It's a good start, but we really need more of this and fast. I can only hope this is the beginning because if it isn't we are going to be in some dire straits.
I believe Herrera's victorious campaign provides some good starting lessons for any other young Republican who wants to challenge the old guard & win.
1) Do not sperg about Trump - Herrera's opponent actually did have Trump's endorsement and Herrera still beat him regardless. Herrera avoided directly attacking Trump and instead hammered Gonzales on all the times he voted against Trump's agenda & supporters.
Herrera even avoided losing his shit over the bombing of Iran - his statement was a short one, wishing that it would be a quick, effective campaign and that American servicemen stay safe (ending with a joke about F-14s), nothing overly alienating to either interventionists or isolationists and certainly not to Trump. Whatever we might think of him on KF, Trump is still popular with actual Republican voters IRL and will likely remain so, barring a decades-long ground war in Iran and/or leaked footage of him personally diddling an 11 year old girl on Epstein's island. Bashing him directly even if he endorses your primary opponent is clearly a losing proposition, even if he doesn't notice & directly nuke you on social media in retaliation it won't endear you to Republican primary voters. On the flipside, Putsch's (I think) meltdown about Trump a little while ago is a great example of what
not to do.
2) Do not sperg about Jews and other loathsome racial minorities - Suffice to say, real life is not Cozy.tv, it's not even Kiwi Farms (sadly). Republican primary voters are still largely normies who are not super tuned in to the JQ, the definition of izzat and the Indian Hate Thread, etc. and far from thinking you're based, they are going to be weirded out to the point of tuning you out if you start publicly blathering about how the Jews suck freshly circumcised baby dicks or how the Indians are rape goblins who reek of curry, no matter how true these things might be, so be sure to hide your powerlevel when running for office. Herrera didn't cuck out to AIPAC and actually had a post calling them out for their corrupting influence right after his first primary loss, but he never got super hung up on the Jews and kept his attacks on them strictly limited to the corruption/lobbying angle rather than tilting into anything overtly racial. He proceeded to win this time (and came close to winning last time) despite repeated attempts to smear him as a Nazi Klansman using his history of off-color jokes on Youtube.
3) Real life organization & work matters more than social media sperging - Herrera seems to have put a lot of work into crisscrossing his district, doing Q&A sessions with interested primary voters, getting his supporters organized, etc. this time and it clearly helped a lot. Yeah his online fame as the AK Guy helped too, as did online donations, but he definitely didn't rely solely on that and it would've been a terrible idea to do so. I think mistaking their online audience (who could be spread all over the country or world) for real primary voters in their district is a pitfall that troubles many online influencer types looking to wade into politics.
I'm sure there's more questions & lessons to be had about shit like foreign policy, economics, etc. but these seem like good basics to start with. Anyway, TX-23 seems to be a safely Republican district and was redrawn to be even more conservative this year, so unless it turns out Herrera had his own mistress that he drove to suicide/suicided, he should be fine. Also lol, his Dem opponent is named Katy Padilla
Stout and certainly fits that bill (quite uncomfortably given her size, I'm sure).
