Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales is headed to a runoff in a tight Texas primary race rocked by allegations that Gonzales had an affair with an aide who died after lighting herself on fire.
Gonzales on Tuesday fell short of the majority vote required to avoid a runoff. Now he will face off against the other top finisher in the GOP primary, Brandon Herrera, a YouTuber with a gun business who calls himself “the AK Guy.” Gonzales and Herrera were close to tied early Wednesday morning with most of the vote counted.
Herrera attacked the more centrist Gonzales from the right, criticizing the congressman’s vote for gun-control legislation that was inspired in part by a tragedy in his district: the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde. But personal scandal rather than policy tookcenter stage in the final stretch of the primary, as new information surfaced about Gonzales’s relationship with a former staffer, Regina Ann Santos-Aviles.
The staffer’s estranged husband accused the congressman — a married father of six — of infidelity, and shared text messages that showed Gonzales pressing Santos-Aviles for a “sexy pic” and asking her about her favorite sex position.
Santos-Aviles pushed back against the lawmaker, writing, “This is going too far boss,” at one point in the May 2024 conversation.
Gonzales recently declined to say whether the messages are authentic.
Santos-Aviles doused herself in gasoline and lit herself on fire in her backyard about a year and a half after the messages were sent. Before she died, Santos-Aviles told police officers she had learned that her husband was having an affair, according to a police report, which also noted that a friend said “Regina’s supposed affair” had strained the marriage.
Some of Gonzales’s Republican colleagues in Congress urged him to drop out or resign amid the new scrutiny of his relationship with Santos-Aviles. But Gonzales said he would not step down. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) called the accusations “very serious” last month but declined to call on Gonzales to step aside.
Herrera came close to unseating Gonzales in 2024, trailing him in a runoff by a few hundred votes. Announcing another bid for the seat last year, he attacked the congressman as insufficiently conservative and noted the Texas GOP’s move in 2023 to censure Gonzales for what party officials called “lack of fidelity to Republican principles.”
Gonzales was the only House Republican from Texas to vote to codify the right to same-sex marriage and the only one to support a bipartisan gun-control bill ultimately signed into law by President Joe Biden. John Cornyn, the senior senator from Texas, helped negotiate the gun restrictions in the wake of the Uvalde school shooting, which left 19 students and two teachers dead.
“The reality is I’ve taken almost 1,400 votes, and the bulk of those have been with the Republican Party,” Gonzales said at the time.
Herrera, a Second Amendment rights activist with more than 4 million followers on YouTube, has controversies of his own. He drew backlash for a 2022 video featuring a Nazi-made gun, which he called a “a really cool piece of history.”
“The best way that I know to get you guys to learn about history is to make really f—ed up jokes about it,” he said.
The GOP has the advantage in the 23rd District, a sprawling region along the southern border that Texas Republicans made redder in last year’s redistricting. President Donald Trump would have won the redrawn district by nearly 15 points in 2024, but Democrats hope the drama on the GOP side of the race will give them a boost in the fall.
Teo Armus contributed to this report.
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