A gun rights activist and hard-right YouTuber became the default Republican nominee in a West Texas congressional race late Thursday after a sex scandal forced the incumbent, Representative Tony Gonzales, to drop his bid for re-election.
By Friday, clips of the challenger, Brandon Herrera, shooting Nazi-era weapons and discussing his copy of “Mein Kampf” were circulating widely among Democrats. Suddenly Mr. Gonzales’s district — the solidly red Texas 23rd — appeared to Democrats as one they could flip in November.
Democratic strategists in Washington were exploring whether to dedicate money to support their candidate in the district, which stretches from San Antonio along the U.S.-Mexico border to El Paso.
The seat was not on the party’s initial list of potentially vulnerable Republican districts. Adding it would mean fund-raising and providing strategy help for the Democratic candidate in the race, Katy Padilla Stout. It also could create an added headache for Republicans, who have already had their hopes of flipping five Democratic U.S. House seats in Texas grow more remote.
Mr. Herrera, popular with the hard-right base of Republican voters, runs a YouTube channel with more than four million subscribers where he is known as the AK Guy. He tests firearms and discusses military history in his videos.
In an interview on Friday, Mr. Herrera said the clips being shared online by Democrats were selectively edited, “disingenuous” attacks against him.
“I have a career on the internet doing comedy,” Mr. Herrera told The New York Times. “If their strategy is going to be clutching their fake pearls, and they don’t know the difference between jokes and what I actually believe, then this is going to be a very annoying few months.”
In his video of the Nazi submachine gun, Mr. Herrera calls the weapon the “original ghetto blaster” and “Hitler’s street sweeper” and marches to a Nazi-era German war song.
In the interview, Mr. Herrera said he rejected the “teachings” found in “Mein Kampf” — “It’s very clear that I don’t” — and said he also owns a copy of “The Communist Manifesto.” The submachine gun video, he said, was part of a series in which he also tested Soviet andAmerican-developed firearms and made jokes about shooting Nazis.
Democrats hope that Mr. Herrera’s long internet archive will make him a less formidable opponent than the more moderate Mr. Gonzales. The congressman dropped out of the race amid mounting pressure from House Republicans over an affair with a former aide who killed herself last year. Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Herrera had been set to face off in a runoff in May after neither was able to win a majority of the votes in the primary election.
Ms. Padilla Stout, a first-time candidate who was a teacher before becoming a lawyer, said she jumped into the Democratic primary after hearing that Mr. Herrera would be one of the Republicans in the running.
“My first thought was there is no way I am letting this man represent my children,” she said in an interview. She won her race on Tuesday.
Ms. Padilla Stout called Mr. Herrera an “outsider” — he moved to Texas from North Carolina in 2021 — and said that because of his background as a firearms enthusiast, he should not represent a district that includes Uvalde, where 19 children and two teachers were killed in a shooting at an elementary school in 2022.
“This district has elected Democrats. It’s elected Republicans,” Ms. Padilla Stout said. “But one thing it has never elected is an extremist.”
Predominantly Hispanic and rural, the district has been represented by a Republican since 2015. It was redrawn by Texas Republicans last summer as part of the Trump administration’s push for redistricting in order to help preserve the party’s slim margin in the House.
Mr. Gonzales said he would serve out the remainder of his term.
Mr. Herrera narrowly lost to Mr. Gonzales in the 2024 Republican primary for this same seat. He described his victory this week as “vindication” for “the good guys.”
“I’m glad that we held somebody accountable,” Mr. Herrera told The Times.
When asked about Democrats’ hopes that his online comments would make him a weaker opponent, he said it was Mr. Gonzales who had put the seat at risk for Republicans.
“Tony did a great job making the seat vulnerable,” Mr. Herrera said.
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