Democrats Bought A Billboard In This Republican Texas County. Then Something Funny Happened.

For the past three election cycles, Democrats in Kendall County, Texas, have put up billboards encouraging people to vote Democratic.

The billboard is a signal that while the county may be overwhelmingly Republican, it’s not entirely Republican.

“Kendall County is a heavily red county, and we like to put up billboards because it just basically lets everybody know that, yes, there are Democrats here,” Laura Bray, chair of the Kendall County Democratic Party, said in an interview.

Kendall County will surely go for Trump next month, but the area has been trending bluer, ever so slightly. Trump won 75% of the Kendall County vote in 2020, down from his 77% share in 2016 and Mitt Romney’s 81% in 2012.

Something different happened after the Democrats put up their advertisement on Interstate 10 in September. Within a few weeks, a local business put up a billboard just beneath that said “JUST KIDDING.”

It turned out the Democrats had rented their ad space right above a gun shop. Clint Voigt, owner of CGC Cerakote, a company that specializes in applying ceramic coatings to firearms, considers Democrats’ gun control agenda a threat to his business. As soon as the Democrats’ sign went up, he asked the local gun-owning community for help coming up with a response. A video showing the before-and-after went viral on social media.

“We’ve had a lot of people that have been very supportive and donated, and it actually didn’t end up costing us any money,” Voigt said.

Bray thought the second sign was “pretty clever” and made a mental note to reserve both the top and bottom billboard spaces in the next election cycle. She and her fellow Democrats wondered if they should respond. Ultimately, they decided to take down their sign — and replace it with a new one.

Bray called the new sign, with its image of Donald Trump supporters rioting at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a victory. “We don’t get many victories here as Democrats, and just seeing that and the fact that Republicans are having to pay attention to us and having to spend money here, we’ve done our job,” she said.

Voigt said he thinks his “JUST KIDDING” sign still works. He said the image of the Capitol riot is hard for drivers to see and doesn’t spoil his sign’s message.

“You can’t see it from the highway, and it looks like a big Trump rally. So it looks like my sign is still fitting,” Voigt said.

Kendall County will surely go for Trump next month, but the area has been trending bluer, ever so slightly. Trump won 75% of the Kendall County vote in 2020, down from his 77% share in 2016 and Mitt Romney’s 81% in 2012.