In Battle for Shriveled Soul of GOP, Congressman and YouTuber Will Face Off Again (Again)

On Tuesday night, a three-term Republican congressman dogged by an affair with a staffer who ended her life by self-immolation lived to fight another day against a gun-obsessed YouTuber who’s used his platform to make light of the Holocaust. Or is it the other around? Perhaps I should say that Brandon Herrera, “the AK guy” who’s in his second bid to unseat incumbent U.S. Representative Tony Gonzales after narrowly failing in 2024, is the one who’s lived to aim a possible death-blow at Gonzales in the May 26 runoffs.

Either way, the Texas GOP is clearly in fine shape. (Quico Canseco, who once represented an earlier version of the same congressional district, came in at single digits in the four-way primary Tuesday.)

Congressional District 23, a sprawling monstrosity from El Paso to San Antonio—60-percent Hispanic but plus-15 for Trump based on the 2024 results—was Texas’ swingiest U.S. House seat before the GOP redrew it firmly into their column. Gonzales, a Navy vet, has repped it since 2021. He very narrowly avoided defeat in a 2024 runoff with Herrera. Gonzales was running then without the endorsement of Donald Trump; the congressman had blasphemously voted for a commission to investigate January 6 (but, on the other hand, Herrera had mocked Barron Trump, so the then-ex-president stayed neutral). Gonzales had also dared to support a milquetoast piece of gun-related legislation following the school massacre in 2022 in Uvalde, which is in his district. 

This time around, Gonzales got the Trump nod back in December, which likely would’ve set him up for an easier go-round—until a truly disruptive scandal burst onto the primary scene. A cloud had hovered since last fall when Gonzales’ aide committed suicide and the right-wing outlet Current Revolt reported the congressman and she’d had an affair. But the issue seemed perhaps containable until last month when the San Antonio Express-News nailed the story down. The details of the aide’s death are horrifying, and I won’t recount them here—you can find them elsewhere if you need. In a recent social media thread, Trump declined to restate his endorsement of Gonzales, and a growing number of fellow House Republicans called for the latter’s resignation.

The supercharged scandal seemed to raise the possibility that Gonzales could now lose outright. That didn’t happen Tuesday, but he fell well short of 50 percent. Typically, Texas incumbents who are pushed into runoffs lose—the math is simple: 50-percent-plus-one didn’t want you the first time; why would they the second time? Gonzales bucked these odds once by a hair, but he faces new headwinds, to understate the matter. 

All of this raises the very bleak prospect that Herrera, a professional gun fanatic and gun-rights extremist, could come to represent Uvalde, home to the worst school shooting in state history—one that likely could have been prevented with a simple age-limit increase for weapons of war. We’re talking specifically here about a man who was praised by a mass shooter as recently as August in Minneapolis. 

Of course, there is another major political party in Texas, at least in theory and perhaps this year in reality. Despite the heavy Trump lean of the district, the state Democratic Party chair recently called it a “real opportunity for Democrats.” And if Texas Latinos are shifting back into the Democratic column, maybe it really is. (It probably won’t hurt that Texas Hispanic primary voters clearly broke for James Talarico at the top of the ballot and that Talarico prevailed.) 

In the 23rd’s Democratic primary, Katy Padilla Stout easily outpaced the pack of four candidates on Tuesday. As described in her Express-News endorsement, she is a former schoolteacher who’s served on the Bexar County Child Welfare Board and is a mom with four kids, two adopted through foster care. She told the paper’s editorial board she hoped to help build a middle class of “happy, healthy families.”

On her campaign site, she writes in her Gun Violence section: “As a mother, I can’t describe the pit in my stomach when I drop them off at school every morning, knowing that they are more at risk than I was growing up”—and she lists at least some basic firearm control measures.

Well, Amen to that.