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HOUSTON (AP) — Former Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner was picked Tuesday as the Democrats’ nominee to succeed the late U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who died last month after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Turner, 69, will appear on the November ballot after securing the most support from local Democratic precinct chairs during a party meeting in Houston. Jackson Lee had already won the Democratic nomination for what would have been a 16th term before her death on July 19, leaving party officials to select her replacement.

Turner left the mayor’s office in January after serving eight years, the most allowed by term limits. He was previously a longtime state lawmaker.

The House district in Houston is solidly Democratic. Turner will face Republican challenger Lana Centonze.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Bill Clinton were among those who paid tribute to Jackson Lee at her funeral this month. She was 74.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The long-unsolved 1986 killing of a young Southern California woman has been linked to a convicted serial killer who admitted the crime, authorities said Tuesday.

DNA from the killing of Cathy Small, 19, matched William Suff, who was sentenced to death after being convicted in 1995 of 12 murders that occurred in Riverside County from 1989 to 1991, said Los Angeles County sheriff’s Lt. Patricia Thomas.

Suff was known as the Riverside prostitute killer or the Lake Elsinore killer, Thomas told a news conference. He was also convicted in 1974 in the death of his 2-month-old daughter in Tarrant County, Texas, and despite being sentenced to 70 years in prison he was paroled to California in 1984.

Small’s body was found on a street in South Pasadena, a small Los Angeles suburb, at 7 a.m. on Feb. 22, 1986. Clad in a nightgown, Small was found to have been stabbed and strangled.

She was a Jane Doe until a resident of Lake Elsinore, about 70 miles (110 kilometers) southeast of South Pasadena, called detectives and said that after reading a news story about the killing he was concerned that it could a local prostitute who lived with him for several months.

The resident identified Small and told investigators that the night before she was found dead she had told him a man named Bill was picking her up and giving her $50 to drive with him to Los Angeles, Thomas said.

The case nonetheless remained unsolved for years.

In 2019, an LA county medical examiner’s investigator contacted homicide detectives after responding to the natural death of a 63-year-old man found on a couch in a South Pasadena house across the street from where Small’s body was left.

“The coroner’s investigator observed several disturbing items in the house, numerous photos of women who appeared to have been assaulted and held against their will, possibly by the decedent,” Thomas said.

In his bedroom there was a newspaper article about the identification of Small as the victim of the 1986 killing, she said.

Detectives went through the Small killing file and discovered that the evidence was never subjected to DNA testing. Subsequent testing matched Suff and another unknown man, but not the man found on the couch, who was not linked to any crimes, Thomas said.

In 2022, detectives interviewed Suff over two days at a Los Angeles County jail.

“He confessed and discussed in detail the murder of Cathy Small,” Thomas said. “He also discussed and admitted to some of the previous murders in Riverside County.”

Investigators are not expected to seek to try Suff in the Small killing because of his prior convictions and pending death sentence. There has been a moratorium on the death penalty in California since 2019.

Small had two small children and a younger sister, authorities said. Thomas read a letter from the sister, who was not able to travel to the news conference.

“My sister, Cathy Small, was not a statistic,” the letter said. “She was a protective big sister, a loving mother, and a good daughter. Kathy was funny, smart, and caring. She had a big heart and would do anything for anyone.”

TEXAS (AP) – Two Saturdays a month, Sorcha Costigan climbs into her Jeep and drives 100 miles from Sabine County into Louisiana, all the while worrying about another vehicle part malfunctioning and how much the gas is going to cost.

It’s important to her, though, to see her husband as much as possible. Jess Hampton is being held at Louisiana Workforce, a private prison in DeQuincy, Louisiana, even though he is charged with child abuse in East Texas.

Hampton adamantly claims he’s innocent, but he can’t afford the $250,000 bond to secure his release before his case is resolved. And the distance between where he’s locked up and where his criminal proceedings are playing out has made it difficult to connect with his lawyers. Even after a Child Protective Services investigation found that the abuse Hampton is accused of committing never occurred, he couldn’t get his bond reduced further.

His attorney at the time, based in Nacogdoches County, didn’t show up to the hearing.

“He never presented one scrap of evidence, nor did he ever respond to any of my requests for contact,” said Costigan, who has been advocating for Hampton during the nearly eleven months he has been incarcerated far from home.

Every day across Texas, counties as large as Harris and as small as Sabine struggle to properly house the people held in their jails. So they spend millions in tax dollars transporting inmates, many of whom have yet to stand trial and are legally considered innocent. Some are sent to neighboring counties; others are bused across state lines.

A combination of factors is worsening the situation. Solutions prove elusive. And people like Hampton and Costigan are bearing the consequences.

The number of Texas inmates who were housed outside of their county of arrest surged from 2,078 in June 2019 to 4,358 in June 2024, according to a Texas Tribune analysis. The number of counties relying on outsourcing has also risen. In June 2010, 31% of Texas county jails housed inmates elsewhere. In June 2024, 41% counties did so, according to data kept by the Texas Commission on Jail Standards.

“Counties are having to think outside the box,” said Ricky Armstrong, assistant director of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards. “We know there are some counties housing people out of state. It’s not something we recommend or encourage, but we see that as a necessary evil.”

Several factors are worsening the situation. The number of new jail cells in Texas isn’t keeping pace with the state’s explosive population growth. Several counties are still trying to dig themselves out of the caseload log jam the COVID-19 pandemic caused.

A 2021 state law limiting who can be released while awaiting trial is increasing the number of people in jails and lengthening the amount of time they stay there. So, too, is the overburdened mental health system in the state, which essentially forces jails to take on psychiatric care even though they are ill-equipped to do so.

And finding jailers is difficult — which exacerbates the problem because under state jail standards, fewer jailers means lock-ups have to lower the number of inmates they hold, even if there are cells available.

Meanwhile, violent crime rates did increase in recent years, but appear to have peaked in 2020 and have since gone down.

“It’s very difficult to know exactly what is driving incarceration rates, but typically it’s not crime rates,” said Jeff Asher, a crime analyst, who cautioned against drawing a direct connection between the amount of crime in a community and the size of its jail population. “It’s more about enforcement.”

Law enforcement officials say jail space must increase, though residents opposed to tax increases to fund expensive construction costs hamper those efforts.

Civil rights advocates and defense lawyers argue that the state should invest more heavily in mental health support and alternatives to incarceration. They also say the state should adjust its bail policies so decisions about who is freed until trial are not effectively based on a person’s wealth.

“We are addicted to carceral solutions,” said Krish Gundu, co-founder of the Texas Jail Project, which advocates for people in Texas county jails. “If we really cared about not having these people in jails, you’d look at why they are ending up in jail and solve the problem at the root.” But Texas’ Republican-controlled Legislature is unlikely to follow their advice. The state has a long history of relying heavily on incarceration to control crime and to maintain law and order. Texas locks up 751 per 100,000 of their residents, one of the higher rates in the United States, according to a recent report from the Prison Policy Initiative.

“Texas has been, and always will be a law and order state, and criminals must know that justice is awaiting them,” Gov. Greg Abbott ’s press secretary, Andrew Mahaleris, told The Texas Tribune in an email. “Gov. Abbott will continue to work with the legislature to end revolving door bail policies and keep dangerous criminals off our streets.”

Abbott’s office did not answer questions about how the state will respond to jail overcrowding. The governor appoints the nine members of TCJS, which conducts regular inspections of all county jails.

“Some of the ones that do have available beds struggle with staffing issues,” Brandon Wood, the agency’s executive director, said at a TCJS meeting this month. “We will continue to study the issue.”
Staffing challenges

On a Thursday morning in April, the processing center at Harris County Jail did not appear overcrowded. A cell block that could accommodate 70 people housed under 50, the infirmary was nearly empty, and everyone in intake had a place to sit. And yet about 2,000 of the county’s roughly 9,300 inmates were being housed in facilities as far away as Tutwiler, Mississippi and Olla, Louisiana.

This costs the county roughly $50 million per year and is in part due to a persistent staffing shortage. Harris County Jail is approved to hold up to 9,448 inmates — but only if they have enough guards to monitor them.

A staffing shortage is one of many reasons — along with failures to provide medication and extended stays in holding cells — that the jail has been out of compliance with state standards since September 2022. The state’s regulatory body mandates a minimum of one jailer per 48 inmates.

Staffing has always been a challenge, said Jason Spencer, the chief of staff for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. But the issue worsened with the 2020 uptick in violent crime.

“That creates more tension in the jail, and makes it a tougher place to work,” Spencer said.

He added that a higher proportion of people in the jail are accused of murder and are more difficult to manage. About one-third of detention officers quit each year in Harris County. But the number of people awaiting trial in Harris County has grown at the same time, stemming from a backlog first created by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an effort to increase jailer recruitment and retention, Harris County increased the starting pay for detention officers from under $19.99 an hour to $22.39 an hour. County officials also approved a $2,000 retention bonus.

Phillip Bosquez, who oversees the jail and is assistant chief at Harris County Sheriff’s Office, told state jail officials in May that retention was improving. But this month the jail still had a shortfall of 139 jailers, Bosquez told state jail officials.

Similar situations play out across the state.

“My big issue is that everybody is having this jailer issue,” said Dustin Fawcett, the Ector County judge who is that county’s chief executive. “And so in order to compensate for that jailer issue, everybody is increasing salaries for jailers, which means they are going to increase their cost of housing an inmate.”

Ector County, which sits in the petroleum-rich Permian Basin in West Texas, also increased jailers’ salaries last year. But that didn’t completely solve the staffing shortfall — the county is still short 52 jailers, Fawcett said — and officials have continued sending inmates to other counties for a fee ranging from $55 a day to $80 a day.

The state awarded $125 million in grants to rural sheriffs’ departments and prosecutors earlier this year as part of Senate Bill 22. But Fawcett said the funding isn’t enough.

“It’s a fraction of our budget, and yet we are constitutionally required to have these facilities,” Fawcett said. “There is little help from the state.”
Costs to counties

Trinity County Sheriff Woody Wallace can’t help but feel like his department is wasting taxpayer money.

Nearly $1 million — or roughly 10% — of the rural East Texas county’s budget has been sent to other jurisdictions that house inmates who can’t fit in the jail, which was built in the 1930s to accommodate up to seven inmates. Today, it can hold up to 16 inmates. And in June, Trinity sent 17 inmates to other lock-ups, costing the taxpayers up to $75 per inmate, per day.

Then there’s the cost to transport the inmates.

“We are driving as far as 3.5 hours away,” Wallace said. “I have a small jail staff, and we are having to scramble to find vehicles and people to take them.”

Most people in jail haven’t been convicted or sentenced, so they still have to return to their county of arrest for court hearings. In 2023, the county spent about $91,000 in inmate transportation costs, according to county records.

Sometimes figuring out where to house the overflow population is onerous, Wallace said, since those lock-ups also become overcrowded.

“Just because we have a contract doesn’t mean they’ll accept inmates that day,” he said. “They’ll say not today, maybe tomorrow.”

Since 2022, at least eight counties — Sabine, Harris, Wilbarger, Newton, Chambers, Tyler, Loving and Liberty — have sent their overflow jail population out of state to Louisiana, Oklahoma, Colorado and Mississippi, through contracts costing taxpayers millions of dollars.

“Outsourcing is the single most expensive thing we do as a county,” Daniel Ramos, Harris County budget director said at a Feb. 1 TCJS meeting. “Everything we can do to bring these folks home and have a safe jail is worth the money.”
Disagreement on solutions

Advocates for the criminal defendants say the state should arrest fewer people, especially for minor crimes such as possession of small amounts of marijuana, a Class B misdemeanor in Texas.

“Jail space is a finite resource and we can’t keep expanding it indefinitely,” said Michele Deitch, a senior lecturer at University of Texas at Austin’s School of Law and LBJ School. “The space needs to be for people who are too dangerous.”

But Wallace, the Trinity County sheriff, says people must be arrested for low-level offenses to deter them from committing more serious crimes.

“If someone spends a couple weeks or 30 days in jail, they might say ‘I don’t like this,’ and maybe they won’t graduate to felonies,” Wallace said.

That’s a refrain state lawmakers echo. Republicans control both chambers of the Legislature and every statewide office. Their hardline stance on law and order has translated into policies that keep people in jail for longer. Those policies include Senate Bill 6, which passed in 2021 after Abbott, the governor, made bail-reform an emergency item on the legislative agenda.

SB 6 prohibits judges from letting people accused of violent crimes out of jail unless they pay a cash bond or a portion of that amount to a bail bonds company. Proponents say it keeps dangerous people off the streets. Critics say the law disproportionately impacts poorer defendants who haven’t yet been convicted.

Last year, Abbott pushed for a constitutional amendment to expand the circumstances in which a judge can deny bail. It failed in the House but is expected to be proposed again next year.

Some people fear if that passes, overcrowding and understaffing will only worsen.

“There’s nothing inevitable about the size of a jail population,” Deitch said. “That’s a decision that is made and there are only two things that affect it: how many people are going in and how long they are staying there.”

As jails have filled up, they’ve also become the largest mental health provider in the state. Inadequate or inaccessible community mental health care means that law enforcement officers are often the first to respond when a person faces a crisis.

Instead of being treated by doctors, people end up arrested for criminal behavior, and their underlying mental health issues remain. They then often sit in jail for months until a state mental health bed becomes available.

As of June 14, 1,173 people in jail were on the waitlist for a state mental health bed, which are used for people deemed incompetent to stand trial. The state has allocated money to build more state mental health facilities, but has struggled to adequately staff those facilities.

“Jail is not the place for someone with a mental health issue,” Crockett Police Chief Clayton Smith said during the East Texas Mental Health Summit last year. “Sometimes that’s where that patient ends up because of a lack of beds, but ultimately, jail is not going to help the mental health patient at all.”
Effects of outsourcing

Before the child abuse accusations, Hampton lived a quiet life in Sabine County’s Rosevine community with his partner, Sorcha, and his son. Hampton worked as a farrier and blacksmith, trimming and balancing horses’ hooves. He also sold firewood that he cut and split by hand. In his free time, he enjoyed hiking national forests and kayaking on the lake.

“My philosophy was work hard, play hard and live life,” Hampton wrote in an electronic message from prison.

After a dispute, a family member accused Hampton of sexually abusing a child. A Child Protective Services investigator who followed up on the accusation multiple times and interviewed the child found that the abuse did not occur, according to an August report that Costigan provided The Tribune. An agency spokesperson said the case had been closed and that its details are confidential.

A military veteran, Hampton has fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few years ago, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after his time in combat. Hampton said he learned how to regulate the effects of the disorder, but he’s now noticing a regression.

“Since I’ve been locked up I find it much harder to regulate,” he wrote.

Back home in Rosevine, Costigan does what she can to help with his defense, advocate for his release before a trial, visit him and keep their home running. But it’s not always easy.

“The stove is out, the refrigerator just died, my dryer doesn’t work,” Costigan said.

Hampton could probably fix them. But nobody seems to know how long he’ll be behind bars.

After missing an arraignment hearing, Hampton’s lawyer was one hour late to another court date. Costigan filed a grievance against the attorney, who did not respond to The Tribune’s requests for comment but disputed Costigan’s accusations in a filing to the state bar association.

Hampton is now represented by a court-appointed attorney, who vows to get Hampton’s bond reduced and at least one of the charges against him dismissed.

For now, it’s just a waiting game 100 miles from home.

“I just don’t understand how they are shuttling pre-trial people to Louisiana,” Hampton said. “Do you know how hard it is to prove yourself innocent here?”

AUSTIN – Since a 2021 court ruling limited Attorney General Ken Paxton’s ability to prosecute voter fraud, his office’s work combating those crimes has slowed to a crawl, according to the Houston Chronicle. Yet even as Paxton’s election fraud unit has seen its caseload dwindle and most of its lawyers disperse, it has continued to spend millions, records obtained by Hearst Newspapers show. Last fiscal year, the unit prosecuted just four cases and spent most of its $2.3 million budget. This year, which ends Aug. 31, it has closed just two cases and is on track to spend $1 million. Democrats and voting rights advocates questioned why the attorney general appears to be budgeting more money for the unit when it’s doing less work and when many agencies in Texas could use his office’s support.

Paxton’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment. To be sure, the office also seems to be working on cases that are still at the investigation level; those can take a long time and do not always end in a prosecution. Even before the December 2021 ruling, the unit didn’t produce a high number of prosecutions, and most cases were resolved with pretrial diversion, which provides an alternative to prosecution, or deferred adjudication, a form of probation. In 2021, for example, the office’s lawyers spent tens of thousands of hours working cases but closed just three. Paxton has made reversing the ruling a top priority, and he launched a successful effort this spring to support primary challengers to three of the Republican judges on the state’s highest criminal appeals court who co-signed the opinion and were up for reelection. The ruling prevents Paxton’s office from filing cases on its own, but it can still assist local officials on cases if they ask for help or take over cases when local officials recuse themselves. Jonathan Diaz, director for voting advocacy and partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan voting rights group, said the amount of money dedicated to the voter fraud unit, especially one that is now only doing this work in a supportive role, seems like “overkill.”

AUSTIN – The Austin American-Statesman says the Austin Police Department says it regularly “restricts” various pieces of evidence, such as body-worn camera footage, from the Travis County district attorney’s office and defense lawyers — a possible violation of state law. The Police Department “does not believe it has violated any rules of evidence handling” laws, a spokesperson told the American-Statesman. A joint statement from the department and the district attorney’s office said police give “thorough access to all evidence” in cases and that changes to “business processes” and “technology” in recent months at their offices “led to complications related to the sharing of evidence” that both offices are working to address. The revelation came in a tense pretrial hearing Friday afternoon in Travis County’s 460th Criminal District Court for a murder trial that was expected to begin Monday. In the hearing, state prosecutors said they had discovered that body-worn camera footage of officers who responded to the scene had not been released to them and therefore wasn’t given to defense lawyers.

The evidence in question pertained to the body-worn camera footage of 21 officers who responded to a shooting that killed one person in downtown Austin on March 14, 2021. Police later arrested 25-year-old Adriean Benn and charged him with the murder of Jorian Donte Hardeway. Benn is represented by the Vazquez Law Firm, which maintains that he is innocent. Travis County Criminal Court Judge Selena Alvarenga pushed the trial’s start date to October in light of the development. Alvarenga suppressed the evidence from the state, meaning that prosecutors cannot use evidence from the 21 videos in their arguments. Alvarenga also ordered the Police Department to stand before the court Wednesday to answer why the evidence was withheld. “I want to hear from someone from APD about why evidence in a murder trial is restricted,” Alvarenga said. “I want to know why any evidence is being restricted. Is that a policy?” The Police Department acknowledged the restriction of evidence in a series of statements to the American-Statesman, the latter portion of which appeared to backtrack or downplay the department’s initial response to the Statesman’s questions. Contrary to what was said in court, the Police Department initially said the district attorney’s office did have access to those videos, according to police spokesperson Anna Sabana’s written response to emailed questions sent by the Statesman. However, Sabana said the department does restrict videos from prosecutors and defense lawyers, including these 21 videos.

AUSTIN – The Dallas Morning News reports that political fights that will determine how schools operate for millions of Texas children — and whether their families can use public money for private education — were foreshadowed Monday during a legislative hearing in Austin. The House Public Education Committee began discussions on the voucherlike efforts. Education savings accounts are a priority of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who poured millions in cash and political capital to elect conservatives who would back his plan. He appears poised for success ahead of the November election. Teachers, parents and advocates testified on the school choice idea, which has repeatedly been batted down by a coalition of rural Republicans and Democrats who worry it will siphon money away from the public schools that serve the vast majority of Texas children. ESAs will degrade public schools across the state by taking away resources, said James Hallamek, the government relations specialist with the Texas State Teachers Association.

“Lawmakers should work to increase appropriations to public schools, not divert taxpayer funds to private schools,” Hallamek said. The hearing took place on the first day of classes for many Texas schools, making it difficult for many teachers and parents to testify during the marathon day that ran from 9 a.m. until after 7 p.m. Abbott used the back-to-school season to highlight his demands for parental choice. He has pushed for education savings accounts, or ESAs, to be universally available. Families could use dedicated state funding to pay for tuition, tutoring, textbooks or other educational needs. “During the upcoming legislative session, we’re going to work to make school choice a reality,” the governor wrote on X. “Parents matter — and choosing where they send their children to school matters.” Among the proposals that gained traction – but didn’t pass last year – was one to give families up to $8,000 in an ESA. The policy would have cost about $500 million in its first year and serve as many as 25,000 kids, according to a state analysis. However, the plan’s costs could have ballooned to nearly $1 billion by year three, according to the estimates. ProPublica recently reported that Arizona’s universal voucher program contributed to financial woes. The state faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last year, the fight over ESAs in Texas derailed several other education proposals, including bills that would’ve boosted teacher pay and increased the base amount of money public schools receive per-student.

SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Texas (AP) — Crews on Monday tore down a Texas church where a gunman killed more than two dozen worshippers in 2017, using heavy machinery to raze the small building even after some families sought to preserve the scene of the deadliest church shooting in U.S. history.

A judge cleared the way last month for the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs to tear down the sanctuary where the attack took place, which until now had been kept as a memorial. Church members voted in 2021 to tear it down, but some families in the community of less than 1,000 people filed a lawsuit hoping for a new vote on the building’s fate.

Authorities put the number of dead in the Nov. 5, 2017, shooting at 26 people, including a pregnant woman and her unborn baby. After the shooting, the interior of the sanctuary was painted white and chairs with the names of those who were killed were placed there. A new church was completed for the congregation about a year and a half after the shooting.

John Riley, an 86-year-old member of the church, watched with sadness and disappointment as the long arm of a yellow excavator swung a heavy claw into the building over and over.

“The devil got his way,” Riley said, “I would not be the man I am without that church.”

He said he would pray for God to “punish the ones” who put the demolition in motion.

“That was God’s house, not their house,” Riley said.

For many in the community, the sanctuary was a place of solace.

Terrie Smith, president of the Sutherland Springs Community Association, visited often over the years, calling it a place where “you feel the comfort of everybody that was lost there.” Among those killed in the shooting were a woman who was like a daughter to Smith — Joann Ward — and Ward’s two daughters, ages 7 and 5.

Smith watched Monday as the memorial sanctuary was torn down.

“I am sad, angry, hurt,” she said.

In early July, a Texas judge granted a temporary restraining order sought by some families. But another judge later denied a request to extend that order, setting in motion the demolition. In court filings, attorneys for the church called the structure a “constant and very painful reminder.”

Attorneys for the church argued that it was within its rights to demolish the memorial while the attorney for the families who filed the lawsuit said they were just hoping to get a new vote.

“It’s a very somber day for us,” said Amber Holder, a church member who was a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

She said she wasn’t at the service on the day of the shooting but arrived soon after. As a teen, she was taken in by the family of the pastor, whose 14-year-old daughter, Annabelle Pomeroy, was among those killed.

Holder said the church had become a piece of history and that the scars on the building from that day, including bullet holes, were a powerful reminder of what happened.

“Tearing it down, no good comes from that,” Holder said.

In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs alleged that some church members were wrongfully removed from the church roster before the vote was taken. In a court filing, the church denied the allegations in the lawsuit.

A woman who answered the phone at the church said Monday that she had no comment then hung up.

The man who opened fire in the church, Devin Patrick Kelley, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after he was chased by bystanders and crashed his car. Investigators have said the shooting appeared to stem from a domestic dispute involving Kelley and his mother-in-law, who sometimes attended services at the church but was not present on the day of the shooting.

Communities across the U.S. have grappled with what should happen to the sites of mass shootings. Last month, demolition began on the three-story building where 17 people died in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. After the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, it was torn down and replaced.

Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo, New York, and the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where racist mass shootings happened, both reopened. In Colorado, Columbine High School still stands, though its library, where most of the victims were killed, was replaced.

In Texas, officials closed Robb Elementary in Uvalde after the 2022 shooting there and plan to demolish the school.

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Stengle reported from Dallas.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Millions of dollars are being spent this year to steer voters toward candidates for Republican-led Legislatures who not only support school vouchers, but will become key figures in implementing school choice programs in states across the U.S.

Most recently, national pro-voucher advocates declared victory after spending more than $4.5 million in Tennessee’s primary election to defend and elect legislative candidates they claim will support school choice proposals in 2025 when state lawmakers are slated to return to the Capitol to enact policy.

Meanwhile, at least $14.8 million was spent by similar advocacy groups in the Texas primary election earlier in May to oust and replace voucher opponents. In Idaho, hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on candidates who both opposed and supported school vouchers in the rural mountain-west state.

The spending spree is backed by the nation’s most high-profile voucher influencers, including the School Freedom Fund, a pro-voucher group tied to Club for Growth; the American Federation for Children, which was founded by former Trump administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos; and Americans for Prosperity, the Koch family’s well-heeled free-market group.

Their focus is often on primary elections because in Republican-dominated states, primaries are seen as the most competitive hurdle to getting elected.

“Make no mistake — if you call yourself a Republican and oppose school freedom, you should expect to lose your next primary,” said David McIntosh, president of the School Freedom Fund, said in a statement shortly after Tennessee’s primary election. “As we continue to hear from different governors, we plan on repeating our results from Tennessee and Texas across the country. The school freedom revolution is just beginning.”

Thirty-two states have implemented some sort of voucher program in the U.S., and some have been in place for decades, often with strict income requirements or narrowly tailored for students with disabilities.

Yet, over the years, there’s been a noticeable push among Republican leaders to make available taxpayer-funded vouchers, or scholarships that can follow a child regardless of income to any public or private school. About a dozen states now have such programs. But proposals are being considered in many more, with varying degrees of legislative support.

Idaho, Tennessee and Texas all weighed sweeping school voucher proposals over the past year, but faced resistance not only from Democrats — who don’t hold as much political power — but also Republican members wary of directing public education dollars away from their districts.

Tennessee’s Republican Gov. Bill Lee was forced to abandon his plans for universal school choice earlier this year after divisions inside the GOP-controlled Statehouse failed to come to a consensus on key specifics.

The failure prompted Lee to break with his previous stance of remaining quiet during GOP primary elections and instead publicly pick favorites this year in a handful of legislative races.

Additionally, outside groups like Club for Growth, American Federation for Children, Americans for Prosperity Action, and others poured $4.5 million across 16 House and Senate legislative races. Three of the open primaries saw almost a million dollars spent in each of the races.

Club for Growth spent the majority of the money, pouring $3.6 million across five races and ultimately winning four of those seats.

Lee didn’t endorse any opponents of a sitting Republican incumbent, but he did throw support behind candidates in four open legislative seats — three of which were successful.

The modest gains for Lee’s cause came at a big political cost.

After Lee endorsed Sen. Jon Lundberg, this year’s voucher bill sponsor, former President Donald Trump backed Lundberg’s opponent, Bobby Harshbarger, son of U.S. Rep. Diane Harshbarger. After Harshbarger was declared the winner, Trump swiped at Lee on social media, calling him a RINO, or “Republican in Name Only” even though he endorsed Lee in his 2022 reelection.

Lee has so far brushed aside the criticism, and instead released a statement declaring that Republican primary voters “sent a clear message: It’s time to deliver school choice for Tennessee families.”

Focusing solely on primary voters may be a winning strategy to securing key state level races, but it comes at a cost of electing candidates who may not represent the average voter, said John Geer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University.

“A very small proportion of the Tennessee voting public is driving these outcomes, that’s not good for democracy,” he said.

In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott also touted major wins for voucher advocates in the aftermath of the state’s runoff primary election in May.

Months prior, back in late 2023, a group of House Republicans joined Democrats to help defeat a school voucher bill — delivering a blow to one of Abbott’s top legislative priorities.

Similar to the playbook used in Tennessee, Abbott and national voucher groups pivoted to ousting voucher opponents in the primary election in order to secure a legislative victory in 2025.

Club for Growth ultimately took credit for removing 10 GOP incumbents who had opposed Abbott’s voucher push after targeting 14 races in primary and runoff election. Club for Growth reported spending $8.8 million and Abbott spent at least $6 million between the primary and runoff elections.

“The Texas legislature now has enough votes to pass school choice,” Abbott posted after the runoff election.

And in Idaho, four anti-school voucher Republican incumbents lost their reelection bids after the American for Children PAC spent more than $300,000 to promote school choice candidates.

During the 2022 election cycle, the organization spent $9 million on state legislative races to support school choice friendly candidates but CEO Tommy Schultz promised to spend “at least $10 million” this year.

“To date, AFC and its affiliates have deployed more than $9 million in state legislative primary elections across the country, and we will spend millions more in the general election to advance school choice policies for American families,” Schultz said in a statement to AP.

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Associated Press writer Jonathan Mattise contributed to this report.