A Texas Democrat has been accused of editing a photo of his Republican rival to make her eyebrows look scarier.
Vicente Gonzalez and Mayra Flores are both incumbents but following redistricting, they are now fighting it out for Texas’s 34th District congressional seat.
An ad released by the Gonzalez campaign on Monday focusing on school safety and gun control features an image of Ms Flores which appears to have been edited.
The ad blasted the Republican, who won a special election to claim her seat earlier this year, for voting against the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas this summer.
The image of Ms Flores in the Gonzalez ad has a filter and skewed eyebrows. The photo appears to have been lifted from an Instagram post Ms Flores shared earlier this year.
“After the tragic shooting at Uvalde, Mayra Flores’ first vote in Congress was AGAINST a bipartisan school safety bill,” Mr Gonzalez tweeted as he shared the ad. “We need a representative that works to protect our children and families; not someone who puts them in danger. Remember to vote for Vicente Gonzalez.”
When the seemingly edited image of Ms Flores appears, the narrator of the ad says “Republican Mayra Flores’ first vote in Congress was against the Bipartisan Safe Communities Act”.
“She voted against keeping our children safe in schools, against keeping weapons out of the hands of Mexican cartels, and against keeping guns out of the hands of criminals with a prior history of domestic violence,” the narrator adds.
Ms Flores told Fox News Digital that she didn’t think voters would be susceptible to “scare tactics”.
“First, Vicente Gonzalez hired a racist blogger to attack me for my heritage. Now Vicente is doing the dirty work himself with this shameless and pathetic photoshopping,” she added. “The people in the [Rio Grande Valley] are smarter than this and will see right through Vicente’s scare tactics and constant lies.”
Ms Flores is a respiratory therapist and became the first member of the GOP to win her seat in 150 years, Vox noted.
Republicans have gained a lot of support recently for Latino voters in the area around the Rio Grande Valley near the Mexican border.
In the 2020 election, “the bluest of blue counties along the river, Zapata County, flipped to President Trump, who won 52.5 percent of the vote. It was the first time since Reconstruction that a Republican presidential candidate won Zapata County,” The Washington Post reported just days after the vote.
Democrats have argued that they didn’t put much effort into the special election this summer as the seat would be up for grabs again just a few months later.
Following the redistricting process, the Democrats look poised to retake the seat, with FiveThirtyEight listing it as D+17.
The Independent has reached out to the Gonzalez campaign for comment.
