Former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is in San Antonio on Sunday, Sept. 20, 2026, to stump for two South Texas Democrats — including Katy Padilla Stout, the Democratic nominee trying to flip Texas’s 23rd Congressional District against Republican Brandon Herrera, the gun-rights activist and YouTuber better known as @TheAKGuy.

The rally, organized through Buttigieg’s Win the Era PAC, is scheduled for 5–7 p.m. local time (Central), with the venue disclosed to attendees after RSVP, according to the San Antonio Current (Michael Karlis, Sept. 17) and Hoodline (Javi Gonzalez, Sept. 18). Sharing the stage billing with Stout is Johnny Garcia, a former Bexar County sheriff’s deputy running in Texas’s 35th District.

Buttigieg, who ran for president in 2020 and has been barnstorming midterm races through Win the Era, has endorsed more than 50 candidates this cycle, including Padilla Stout and Garcia, the Current reported. In a statement to the Current, Buttigieg cast the stop in national progressive terms:

“Voters in these districts have the chance to send leaders to Congress who will hold this administration accountable for their failures, work to lower healthcare costs, strengthen public schools, and build an economy where one job is enough,” Buttigieg said. “Johnny and Katy will prove in November that there is no such thing as a permanently red district or state, and I’m proud to be on their team.”

That is the parachute-in frame national Democrats are selling. On the other side of TX-23 sits Herrera — a grassroots gun-rights nominee who built a massive online following before politics, nearly beat incumbent Rep. Tony Gonzales in the 2024 GOP primary (losing by roughly 400 votes, per contemporaneous reporting cited by Hoodline), and then won the party’s nomination for the now-open seat. House Speaker Mike Johnson has backed Herrera, underscoring how nationalized the fight over this San Antonio–area district has become.

Why TX-23 is open — and why Herrera is the Republican to beat

The seat sat vacant after Gonzales resigned in April amid a House Ethics Committee investigation into an affair with an aide — a resignation that averted a scheduled expulsion vote, according to Texas Tribune reporting summarized by Hoodline. That vacuum handed Democrats a rare mid-cycle shot at a district that had been held by a Republican; it also handed Herrera a cleaner path than the razor-thin 2024 primary rematch he almost won against an entrenched incumbent.

Padilla Stout, a former Northside ISD teacher who serves on the Bexar County Child Welfare Board, won a four-way Democratic primary. Her campaign biography, as presented in local coverage, leans on classroom and child-welfare service. Herrera’s lane is different: Second Amendment activism, a direct-to-audience YouTube brand, and Speaker-level GOP institutional support — the kind of grassroots-plus-leadership combo national progressive PACs usually try to outspend rather than out-organize.

Sunday’s Buttigieg stop pairs Stout with Garcia under an affordability-and-public-safety message Democrats say can flip historically tough Texas ground. Whether a celebrity Cabinet alum and Win the Era branding move TX-23 voters is the test; Herrera enters as the Republican nominee with the online army, the near-miss primary receipt from 2024, and the Speaker’s blessing.

As of Sunday afternoon Eastern — before the 5 p.m. CT doors — the Current and Hoodline accounts remain the advance record: scheduled stump, attributed Buttigieg quotes, no new on-the-ground remarks yet. If fresh quotes drop after the rally, they will belong in an update; until then, the story is a national progressive PAC dropping into San Antonio to prop up Stout while Herrera holds the GOP line in an open border-district race.

Sources