It’s no surprise that I’m a fan of Brandon Herrera for the 23rd District of Texas. He’s one of us, with a massive gun collection and a dark sense of humor that has gotten him in a spot of difficulty from time to time, but none of it has stuck since it was, in fact, humor.
Hell, his opponent and her supporters couldn’t even get their attack over him owning a copy of Mein Kampf to stick, in part because the clip they used cut out the part where he talked about how deranged Hitler sounded in the text. It wasn’t hard to find that podcast episode and provide the rest of the clip, after all.
But the fact that I like the guy doesn’t ensure he’ll actually win, right? I mean, I liked him two years ago and we know how that turned out.
I’m not seeing a lot of polling out of that district, but what little there is shows Herrera with a slim lead. In the fundraising department, though? That’s a very different story, as Republicans throughout Texas are winning that fight, but Herrera especially.
In the new Congressional District 23, Democrat Katy Padilla Stout has raised $238,000, with only $145,000 cash on hand. She is expected to lose in November to Republican Youtuber and gun rights activist Brandon Herrera. who has raised more than $1.5 million, with more than $305,000 cash on hand. Former Republican U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales held the seat until he was forced to resign after two sex scandals, including one involving a former staffer who killed herself.
Two years ago, Herrera almost won a runoff against Gonzales despite being outspent something like 10-to-1. This time, he’s got the fundraising edge and is clearly spending it effectively.
Let’s also remember that this is the district that contains Uvalde, which is why Gonzales felt so comfortable coming out for gun control after the shooting there. Herrera isn’t exactly inclined to bend the knee on that, understanding that the gun is never the problem, but the person pulling the trigger.
Stout, though, has tried to follow Gonzales’s 2024 playbook with Herrera, taking clips from his podcast or YouTube videos out of context and trusting that the masses will be too stupid to actually look at the information for themselves. However, if you look at how narrow that runoff was, with Herrera losing by about 400 votes despite the difference in spending, it should be clear that such attacks didn’t do much.
Who knew that trying to say a guy who thought Hitler was deranged and who actually shot a likeness of Hitler in the head was a Nazi could backfire?
Now, I suspect that much of Herrera’s fundraising has been from outside of the district. I also think that Stout has gotten a lot of money from outside the district, too, since anti-gunners really don’t want Brandon Herrera in Congress.
If I were them, I wouldn’t want him in there, either.
Sure, they might breathe a little easier that Thomas Massie isn’t going to be back–he was very pro-gun, even if you disagreed with a lot of other stuff he said–but having someone like Herrera come in would set them right back to square one.
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