Texas GOP congressional candidate Kathaleen Wall

This week, Texas Republican Party fundraiser Kathaleen Wall announced that she would run for the 22nd Congressional District, a competitive open seat in the southern Houston suburbs. Wall joins Greg Hill, a former judge in Brazoria County, in the GOP primary, though other Republicans are also considering running to succeed retiring Republican Rep. Pete Olson.

Wall ran last year in the nearby 2nd District, but while she looked like the clear frontrunner for most of the campaign, she unexpectedly ended up narrowly missing the primary runoff. Wall, who still lives in the 2nd District, poured $6.2 million of her own money into that campaign, which the Houston Chronicle writes was the most any self-funding House candidate in Texas has deployed in the last 20 years.

This spending spree allowed her to decisively outspend all of her many primary foes and dominate the airwaves: A Texas Tribune story from last year even wrote that she might have been one of the most famous people in Houston at the time thanks to her many ads. Wall also had some big names in her corner, including Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. Ted Cruz, and the Tribune suggested there was a chance that she could win a majority of the vote and avoid a primary runoff.

However, there were signs that Wall wasn’t the strong candidate she was cracked up to be, especially because her own performance on the campaign trail. The Houston Chronicle wrote that at events "she struggled to remember talking points during forums. Her campaign also avoided interviews with the media, turning down repeated interview requests with the Houston Chronicle." And after watching this cringe-inducing video of a time Wall did speak and badly garbled her talking points multiple times, we can see why.