Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate Sarah Stogner

Sarah Stogner was struggling last year to call attention to leaking oil wells near her home in West Texas when some friends suggested she try TikTok, the video sharing platform popular with teens and young adults.

“I started doing a little digging and was like, wow, this is great,” the 37-year-old Republican lawyer said. “This is how I’m going to communicate to the masses about what’s happening out here, because people are visual.”

Her footage of rusted wellheads and murky groundwater, often set against playful music and the occasional provocative dance, were popular enough to convince Stogner she could unseat the state’s top oil and gas regulator, and do so without the hundreds of thousands of dollars a statewide campaign typically takes.

But what started as a lighthearted digital approach is turning away some supporters after Stogner posted a five-second clip last week of herself semi-nude atop a pump jack.

“They said I needed money,” she wrote in the post, with a laughing face emoji. “I have other assets.”

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Fellow Republicans criticized the move and the San Antonio Express News has since pulled Stogner’s lone endorsement, calling her stunt “disgraceful.”

“We expect candidates for public office to model civil discourse and decorum worthy of the public’s trust,” the paper’s editorial board wrote. “This was neither.”

Stogner, however, has no regrets, insisting that while the video was a joke, her candidacy for Railroad Commission is not.

“We have confirmed radium 226 and 228 in our groundwater and people are more concerned that I got up on a pump jack in pasties last weekend to call attention to it,” she told a group of Republican women in Ector County this week, to light applause. “Y’all, I will use what I got. I’m not accepting money.”

Stogner said the clip was shot in November by a documentary crew she had hired to chronicle the campaign. She hadn’t planned to release it, she said, but with early voting starting this week and a University of Houston poll showing her only a few points behind the frontrunner, incumbent Wayne Christian, the risk seemed worth it. Christian has far outraised his Republican opponents and has been bankrolled in the past by oil and gas interests.

“I knew it would be controversial,” she said. “I didn’t realize it would incite the rage and anger that it did from the press.”

Neither Christian nor a second Republican challenger, Tom Slocum, responded to requests for comment. Dawayne Tipton, who is now endorsed by all three of the state’s biggest papers, including the Express News, said he doesn’t fault Stogner.

“It was a Hail Mary to energize her campaign,” Tipton said. “It’s not something that I would personally do or undertake.”

As a lawyer who works regularly in the male-dominated oil and gas industry, Stogner said she is used to being objectified.

“I understand that when I walk into a room or a space people don’t assume that I’m a lawyer or that I’m competent on anything to do with oil and gas,” she said. “But I am, and have I got your attention now? So let’s put our clothes on and talk about the issues.”

Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said sexualizing a campaign is rare because it hasn’t worked with voters in the past, especially female voters. But he said campaigns in general are increasingly pushing the envelope on provocation in order to rise above the din of the internet — from Dan Crenshaw attacking anti-fascist protesters with an Avengers-style video to Marjorie Taylor Greene blowing up a Toyota Prius, and Gary Chambers smoking marijuana on camera.

“I don’t think you’re going to see a lot more people posing nude in their ads, but you will see a lot more of this guerilla-style marketing that’s very edgy,” he said.

Stogner is prepared for whatever the outcome. Winning a powerful regulatory seat as an outspent and unknown candidate was never going to be easy. At least next time, she said, people will know who she is.

Jeremy Blackman covers health and politics out of the Chronicle's Austin bureau. His previous work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Toronto Star, Concord Monitor, PBS NewsHour and Point Reyes Light. He is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley.