I’ve not hidden my support for Brandon Herrera. I’ve purchased exactly one piece of campaign merch in my life, and it’s a t-shirt from Herrera’s campaign. He’s a very pro-gun candidate and that’s important to me. He’s not a one-issue candidate, either, which also matters, and while I don’t agree with him on everything, I do think he’s a solid choice for the House of Representatives.
His opponent isn’t.
Herrera made not just a solid showing, but came in first during the primary. He avoided a runoff because troubled incumbent Tony Gonzales withdrew from the race after his sordid history was revealed.
Two years earlier, he forced Gonzales into a runoff where GOP insiders outspent the Herrera campaign 10-to-1 and still only helped Gonzales win by about 400 votes.
Now, as Herrera is in the general election cycle, it seems that at least some of the Texas media are wetting themselves over him.
But now, both sides see a battleground. Polling shows that Democrats have an edge nationally (pending the outcomes of an ongoing nationwide redistricting war), and a majority of Hispanic voters disapprove of Trump. And, in the 23rd, the GOP finds itself running a neophyte with a colorful past rather than an incumbent Navy veteran. Herrera himself has even said that he may be trailing, while Stout has seen an influx of campaign donations.
“Brandon Herrera is probably the exact opposite of the type of candidate that most people want going into a competitive race in this election,” said Matt Angle, a longtime Democratic strategist and the director of the Lone Star Project. “His campaign is not about anything that people really care about.”
University of Texas at San Antonio political scientist Jon Taylor echoed the sentiment that Herrera’s nomination has created an opening for Democrats if they’re willing to invest.
“Stout has at least a puncher’s chance, if not better,” Taylor said. “Brandon Herrera is so radical compared to other candidates that there is an opening. … She is building a grassroots effort and a get-out-the-vote effort. It’s just simply a case of this race seems to still be a little bit under the radar.”
As the contest unfolds, Herrera is facing renewed scrutiny on his influencer past, which, according to the Texas Observer’s review of Herrera’s online footprint, includes patterns that have gone largely unnoticed: dissemination of memes associated with the “Boogaloo” movement that advocates for a second American Civil War and has inspired acts of terrorism; rationalization of and joking about violent deaths of people whose politics he describes as communist; and sanitization of the Confederacy’s stance on slavery—in addition to his discussion of the comparative accuracy of weapons used in mass shootings.
Now, let’s understand that Herrera is a guntuber. It’s how he makes much of his living—he’s also a firearm manufacturer, which accounts for another part of how he pays his bills—so his talking about guns used in mass shootings isn’t completely out of line. The “accuracy” thing was him saying that guns are more accurate than trucks or bombs, which can kill a whole hell of a lot more people than a firearm can. That’s hardly the same as the implication that he’s giving advice to mass killers.
Anyway, Democrats ran a poll back in March, and while they keep talking about how it shows the district as being in play, Herrera still led that poll. It was a narrow lead, sure, but I find it interesting that they’re not following that up to see if that’s held.
Instead, the media is painting Herrera as some kind of extremist, simply because they don’t like his positions. It’s not that he’s not running on things people care about. It’s that he’s not running on the things the left cares about. The Lone Star Project, for example, is about getting Democrats elected. Political scientists at universities have a long track record of being leftists, too.
So, what we have are a bunch of left-leaning voices arguing that Herrera is a radical, that he’s an extremist, all because he thinks our rights matter.
The thing is, they really do think that believing in the words on the page that the Second Amendment was written on is radical. Then again, they feel the same way as believing the rest of the Constitution matters, unless it can be twisted to benefit them.
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