Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas is staring down what may be the final days of his congressional career. Trailing his primary challenger by 24 points in a recent poll, facing an active congressional ethics probe, and dogged by allegations of an extramarital affair with a staffer who later set herself on fire, the three-term congressman has refused to resign despite calls from more than half a dozen Republican colleagues to step aside.
He and challenger Brandon Herrera face off again Tuesday in a rematch of a razor-thin primary runoff Gonzales won two years ago by roughly 400 votes. This time, the math looks very different.
An internal campaign poll commissioned by Herrera's team in late February showed Gonzales at just 21% support, compared to Herrera's 45%. Another 26% remained undecided, with former Rep. Francisco "Quico" Canseco and construction executive Keith Barton each pulling 4%. If Herrera clears the 50% threshold, there is no runoff. The arrow, as Herrera put it, is already in flight.
At the center of the scandal is the death of Regina Santos-Aviles, a 35-year-old mother of one who served as Gonzales' regional director. Santos-Aviles self-immolated in the backyard of her Uvalde home and died on September 14. First responders reported that she told them she had discovered her husband was cheating on her with her best friend, and that she poured gasoline on herself and set herself on fire. Police records and autopsy notes indicated she had been drinking and taking antidepressants.
Text messages obtained by the New York Post from a May 2024 exchange, some 16 months before her death, reportedly show Santos-Aviles admitting to an "affair." One message attributed to Gonzales reads: "Then send me a sexy pic." Her widower, Adrian Aviles, denied the claim when contacted. A former colleague of Santos-Aviles also denied it.
Whatever the full truth, the human cost here is undeniable. A young mother is dead. A family is shattered. And a sitting congressman's only public response, delivered to CNN's Manu Raju on Capitol Hill, was this:
"What you've seen is not all the facts."
That is not a denial. It is not an explanation. It is the kind of sentence a lawyer approves and a voter sees right through.
The affair allegations accelerated Gonzales' decline, but they did not cause it. His standing with the Republican base in Texas's 23rd Congressional District had been eroding for years. The district stretches roughly 800 miles from San Antonio to El Paso across the border regions of west Texas, and all but a handful of its counties voted heavily for Trump in 2024. The voters there care about border security. Gonzales gave them reasons to doubt he did.
A former aide who worked for Gonzales from 2021 to 2023 in a border county office told the Post she was "done with Tony," and laid out her reasoning plainly:
"I don't feel he was doing enough for the border crisis to stop that, the red-flag laws, and then the last straw was him voting for all the LGBT stuff, same-sex marriage."
That is not one grievance. It is a list. Red-flag laws. Same-sex marriage. And a perceived lack of urgency on the border, in a district where the border is not an abstraction but a daily reality. When your own former staff is cataloguing your betrayals for reporters, the problem predates any scandal.
At an event in Corpus Christi on Friday, Gonzales was booed by some attendees. The chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Conference and father of six is watching his political coalition disintegrate in real time.
Brandon Herrera, the firearms enthusiast and YouTuber known as "The AK Guy" with more than 4 million online followers, has run a campaign squarely aimed at the district's priorities. His closing message to voters focused on border security, affordability, and veterans' issues. Speaking to the Post on Sunday, Herrera framed the stakes in terms that mirror the broader MAGA agenda:
"Let's help President Trump codify the things that he's done to secure the border; let's work on the massive financial crisis, the debt crisis we're in in this country; let's make sure that veterans get the health care that they deserve and that they were promised, especially in such a veteran-dense district like District 23."
That is a message built for the district: concrete, policy-forward, and aligned with what Republican voters in border country actually want from their representative. Herrera has also argued that Gonzales' refusal to come clean about the alleged affair creates a general election vulnerability, claiming that Gonzales' "lies" could allow Democrats to "flip a reliable Republican seat blue."
With Republicans holding 218 seats to Democrats' 214 heading into the 2026 midterms, that is not a hypothetical concern. It is arithmetic.
House Speaker Mike Johnson called the accusations against Gonzales "very serious" and said he had privately urged the congressman "to address" the matter "directly and head on with his constituents." That is about as far as a Speaker will go publicly against a sitting member of his own conference, but the message was clear enough. Johnson did not vouch for Gonzales. He did not rally to his defense. He told him to face his voters.
The Office of Congressional Conduct began probing the purported affair in November but will not be able to refer findings to the House Ethics Committee for potential punishments until after the primary election. The timeline means voters will render their verdict before the institution does.
This is a race where the outcome may already be determined, and the election is just a formality. Gonzales' support has collapsed among the people who know him best: his former staff, his colleagues, his constituents. The ethics probe hangs overhead. The text messages are public. The woman at the center of the allegations is dead, and his response has been to say the public doesn't have "all the facts" without offering any of his own.
Herrera does not need to be a perfect candidate. He needs to be an acceptable alternative in a district that has already moved on. In a deep-red stretch of border Texas where voters backed Trump by wide margins, the question is not whether the district stays Republican. It is whether the Republican who holds it deserves to.
Tuesday will answer that.
