021 after her father contracted COVID-19 and died. Her mother needed someone to care for her, take care of the house and run the family’s oil business.

Duval moved in.

Her daughter stayed in London.

“I couldn’t be more proud and happy for her,” Duval said. “But she will never come back to Texas to inherit this beautiful piece of land, not as long as it is run by people who think they know how to be doctors.”

The realization that no other Democrat was going to step up and challenge Isaac for the HD 73 seat, and the example set by her neighbor Sarah Brandon, who made an unsuccessful bid for Judge 483rd District Court, inspired her to step up.

It bothered her that Isaac might run unopposed, giving Comal and Hays county voters no choice in who represents their best interests in Austin.

“I was checking down to the last minute,” she said. “Minding my own business is one of my favorite things to do.”

It helped that she wasn’t especially happy with the way Republicans are consolidating their power base in the state capitol, to the detriment of issues that are important to her.

“Republicans are pulling power inwards, centralizing it in a way not dissimilar to communists, Duval said. “What do communists do? They seize control for themselves in a central authority.”

But is she electable?

Comal County is a notoriously red county on the purple-and-blue I-35 corridor between Austin and San Antonio. Voters here are traditionally more aligned with Isaac’s Republican values.

At the top of  Isaac’s Facebook page is an image of her standing next to Rep. Sen. Ted Cruz along with endorsements from Texas Values Action, Texas Right to Life, the Alliance for Life, Gun Owners of America, Texas Homeschool Coalition, Young Conservatives of Texas, and the Texas Department of Public Safety Official Association Inc.

Isaac’s platform focuses on fighting President Joe Biden’s “socialist” agenda, keeping the border and communities safe, keeping property taxes low, upholding American values, protecting unborn life, stopping “critical race theory and liberal indoctrination in schools,” and supporting teachers and students to ensure they have the resources they need to be successful.

Like Duval, Isaac wants to protect the area’s natural beauty and resources.

The wildcard in this election cycle is demographics. Comal County is one of the fastest-growing areas in the country. There are now 142,176 registered voters in the county. There were 130,109 registered voters in Comal County in 2022 and 115,876 in 2020.

League of Women Voters of the Comal Area President Jerrie Champlin said the League is encountering more voters at its registration-and-information tables who have just moved to Texas and aren’t sure how to navigate the state’s sometimes confusing voter-registration system.

Nobody can be sure how newcomers might vote.

HD 73 itself has changed. Republican lawmakers redistricted the area in October 2021 to include Comal and the western half of Hays County.

Democrat Stephanie Phillips ran for the older version of HD 73 twice — and lost. She now runs Blue Horizon Texas, which recently endorsed Duval.

The group supports Democrats who are willing to run for office in red and rural Texas districts, providing training, webinars, and discussion groups and also endorsing candidates it believes can make a difference in their districts.

“One thing that the Texas Republican Party does really well is that it funds and supports grassroots candidates,” she said. “Democrats at the state, local and national level tend not to support people who they don’t think will win. Historically, we have abandoned the rural and exurban parts of the state, and then it’s a self-fulfilling cycle. It makes it incredibly hard to break through.”

Duval’s estimated campaign budget seems reasonable to her. It’s not unusual for a campaign race for a state house seat to cost as much as $1 million.

“I think this is a very unique cycle,” said Phillips, who praised Duval’s video as wonderful but declined to make any predictions.

“It’s a tough district, and what I think that what she’s doing that is smart is that candidates tend to get too conservative in Republican districts and run too much towards the middle. I think it’s a place where you can be bold and you can be creative and you can actually say things that need to be said.

“And that’s what I love about her, the way she’s using that platform.”

(Editor’s note: Cat Kaminsky served as a consultant to Shelly Duval, not as campaign manager as previously reported.)