Tony Gonzales of Texas resigned after being accused of having improper relationships with staff, including a former staffer who died by suicide. The Republican who ran to replace him, gun influencer Brandon Herrera, known online as “the AK Guy,” had a long history of using profane and misogynistic language to denigrate women. The district had gone for President Donald Trump by 15 points in 2024.
But on Tuesday, Democrat Katy Padilla Stout flipped the seat, which stretches along the U.S.-Mexico border from El Paso to San Antonio. Padilla Stout, a former child welfare attorney and teacher, will be the first Latina to represent the district. Padilla Stout’s win came amid a bipartisan reckoning over sexual misconduct spurred by the release of the Epstein files.
In Ohio, Democrat Brian Poindexter defeated Rep. Max Miller, who had been accused of domestic violence by his ex-wife; he denied the allegations. In North Carolina, Democrat Jamie Ager flipped a seat held by Rep.
Chuck Edwards, who dropped his reelection bid and was censured after a House Ethics investigation into his inappropriate relationships with young staff. Jimmy Gomez of California, also under a House Ethics probe over alleged relationships with staff, lost to progressive Angela Gonzales-Torres. Voters’ frustration with high prices and anger at the Trump administration’s policies drove Democrats’ tsunami-level victories Tuesday, flipping control of both the House and the U.S.
But the results also show that voters were fed up with misbehaving men of both parties. The release of the files connected to the late disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein became a major campaign issue for Democrats, who connected the Epstein files to corruption. And many Democratic men became more comfortable leaning into their own masculinity on the campaign trail.
Voters also largely weren’t swayed by Republicans’ efforts to make the election a referendum on the narrow conception of gender they put forth with attacks on transgender people and a pugilistic, machismo-laden vision of masculinity rooted in muscles and high testosterone. The conservative ideal of masculinity was perhaps best encapsulated by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s state of the force address in September, where he declared the department would no longer be the “woke” or “weak” department with a Dr. Seuss-ian definition: “No fatties.
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