More than half of Republicans chose an alternative to U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales in the five-way Republican primary this month.
Now, those who would seek a change in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District are down to a single alternative in Brandon Herrera, a political newcomer who must convince party faithful he’s qualified to replace an experienced incumbent.
The 28-year-old YouTube personality, who designs and sells his own line of firearms, took 25% of the vote in the March primary. He’ll face Gonzales, who took 45%, in a May 28 runoff.
At his first major campaign rally since the primary, roughly 200 attendees turned out to see Herrera at the Angry Elephant last Friday.
The event, which featured conservative firebrand U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), drew a number of fans of Herrera’s YouTube channel, including one who waited in line for Herrera to sign his copy of Skillset magazine featuring the candidate on the cover. The publication is aimed at promoting the “alpha” lifestyle.
Among the regular GOP faithful also in attendance at Friday’s event, however, some said they were still unsure what to think of Herrera and his unconventional campaign.
Since launching a shoestring bid for Congress at a gathering of young libertarians last year, Herrera has brought on some professional campaign staffers with ties to former President Donald Trump. He’s raised more than $800,000 from donors across the country, and in the weeks since the primary, his team has been aggressively working to shore up support from more traditional political backers.
“I believe he’s a serious candidate, and he’s eventually probably going to have all the support from the other three candidates who ran in the primary,” said Republican Party of Bexar County Chair Jeff McManus, who has been trying to help Herrera lock down those endorsements.
Meanwhile, lingering uncertainty about Herrera’s conservative credentials has helped Gonzales pick up some recent endorsements from officials better known for their efforts rooting out GOP moderates, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
“The AK Guy”
Herrera grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he was making his own YouTube videos by the sixth grade — and by high school, building his own guns.
The combination of those two interests would eventually bring Herrera to San Antonio, where a growing number of firearms influencers, like the Donut Operator and Demolition Ranch; and gun lifestyle brands like Black Rifle Coffee Company have found a following among the area’s large military community.
“I started trying to build guns when I was like 15 or 16,” Herrera said in a 2023 interview with Skillset Magazine. “I got the bug pretty early.”
Though he started an undergraduate degree in North Carolina with plans to go to law school, Herrera left to focus on his entrepreneurial pursuits.
Herrera’s YouTube channel makes videos that he calls a “blend of guns and comedy” and now has more than 3.2 million followers.
His first viral video surpassed 1 million views in 2019, poking fun at AR-style rifle owners, whom he depicted as uptight compared to AK-style gun owners. Other videos that have earned him recognition within the gun rights community teach viewers about rare or unusual firearms.
“He started becoming more and more interested in historic firearms, restoring them and telling people about them,” said Michael Milano, a longtime friend and business partner of Herrera’s, in an interview with the San Antonio Report.
Herrera was already sourcing parts and building guns to feature on his YouTube channel when followers started asking him to produce and sell them, which led to the creation of his business selling custom Kalashnikov rifles.
In 2021, that work drove Herrera and his company, The AK Guy Inc., to move to San Antonio, where gun content creators are building their own Hollywood. Their industry has grown so much in recent years that gun content creators have their own awards, called the “Gundies” held in Uvalde, which named Herrera 2023’s Influencer of the Year.
“I consider myself a terrible influence,” he said in an acceptance speech after receiving that award. “If you have small children in the audience, don’t let them watch my stuff.”
Gun politics
At a candidate forum hosted by the Republican Party of Bexar County last month, Herrera fielded questions on a much broader range of conservative issues, from Social Security to border security.
But gun rights are the central theme of his campaign, and Herrera credits Gonzales’ support for a 2022 law that sought to keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers and incentivizing red flag laws as his inspiration for running.
That law, known as the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, came in response to the May 2022 Uvalde school shooting — which took place in Gonzales’ district and spurred the congressman to become outspoken about the issue of gun safety despite his general support of gun rights.
“The first thing that caught my attention is when he voted with Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi on a gun control bill, which … got me looking into some other bills that he voted on,” Herrera said at the Bexar GOP candidate forum.
As lawmakers in D.C. searched for a legislative solution in the aftermath of the shooting that killed two teachers and 19 students at Robb Elementary School, Gonzales twice voted against gun safety proposals involving enhanced background checks before supporting the much narrower law.
“What happened in Uvalde should have never happened,” Gonzales said in a recent interview with CNN. “Not because [the shooter] was 18 years old. Not because it was an AR. Because he was bats— crazy, right? So crazy people should not have access to kill innocent people.”
Asked how he would have handled the situation differently, Herrera said that preventing another tragedy like the one in Uvalde was outside the scope of the federal government, which is now in control of most gun laws, thanks to the Supreme Court.
“Everybody’s got that innate desire to do something. Everybody wants to change something,” Herrera said at the February candidate forum.
“Realistically, what does help is better law enforcement training. They treated [the Uvalde shooter] like a barricaded suspect instead of like a mass shooting where they should have just gone in,” he said. “On top of that, fortify our schools. People only go to soft targets where they know that they will not be shot back.”
Even among those who largely share his policy perspective on gun rights, Herrera has taken some criticism for a lack of sensitivity on the subject.
A recent joke he made about gun-related suicide deaths among veterans has been widely circulated by his critics, and an inactive explosive device he left behind at a December campaign event in Uvalde drew a response from the San Antonio Police Department’s bomb squad.
The Democrat in the race, Santos Limon, is already campaigning on gun safety and called Herrera’s videos a bad example for young people.
“It’s like watching Rambo ‘First Blood’ when he was out there with that .50-caliber gun,” Limon said of Herrera in an interview with NBC. “Is that what our teenagers need to see? Our high school graduates, are they going to vote for a guy like that?”
National influence
Headed into the primary, national political operatives said Gonzales was warned to take his race more seriously.
The Navy cryptologist was censured by the Republican Party of Texas in March of last year for breaking with the party on gun rights, same-sex marriage and border issues, but responded defiantly to the rebuke, insisting he would crush any GOP opponents.
From election night’s crowded field, Medina County GOP Chair Julie Clark, who pushed the state party to censure Gonzales, took 14% of the vote. Retired Border Patrol chaplain Frank Lopez Jr. took 11%, while former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Victor Avila took 6%.
Clark and Lopez did not respond to a request for comment about the runoff, while Avila has thrown his support behind Herrera.
“From the very beginning when I met Brandon, we knew that we weren’t challenging each other,” Avila said at the Angry Elephant. “The challenge was Tony Gonzales, and he should be very scared because of his turnout.”
At the same time that Texas Republicans have been working to root out their party’s moderates, tension among Republicans on Capitol Hill had also grown since taking control of the House in 2023.
The conservative wing blames GOP moderates for not being willing to withhold government funding bills to advance their goals, something Gaetz helped oust the party’s first speaker over last year.
“There’s a lot of things that a government shutdown could be initiated for,” said Herrera, who has vowed to join the cadre of hardline conservatives on Capitol Hill. “People are worried about being controversial or being responsible for a government shutdown. I say shut it down.”
Gonzales, who serves on the House Appropriations Committee, has been among those seeking compromise to avoid a government shutdown that could negatively impact Border Patrol agents and other government employees in his district.
He has the backing of U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has begged Republican lawmakers not to campaign against their colleagues, amid a tough national political landscape this year.
But it’s unclear whether GOP leaders would divert resources from elsewhere on the House map to help a well-funded incumbent fend off a primary challenge to a seat considered safely red.
Shoring up support
Herrera, meanwhile, is receiving his own attention from Washington, D.C.
His Second Amendment advocacy helped him connect with Gaetz, who last year invited him to testify at his congressional field hearing in Florida aimed at building the case to abolish the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Now Herrera’s campaign is run by former Trump campaign staffer Matt Braynard, whose political advocacy group Look Ahead America focuses on defending those involved in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Asked about that event at the Republican Party of Bexar County forum, Herrera characterized the event as “some of the best-armed country people in the United States” going to D.C. “completely unarmed to take a police-guided tour of the capitol.”
Last week, Herrera’s momentum finally drew a response from Gonzales’ campaign, which had ignored Herrera during the primary. The campaign launched a new ad highlighting critical comments Herrera made about Trump’s first term and issued a memo suggesting he could put the seat at risk in November.
“Washington Democrats are all rooting for Brandon Herrera because they know he would hand this seat over to an extreme Democrat,” Gonzales’ campaign warned in the memo.
Though the district was once one of the most competitive in the country, it has since been redrawn to favor Republicans. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report currently rates it “Solid Republican.“
