Rep. Tony Gonzales is out. The three-term Texas Republican announced Thursday he would not seek re-election, ending a campaign that had become increasingly untenable after he admitted to an affair with a former congressional aide — a woman who later took her own life. The decision, made hours after House Speaker Mike Johnson and the full House GOP leadership publicly called on him to quit the race, marks one of the more dramatic collapses of a congressional career in recent Texas political history, and it leaves one of the most strategically significant districts in the country suddenly wide open.
Gonzales had spent weeks insisting he would fight on. As recently as days before Tuesday’s primary, he was denying the affair altogether. That changed Wednesday when he appeared on “The Joe Pags Show” and offered a different account. “I made a mistake and I had a lapse in judgment, and there was a lack of faith, and I take full responsibility for those actions,” he said.
He added that he had reconciled with his wife and sought forgiveness from God. The admission came the morning after voters in Texas’s 23rd Congressional District sent him into a runoff against challenger Brandon Herrera — and the same day the House Ethics Committee formally launched an investigation into his conduct.
The aide at the center of the scandal was Regina Santos-Aviles, a 35-year-old Uvalde office coordinator who was, by all accounts, well-known and beloved in a community that had already endured more grief than most. She died after setting herself on fire in the backyard of her home in Uvalde. The Bexar County Medical Examiner ruled her death a suicide.
Rumors about a relationship between Santos-Aviles and Gonzales had circulated since the conservative outlet Current Revolt first reported on her death in September. Gonzales publicly dismissed those reports as “completely untruthful” as late as November at The Texas Tribune Festival. The story re-ignited on February 17 — the eve of early voting — when the San Antonio Express-News published a text message in which Santos-Aviles herself acknowledged the affair. Additional texts later surfaced, shared by her widower, showing Gonzales pressing for explicit photos and describing messages that Santos-Aviles reportedly characterized as going “too far.”
The political damage was immediate. Herrera, a YouTube gun-rights personality known online as “the AK Guy” who owns a small firearms manufacturing company in San Antonio, had been running against Gonzales from the right since 2024, and came within a few hundred votes of beating him in that year’s runoff. This time around, Herrera outperformed Gonzales decisively on election day itself, even as Gonzales held leads from early and absentee voting — a pattern that suggested the scandal’s final-days coverage was landing with voters. Final primary returns had Herrera finishing ahead, at roughly 43% to Gonzales’s 42%, sending the race to a May 26 runoff that will now never happen.
Gonzales had carried endorsements into this race that, under normal circumstances, should have been more than enough. President Donald Trump backed him, congratulating him by name at a rally in Corpus Christi days before the primary. Trump had not endorsed Gonzales in the 2024 cycle, making the 2026 backing politically significant — or so it seemed. Once the affair story broke wide open, Trump conspicuously omitted Gonzales when reposting all of his Texas congressional endorsements on the same day as that rally.
He has not publicly weighed in since.
Johnson, for his part, had initially counseled patience, telling reporters that accusations alone shouldn’t determine someone’s fitness to serve and that the investigative process deserved time to run its course. That measured stance evaporated Thursday, when Johnson joined Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Majority Whip Tom Emmer, and Conference Chairwoman Lisa McClain in a joint statement calling on Gonzales to step down from the race — though notably not from his seat.
The leadership’s reluctance to call for a resignation rather than merely a withdrawal from the runoff reflects the razor-thin math of the current House majority. Republicans hold the chamber by only a handful of seats, and a vacancy in a competitive district triggers a special election — an outcome leadership has every incentive to avoid. Their calculation appears to be that Gonzales can serve out his term without incident while the Ethics Committee process moves forward, protecting the seat’s Republican designation through January 2027 even as his electoral future evaporates.
House Republican Campaign Committee Chairman Richard Hudson aligned with leadership’s position: “Tony should withdraw from the runoff and allow the Ethics process to move forward while focusing on his family and serving his constituents for the remainder of his term.”
Gonzales ultimately complied, releasing a statement Thursday evening. “After deep reflection and with the support of my loving family, I have decided not to seek re-election while serving out the rest of this Congress with the same commitment I’ve always had to my district,” he said. “Through the rest of my term, I will continue fighting for my constituents, for whom I am eternally grateful.”
He made no direct mention of the affair, the Ethics investigation, or Santos-Aviles.
His departure immediately transforms the 23rd District into one of the most watched open-seat battlegrounds of the 2026 cycle. The district is massive — 27 counties stretching from San Antonio to the outskirts of El Paso, encompassing roughly 800 miles of the Texas-Mexico border. It is Republican-leaning but not impregnable, and Democrats will now have their best shot at flipping it without the structural advantages of incumbency working against them. Herrera, who had already been warning that a Gonzales general election candidacy would hand Democrats an opening, now moves forward as the presumptive Republican nominee heading into the May 26 runoff, though the field could change.
The story also carries echoes of a near-identical episode from the 2022 cycle. Rep. Van Taylor, a Texas Republican, announced his withdrawal from a runoff that year after admitting to an affair, ceding the path to former Collin County Judge Keith Self, who went on to win the nomination and currently serves in Congress. The parallel is striking — and it raises a question that no press conference or joint leadership statement will fully answer: how many more cases like these are quietly waiting in the wings before accountability arrives at the worst possible moment for everyone involved?
There is something particularly painful about how this story intersects with Uvalde. Santos-Aviles worked in Gonzales’s Uvalde office — a district that Gonzales represents and that was scarred by one of the worst school shootings in American history. Gonzales had cast one of the more consequential votes of his congressional tenure in the wake of that massacre, backing a bipartisan gun safety bill in 2022. That vote earned him a censure from the Texas Republican Party and became the central issue in his successive primary battles against Herrera, who had pledged to defend gun rights without exception. There is an irony, sharp enough to cut, in the fact that the scandal now ending Gonzales’s career traces back to the same community he chose to stand for when it was politically costly to do so.
That history does not exonerate what he is accused of. The text messages are what they are. The Ethics investigation will proceed regardless of whether Gonzales is on the ballot. And the woman at the center of this is gone, having died in one of the most harrowing ways imaginable, in the backyard of her home in a city that has already buried too many of its own.
Whatever the full accounting of events turns out to be, the political career of Tony Gonzales is over. The rest — the Ethics findings, the fate of the 23rd District, and what any of it means for the Republicans trying to hold a majority measured in single digits — is still very much unresolved.
