Why Does a Railroad Commissioner Need $9 Million in Her Campaign?

Christi Craddick, a Republican, is one of Texas’s three Railroad Commissioners and the chair of that body. She is up for re-election this year and is sitting on a $9 million war chest according to Open Secrets.

Her opponent, Houston engineer Katherine Culbert, has raised less than $11,000.

That’s not David and Goliath. That’s David the Gnome and Goliath, and it gets weirder the more you think about it. Craddick has never faced any serious competition since she was first elected in 2012. She has trounced every primary and general election challenge without even trying, so why on Earth would she bring the political donation equivalent of a nuclear weapon to fight an opponent with a water pistol?

It’s easy to get a little dollar blind in American politics. After all, the 2020 Presidential Election involved more money than the GDP of Afghanistan, but $9 million for an uncompetitive statewide race, even in Texas, is weird.

Sen. Ted Cruz, for instance, has raised $57 million in one of the highest-profile U.S. Senate races in the country. His opponent, State Rep. Colin Allred (D-Dallas), has raised $37 million. While that’s quite a bit less than Cruz, it is within a reasonable ballpark.

A quarter of Craddick’s fundraising has come from the oil and gas industry, an industry that the Railroad Commission is directly responsible for regulating. This is a long-running pattern with the Railroad Commission. The vast majority of members come from the oil and gas industry itself or have deep family ties to it. Members are often taking donations from companies they are about to rule on.

To be clear, there is no evidence that Craddick or any of her other commissioners are misappropriating campaign funds. However, it is an unmistakable fact that Craddick gets far more money for her re-election than she could ever reasonably need, and millions of it comes from companies that need her to rule favorably for them to continue record profits.

This is the reason so many people call for Railroad Commission reform. Many Texans aren’t even aware that the commission regulates oil and gas, a state of affairs that the commission seems happy to maintain. For generations, the commission has been dominated by Republicans who have worked in oil and gas or received a great deal of money from it.

One plan put forth by the nonprofit Commission Shift, calls for restrictions on donations for the office similar to Texas judges. This would create an 18-month window where the maximum donation would be $5,000.

This would both level the playing field and remove the shadow of impropriety around commissioners like Craddick. It’s clear that she doesn’t require $9 million to stay in office, so there should be no objection.

Meanwhile, she sits on a small fortune that appears to have no real purpose. The implications of that are not good.