The House Republican who represents Uvalde, Texas, and broke with his party to vote for a gun safety bill after the school shooting there will face a runoff election in May against a popular gun YouTuber.
Rep. Tony Gonzales failed to surpass the 50% threshold Tuesday in the Republican primary to avoid a runoff in the state’s 23rd District, which covers a vast rural area from the west region of Texas to the San Antonio suburbs and includes much of the U.S.-Mexico border along the Rio Grande. Gonzales, who is seeking a third two-year term in Congress, got 45.1% in unofficial results, while challenger Brandon Herrera came in second among five candidates, with 24.7%.
Gonzales and Herrera will compete in a runoff May 28, with the winner advancing to face Democrat Santos Limon in November. Limon, a civil engineer, won 58.6% in the Democratic primary Tuesday.
Herrera is part of a large gun culture on YouTube featuring people sometimes known as “gunfluencers” or “guntubers,” who post videos of themselves firing weapons. Herrera has risen to popularity on the platform, where he has 3.2 million subscribers and has posted 485 videos since 2014. His videos about weapons have gotten 557 million views on such topics as grenade launchers, Nazi machine guns and the gun used to kill Abraham Lincoln. He also makes and sells Kalashnikov-style rifles through his website and goes by the nickname “The AK Guy,” a reference to the infamous Russian family of machine guns that includes the AK-47.
On his campaign website he describes himself as “an entrepreneur, Second Amendment activist, and social media personality.”
“Texas is done with RINO’s. The war starts now,” Herrera said late Tuesday on X, using a common conservative abbreviation for “Republican in name only.”
