They came for Brenda Hughes. Here’s what they used — and what the truth is.

Early voting begins Monday in the Republican runoff for Precinct 1 Commissioner. Before voters head to the polls, they deserve a clear accounting of what has been said about Brenda Hughes over the past several months — who said it, what the facts are, and what the pattern of attacks reveals about the people making them.

This has been an extraordinary campaign. Not because of anything Hughes has done, but because of what has been done to her.

The Kerr County Republican Party was caught on camera stealing Hughes campaign signs from property where Hughes had permission to place them — property sitting directly in front of GOP headquarters. Hughes had replaced those signs multiple times. After Buzzie Hughes confronted her, chair Helen Herd offered a single justification: “Because Brenda is a Democrat.”

She is not. Hughes is a lifelong Republican. Her voting record is public. Herd’s statement isn’t a misunderstanding. It’s a smear. Clayson Lambert, Hughes’ opponent in this runoff, was inside the GOP office as it happened. He covered his face with a manila folder on his way out rather than face a camera.

The people behind the broader attack campaign deserve to be named and understood.

Harley David Belew — the former Precinct 1 commissioner removed from the Kerr County Commissioners Court by a judge after The Lead reported his felony conviction — has spent this campaign defending Herd’s sign theft publicly and threatening to appear at a Lions Club meeting where Hughes was speaking to “flush her political career, once and for all.” He showed up. The Lead and the Hill Country Community Journal were there. He kept his mouth shut.

Mikaela Jade Taylor is a former shock jock wannabe who once competed against Belew in local radio and has reinvented herself as a purveyor of deranged flood conspiracy theories on her website. Taylor has used the deaths of 119 Kerr County residents as a backdrop for political attacks against Hughes — ads she served up herself. She is not an activist. She is not an investigator. She is someone with a grudge, a website, and a willingness to exploit a community’s grief.

That Belew and Taylor — a rabidly right-wing convicted felon and his former radio competitor — are now political allies against the same Republican woman is the strangest footnote in Kerr County political history. It is also, at this point, the company Clayson Lambert keeps.

The claims themselves tell you everything about the people making them.

Hughes has been accused of voting for the highest tax rate allowable by law while flood victims were suffering — a characterization so dishonest it requires active effort to construct. The council voted 4-1 to adopt a temporary “Disaster Rate” specifically designed to cover flood-related expenses, at an average cost to residents of $40 per year. That’s not exploitation of a tragedy. That’s governing in the middle of one.

She’s been accused of smearing the Holy Bible and defending pornographic books in the children’s section of the library — a smear so detached from reality that it barely warrants engagement. Hughes pointed out that the Bible contains content some find offensive to illustrate why blanket content censorship is impossible to apply consistently. The people who objected were given the formal process to challenge any library book for removal. After four years, not one challenge has been filed. They were never serious.

She’s been accused of voting to pump wastewater into Kerrville’s drinking water — a deliberate grotesque misrepresentation of the city’s aquifer storage and recovery system, which the Texas Water Development Board has recognized as a model program and which has secured Kerrville’s water supply for the next 60 years.

She’s been accused of driving nearly $2 million in cost overruns at the Kerr County Animal Services Shelter through her role with Kerrville Pets Alive. Kerr County commissioners admitted in open session that they failed to budget for kennels. Three years of project delays meant significant inflation hit before construction began. Neither KPAI nor Hughes had any involvement in the construction process. The commissioners who controlled that budget own those overruns entirely.

And she’s been accused of a conflict of interest because she holds the mortgage on KPAI’s office building — the suggestion being that she’s angling to direct public money to the organization. KPAI has never received a cent from Kerr County. It has given the county thousands of dollars to feed animals, medical equipment and other needs to animals in county care and contributed volunteer labor that would otherwise cost taxpayers money. The financial relationship is the opposite of what the attack claims.

This is what the Kerr County Republican apparatus, Harley David Belew, and their allies have decided to put in front of Precinct 1 voters in the final days of this race. Not a vision for the precinct. Not a case for their candidate. A pile of distortions, misrepresentations, and outright lies aimed at a lifelong Republican with 30 years of documented service to this community.

Through all of it, Lambert has offered Precinct 1 voters this assessment of the woman he seeks to defeat: standing before the Republican Women of Kerr County, he said that 32 years in the barbecue business and six years on the City Council “doesn’t mean anything in a town the size of Kerrville.”

The room gasped. Some booed. They were right to.

Hughes has spent three decades building this community — the Public Safety Complex, the animal shelter, Kerrville Pets Alive — and her opponent stood in front of the people who know her best and told them none of it counted. That is who Clayson Lambert is.

Early voting runs Monday through Friday, May 23, at the Kerr County Elections Office. Election day is May 26.

Our endorsement of Brenda Hughes stands. It has never been clearer.