The bad news for Republicans keeps piling up in Fox News’s latest 2026 Power Rankings, which shifted 17 races toward Democrats. Several deep-red districts the GOP has held for years are among them. But if you’re a gun owner pulling for Brandon Herrera in Texas’s 23rd Congressional District, there’s a bright spot in the numbers.
Fox still rates Herrera the “likely” winner on Election Day. That’s no small thing given how many other Texas Republicans are watching their odds slide.
Texas Is “Slipping Away”
According to Fox, the Lone Star State is eroding for the GOP. Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico are now locked in what the network calls a true toss-up for the Texas Senate, while the governor’s race has slipped to “leans R.” Even the 34th Congressional District, redrawn to help Republicans, got bumped from “toss-up” to “Lean D.”
Elsewhere, Fox downgraded John McGuire’s Virginia Fifth from “likely R” to “leans R,” even though McGuire won the seat in 2024 by 15 points. TX-23 holding its “likely R” rating in that environment says something.
The Attacks Aren’t Landing — Yet
National outlets have gone after Herrera. The New York Times, CNN, and others have run critical stories over remarks he made on his podcast over the years. The Times flagged his repeated cracks about overweight feminists and revived the antisemitism claims his former primary opponent Tony Gonzales pushed in 2024, built around jokes about Nazis and a video in which he called a German WWII machine gun the original “ghetto blaster.”
Worth remembering how Herrera got the nomination this cycle: Gonzales didn’t lose it, he abandoned it. The incumbent dropped out mid-race after an affair scandal, handing Herrera the nomination outright. That timeline matters for the attack narrative — the Times is amplifying claims made by a candidate who wasn’t willing to stay in and try to win with them.
So far, none of it appears to be hurting the campaign, though there’s been no recent polling in TX-23 since August, when TTAG covered a Herrera six-point lead. AB PAC, founded by Media Matters creator David Brock, has spent nearly $200,000 attacking Herrera, but that’s in line with what the group has thrown at other Republicans on its target list.
The bigger tell: gun control groups aren’t dumping money into this race. Giffords endorsed Democrat Katy Padilla Stout in June and has chipped in $1,000 as of September 22, but the available FEC filings show neither Giffords nor Everytown among the major outside spenders. Giffords PAC has $6 million in its coffers and Emma Brown just launched a $10 million midterm ad blitz — the fact that TX-23 hasn’t drawn a slice of that spending is telling. If the gun control lobby thought Herrera was vulnerable, you’d expect cash flooding in.
Herrera also has the money advantage on his own side of the ledger. FEC filings showed him with $309,000 cash on hand at the end of June to Padilla Stout’s $171,000.
Don’t Get Cocky
The cautionary note comes from VoteHub, which now gives Herrera a 61 percent chance of winning, down from a mid-July high of 73 percent, with six points lost in the past two weeks. VoteHub’s projection has Herrera taking 51.2 percent — a win, but a tight one. Gonzales won this same seat with more than 62 percent two years ago, so the erosion Fox found statewide may be showing up here too.
Herrera’s not in Paxton-level trouble. But the advice stands: stay humble, keep working, and throw whatever support you can behind his campaign — because Fox’s optimism only holds if the ground game does.
