Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) has pressured a runoff election in Texas’ twenty third District, the place neither he nor any of his three challengers managed to get 50% of the vote on Tuesday.
Gonzales and his high challenger, Brandon Herrera, a gun rights influencer, will go head-to-head in a Might 26 runoff election to find out which man would be the Republican Celebration’s candidate in November’s common election.
The election will likely be a rematch, since Herrera additionally ran in opposition to Gonzales in 2024, however there’s a giant distinction this time: Gonzales is engulfed in scandal.
The third-term reasonable allegedly had an affair with a staffer in 2024. Her marriage collapsed after her husband found the reported relationship, and he mentioned she entered a depressive spiral, which resulted in September when she set herself on fireplace and died.
Gonzales has denied the affair, however the staffer’s widower, Adrian Aviles, shared text messages with HuffPost and different information retailers from his late spouse’s cellphone by which Gonzales requested her for a “attractive pic” and made different advances in 2024.
Aviles tried to succeed in a personal authorized settlement with Gonzales below the Congressional Accountability Act, which protects Capitol Hill staffers from sexual harassment and retaliation, however after one other staffer told the San Antonio News-Express about the affair final month, Gonzales claimed he was being “blackmailed.” Aviles’ lawyer instructed HuffPost that after folks came upon in regards to the affair, Gonzales created a hostile work surroundings.
Gonzales’ Republican colleagues don’t imagine he’s the goal of a coordinated political assault, as he’s claimed, and several other have mentioned he ought to both resign or a minimum of drop his marketing campaign.
“A male harassing a feminine worker, I simply can’t abdomen it, dude. I’ve received a spouse and a daughter. He must go,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said last month.
At least one voter within the district has mentioned the affair is a purpose to again Herrera.
Scandal apart, the runoff is a contest between competing visions of the Republican Party. Gonzales, whose district consists of Uvalde, the positioning of one of the horrific college shootings in U.S. historical past, voted for a bipartisan gun reform invoice after that taking pictures in 2022. Herrera, in the meantime, is a gun rights maximalist who made his identify as “The AK Man” on-line.
