Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) has forced a runoff election in Texas’ 23rd District, where neither he nor any of his three challengers managed to get 50% of the vote on Tuesday.
Gonzales and his top challenger, Brandon Herrera, a gun rights influencer, will go head-to-head in a May 26 runoff election to determine which man will be the Republican Party’s candidate in November’s general election.
The election will be a rematch, since Herrera also ran against Gonzales in 2024, but there’s a big difference this time: Gonzales is engulfed in scandal.
The third-term moderate allegedly had an affair with a staffer in 2024. Her marriage collapsed after her husband discovered the reported relationship, and he said she entered a depressive spiral, which ended in September when she set herself on fire and died.
Gonzales has denied the affair, but the staffer’s widower, Adrian Aviles, shared text messages with HuffPost and other news outlets from his late wife’s phone in which Gonzales asked her for a “sexy pic” and made other advances in 2024.
Aviles tried to reach a private legal settlement with Gonzales under the Congressional Accountability Act, which protects Capitol Hill staffers from sexual harassment and retaliation, but after another staffer told the San Antonio News-Express about the affair last month, Gonzales claimed he was being “blackmailed.” Aviles’ attorney told HuffPost that after people found out about the affair, Gonzales created a hostile work environment.
Gonzales’ Republican colleagues don’t believe he’s the target of a coordinated political attack, as he’s claimed, and several have said he should either resign or at least drop his campaign.
“A male harassing a female employee, I just can’t stomach it, dude. I’ve got a wife and a daughter. He needs to go,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said last month.
At least one voter in the district has said the affair is a reason to back Herrera.
Scandal aside, the runoff is a contest between competing visions of the Republican Party. Gonzales, whose district includes Uvalde, the site of one of the most horrific school shootings in U.S. history, voted for a bipartisan gun reform bill after that shooting in 2022. Herrera, meanwhile, is a gun rights maximalist who made his name as “The AK Guy” online.
