UVALDE, Texas — Down the road from the site of one of the deadliest school shootings in history, the man known to his 4 million subscribers as “the AK Guy” laid out the singular reason he wanted to represent the area in Congress: guns.
“I’m [supposed to be] represented by a conservative,” the candidate, Brandon Herrera, told a few dozen people at a campaign stop here this week. So “why is my Texas Republican voting with Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden on a gun control bill?”
Herrera, a 30-year-old firearms manufacturer, said he had been content rallying for the Second Amendment at statehouses and on his YouTube channel. That changed in 2022, when Rep. Tony Gonzales (R) — the area’s current congressman — became one of a few Republicans to vote for a federal gun control law inspired the school shooting.
Herrera went onto challenge Gonzales two years ago, coming within 354 votes of securing the nomination.
Now, after another tragedy that has rocked this town in the South Texas scrublands, he may be better positioned to win the party’s nod.
Gonzales’s campaign in the last week has been rocked by allegations that he engaged in an affair with a longtime staffer, who grew up in Uvalde and then lit herself on fire outside her home here. The congressman has denied any sort of inappropriate relationship.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) called the accusations “very serious,” and at least eight of Gonzales’s Republican colleagues in the House have called on him to drop out of the race or resign. Gonzales and his congressional office did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. He told reporters on Capitol Hill earlier this week that he would continue to “work every day for the people of Texas.”
Here in Uvalde, a community of 15,000 people that has endured more than its fair share of heartache, that episode has transformed the GOP primary into a raw, emotional contest that will leave deep wounds no matter what. The backyard where Gonzales’s aide lit herself on fire is two blocks from a memorial at what remains of Robb Elementary, where 19 children and two teachers were killed in 2022.
“These are both things that run deep,” said Carlos Lopez, the local Democratic Party chair. “People are flabbergasted.”
Herrera’s firm adherence to the Second Amendment — he has designed a rifle he calls the “AK-50” — may be an added advantage to winning over GOP primary voters here in Texas’s sprawling 23rd District, which covers an area twice the size of West Virginia.
The area stretches about 800 miles along the border from the San Antonio suburbs to El Paso, including many rural communities where guns are sacrosanct and where the Uvalde shooting did little to change that.
But some of Herrera’s own conduct has also drawn scrutiny, including joking about veterans’ high suicide rate and videos on YouTube in which he has fired Nazi-made weapons and shot a gun while yelling: “for the Fatherland!”
(Herrera has said his jokes about veterans were an example of dark humor and characterized shooting the Nazi-made guns as a way “to learn about history.”)
“These guys have made big mistakes that are going to cost them both. It’s probably going to cause a lot of Republican voters to be upset or disgusted about different things,” said Brendan Steinhauser, a GOP strategist in Texas who has been attacked by Herrera online.
Steinhauser — and plenty of Democrats — say that regardless of who wins the nomination, those incidents could give Democrats more of an opening in November, even though the district was redrawn by the state GOP last year to give their party more of an edge. President Donald Trump won the newly drawn district in 2024 by nearly 15 points.
“If you’re trying to defend yourself for having an affair with your staffer and the poor woman committed a horrific and tragic suicide, or you’re defending yourself for shooting Nazi weapons and calling them ‘the original ghetto blaster’ … it does not put the GOP in a good position, to put it mildly,” he said.
Herrera, who has hosted a campaign event at a gun range near the site of the El Paso Walmart shooting, said in an interview that he would edge out Gonzales on policy, including on guns — the reason that he had entered the contest to begin with.
He said that the bipartisan gun bill Gonzales supported — which expanded criminal background checks for some gun buyers, barred more domestic-violence offenders from purchasing firearms and funded programs to let authorities to seize guns from troubled individuals — would not have prevented the Robb shooting, which was carried out with a legally purchased weapon.
“There’s no detriment to having a representative that values the Constitution above special interests — above D.C. money and above interests that are outside of the district,” he said. “I’m happy to not only support the Second Amendment, but the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment — all the things my opponent has failed to do.”
At least some voters in Uvalde appeared to agree.
“I don’t like [Gonzales] voting against the gun issues,” said Terri Black, a nurse in her late 50s who had come to see Herrera speak and answer questions — in front of a banner branded with his logo — on the patio of a furniture store.
Her husband, Charlie Black, a rancher also his late 50s, said he thought that Gonzales was not as conservative as he made himself out to be.
“We have the freedom to bear arms, and he [Herrera] will protect that,” Black added. “Our country is built on that.”
A third candidate, Quico Canseco — who represented the 23rd District in Congress from 2011 to 2013 — has largely trailed the two in fundraising but could push the contest into a runoff.
Though allegations about an affair Gonzales may have had with his staffer, Regina Ann Aviles-Santos, had persisted locally for months, they exploded on Capitol Hill and in national circles when another former aide of his — and then Aviles-Santos’s estranged husband — released text messages purporting to confirm the affair.
One series of messages provided to The Washington Post by Adrian Aviles documented an increasingly sexual conversation between his wife and the congressman in the early hours of May 9, 2024, in which he pressed her on her favorite sex position and she repeatedly pushed back on his advances. (His lawyer, Bobby Barrera, said Aviles owned the phone line and thus had access to the text messages; Gonzales has declined to answer questions on whether they were authentic.)
“Then send me a sexy pic,” Gonzales, whose contact was saved as only “TG,” wrote to her shortly after midnight.
“I swear my life has been a Telenovela for the past seven days,” she answered. “You don’t really want a hot picture of me.”
“Yes I do,” he wrote back. “Hurry”
More than a year after those messages were purportedly sent, Santos-Aviles — by then estranged from her husband — poured gasoline on herself and then lit herself on fire in her Uvalde backyard, according to a police report. She told officers she decided to self-immolate after learning her husband was having an affair, the report said. She died the next day.
A friend of hers told a police detective that “Regina’s supposed affair” had strained the couple’s marriage and led to Aviles’s affair, according to the report.
None of the dozen or so Republicans who voted at Uvalde County’s one early polling location on Wednesday afternoon would acknowledge publicly that they voted for Gonzales.
But Dawn Swapp, 70, said Santos-Aviles’s death was the deciding factor to back Herrera. “I didn’t like what happened with the girl — if he had an affair with her and then she killed herself, that’s horrible,” she said.
The only Gonzales voter who agreed to answer questions — on the condition their name not be published — said Gonzales’ slightly more moderate brand of politics was a better fit for the district.
Notwithstanding the circumstances, a primary victory for Herrera would make a statement about guns.
Some Democrats predicted that the school shooting would have bolstered their party here, but Uvalde County — which is more than 70 percent Hispanic — got redder in that fall’s elections. In 2024, Gonzales won nearly double the votes Herrera did in Uvalde County and then edged him out by about 250 votes — or 10 points — in the June runoff locally.
“We get on with our lives, and it’s sad that we’re not vocal,” said Uvalde County Commissioner Ronnie Garza, a Democrat. He said that a mix of big money behind Republicans, gerrymandering and a lack of political motivation meant that many voters seemed to forget about the massacre, even a few years later.
“Some people would like to put this away and move on,” he added. For them, “it’s kind of like a scab. You keep scratching it, and it can’t heal.”
Kadia Goba in Washington contributed to this report.
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