There has always been a market for the misleading edit in politics — the quote clipped short, the unflattering freeze-frame, the number without its denominator. Those are old tricks, and voters have some defenses against them.

What is happening in 2026 is different in kind. Candidates are no longer stretching what their opponents said and did. They are manufacturing it: generating video of a person delivering a speech he never gave, editing a symbol into a photograph that never contained it, and registering a domain in the opponent's own name to intercept the voters looking for him.

The cost of making a convincing fake fell to roughly zero in the last two years. Here is what five Republicans on the ballot did with that.

Greg Abbott's campaign took a photo about a closed school and put a transgender flag in it

On September 8, an X account called "Governor Hot Wheels" — a campaign account run by Greg Abbott's team — posted an image of Democratic nominee Gina Hinojosa sitting at a table with a child. A transgender pride flag stood on the table.

"Gina wants to turn your local public school into a gender transition camp," the post said.

The image is doctored. AFP ran a reverse image search and found the original: a video Hinojosa herself had posted, in which she talks with a young girl named Cataleya about a school in her neighborhood that had shut down.

"Cataleya deserves a great public school in her own neighborhood," Hinojosa wrote at the time. "Every Texas kid does. That's why I'm running for governor, to save Texas schools."

On the table in the real photograph is an American flag.

OpenAI's image verification tool found a SynthID watermark in the doctored version — the invisible marker Google embeds in images made with its own AI tools. Abbott's press secretary, Eduardo Leal, told AFP on September 9 that the altered image was "satire."

Consider what was edited out rather than in. The subject of the original photo is a public school that closed. More than 190 Texas public schools have closed or been announced for closure since the 2023–24 school year, according to the nonprofit Our Schools Our Democracy; local news reports have pointed to declining enrollment, budget pressure, charter expansion and the state's private-school voucher program. Abbott's campaign took a picture of a child affected by that and replaced the subject.

Ken Paxton generated a speech James Talarico never gave

Paxton's campaign released an AI-generated video called "King James" depicting his Democratic opponent, state representative and Presbyterian seminarian James Talarico, seated and rewriting the Bible.

The digital Talarico opens with "In the beginning, God was nonbinary." He goes on to say God created six genders, calls Jesus a "radical feminist," and describes himself as "a Christian who hates Christianity." A narrator calls him wrong for Texas and wrong for America. Ken Paxton then appears on screen to say he approved the message.

The construction is the point. The Advocate found that the video takes fragments of things Talarico has actually said about faith and gender, strips their context, alters some of the wording, and scripts them into a monologue he never delivered.

Each fragment had an explanation the ad removes. Talarico has said God is nonbinary, and explained he meant God transcends gender, an idea consistent with his Mainline Protestant tradition. The "six genders" line traces to a 2021 legislative debate in which he discussed chromosomal variation. He did once call himself "a Christian who hates Christianity," and, as Snopes documented, he said it while explaining why he keeps returning to the faith — that he finds Jesus' teachings more radical than any political philosophy.

The Advocate asked Paxton's campaign why it manufactured footage instead of using real video of Talarico saying those words in context. The campaign did not respond. The answer is visible in the ad: in context, they do not work.

This is not the only synthetic Talarico in circulation. A pro-Trump group put out a deepfake of him singing about transgender children, and another conservative group produced an AI ad falsely depicting him as a doctor performing gender transition surgeries on children.

Marsha Blackburn photoshopped a prison uniform onto a man who served a month in the 1990s

Blackburn's campaign for Tennessee governor paid for a website attacking independent candidate Dave Hatley. The header calls him "Deadbeat Dave." Photos of him have been edited to put him in a black-and-white striped prison jumpsuit, and the reggae song "Bad Boys" sits on the page as an audio clip. At the foot, the line that makes it hers: "Paid for by and authorized by Marsha for Governor."

"Tennessee cannot afford a felon running the state," the site says.

The underlying conviction is real, and dates to the 1990s: Hatley was convicted of federal bank fraud for passing bad checks, and served a month in federal prison. He has published a memoir about it, free on his own campaign site, which he wrote, he says, "years before I ever thought about running for office."

Marsha Blackburn also voted for the First Step Act on December 20, 2018 — the second-chance law signed by a president later convicted of 34 felonies, whom she continues to support.

Cindy Hyde-Smith registered a website in her opponent's name

Scott Colom's campaign site is ScottColom.com. On September 9, Cindy Hyde-Smith's campaign launched ColomForSenate.com, built to resemble it, and pushed the link from her campaign's own X and Facebook accounts.

The site's central attack is that Colom "pushed radical sex change surgeries for children." It names its source: a 2021 letter he signed. Read the letter and the word surgery does not appear once in its eight pages. What it asks of prosecutors is that they not spend their resources criminalizing the doctors who provide gender-affirming care to trans young people, or the parents who seek it out for them.

Its attack on his record as a district attorney cites no case at all. The footnote for the whole section reads "Colom's prosecutorial record."

Michael Whatley sold voters a truck he wasn't driving, and a grieving father an ad he didn't agree to

Two different fabrications are working for Whatley's Senate campaign in North Carolina, and they are worth separating, because one is his and one is not.

His own campaign spent $1.5 million on an ad showing him in a flannel shirt driving a GMC truck. Over the same period his campaign committees spent $136,000 on private jets, including $104,749.73 to fly a Cessna linked to a construction executive Trump pardoned for defrauding the government. The truck is real. The life it is selling is the manufactured part.

The rest is being done for him. A video crew making an ad for the Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC backing his race, approached Ronald Hayes about appearing in what he was told was an ad about gun violence. His son had been murdered. What the super PAC made was an attack ad falsely blaming Roy Cooper for that murder. It has been viewed more than 25 million times as part of a $17 million effort on Whatley's behalf.

The same super PAC also runs a website calling itself "Independent Journalism for North Carolina". Popular Information found it is fully controlled by the Senate Leadership Fund. Its unbylined August 21 article blamed Cooper for a killing that happened in South Carolina.

Michael Whatley has made Cooper's pandemic prisoner releases a campaign issue of his own. Asked about the super PAC's ad, his campaign spokesman defended the claim at the center of it.

This is now standard practice, not a few bad actors

These five are not outliers within their party. They are the current examples.

In Wisconsin, Derrick Van Orden posted AI-generated videos putting words in opponent Rebecca Cooke's mouth, without the on-screen AI label Wisconsin requires on the paid political communications its campaign finance law covers. He posted them to his own accounts rather than buying them as advertising, which is what probably keeps him outside the statute. A co-sponsor of that law told UpNorthNews it "certainly isn't within the spirit of the law."

In Iowa, Ashley Hinson's campaign hit Josh Turek with an attack ad within an hour of his primary win, making three claims about positions he has never held.

And as Whatley's race shows, the fabrication is not only candidate-run. One Nation, the Senate GOP's dark money arm, runs at least six websites dressed up as local newspapers, four of them built to flatter Dan Sullivan, Susan Collins, Jon Husted and Ashley Hinson. Each one says who paid for it only in faint type at the very bottom of the page, and One Nation is a 501(c)(4), so it never has to say who funds it.

The defenses are thin. Texas bans only deep fake video, and only when it is published within 30 days of an election — a doctored photograph is not covered at all. Wisconsin's label requirement reaches paid advertising, which is not what Van Orden posted. Nothing stopped Hyde-Smith from registering her opponent's name as a domain. And Abbott's press office has already produced the all-purpose answer: satire.

What the record shows

Greg Abbott's campaign used AI to replace an American flag with a transgender flag in a photograph of his opponent talking to a child about a school that closed, and called it satire when caught. Ken Paxton's campaign generated a video of James Talarico delivering a monologue about God and gender that he never gave, assembled from real fragments with their context stripped out, and put his own face on screen approving it. Marsha Blackburn's campaign paid for a site that photoshops an independent candidate into a prison uniform over a month he served in the 1990s and wrote a memoir about. Cindy Hyde-Smith's campaign registered a domain in her opponent's name whose central accusation — that he pushed surgeries on children — appears nowhere in the one document it cites, which never uses the word surgery at all. Michael Whatley's campaign spent $1.5 million selling him as a truck driver while his committees spent $136,000 on private jets, and the super PAC backing him built a 25-million-view ad around a murdered man's father who says he was told the ad was about gun violence.

Sources

Greg Abbott campaign edits image of opponent to insert transgender flag — Bill McCarthy, AFP, September 10, 2026. Ken Paxton puts fake words in James Talarico's mouth with AI — The Advocate. Ken Paxton put out an AI-generated attack ad. He's not the only one — Texas Standard. Blackburn funds attack site targeting independent rival Hatley — Ben Smith, Johnson City Press, September 10, 2026. US Sen Cindy Hyde-Smith criticizes Colom through fake MS campaign website — Bea Anhuci, Mississippi Clarion Ledger, September 10, 2026.