Brandon Herrera is the Republican nominee for Congress in Texas's 23rd District. In 2023, on a podcast, he gave his view of what happened to America after women won the right to vote.
"I'm not saying that the 19th amendment was a mistake. I'm just saying the country went to shit after."
The clip — less than six seconds long — resurfaced on X on October 2, 2026, the day after MeidasTouch reported where it came from: a 2023 episode of the Painkiller Already podcast. The on-screen banner in the clip labels it episode 654.
The 19th Amendment is the one that says the right to vote "shall not be denied or abridged … on account of sex." It was ratified in August 1920. Herrera's line is a joke with a disclaimer bolted to the front, and the disclaimer doesn't change what the joke says: once women could vote, the country got worse.
What the hosts were talking about
Herrera didn't wander into the subject. According to MeidasTouch, the conversation was about UFC fighter Sean Strickland's argument that women should lose the right to vote.
Strickland had made that argument out loud at a UFC media event in June 2023, before a main-event fight:
"We need to go back to taking women out of the workforce. Maybe that's where we f*cked up, guys. We let women vote. No offense."
He followed it with: "We need to put women back in the kitchen."
So the question on the table was whether giving women the vote was a mistake. Herrera's answer was that he wasn't saying it was — he was only saying the country went to hell after it happened. That is the same claim, with a wink.
Then he pitched a stunt
MeidasTouch reported that Herrera went on to describe a prank he and others would pull in Austin: going around asking people to sign petitions declaring that "women have suffered long enough, we need to end women's suffrage" — betting that people would hear "suffrage" as "suffering" and sign a petition to take away women's right to vote.
The joke only works if ending women's suffrage is the punchline. He was proposing to trick people into signing it.
It isn't the first time
This is one more entry in a long file. Herrera has spent years making women the butt of his material, and none of it has been an accident or a one-off.
A CNN review in September found years of videos, podcasts and posts in which he compared women's weight to nuclear bombs, killer whales and elephants, and called a woman on the news "both fat and wrong." When CNN asked about it, he called it comedy. In another video he used a sexual slur about the child of the founder of Moms Demand Action, a group of mothers working to stop gun violence. And on a 2022 podcast he said COVID "wasn't bad enough" because it didn't kill more fat people.
His defense has repeatedly been the same: it's a joke, and people who object are pretending not to know the difference. He told the New York Times in August that critics "pretend jokes are policy," which we covered at the time.
But this one is about the right to vote itself. A man who jokes that the country went downhill once women got to vote is asking those same women to send him to Washington.
Texas women didn't wait for Washington
Herrera is running in Texas, and Texas has its own history here. Texas women won the right to vote in primary elections in 1918, two years before the amendment. And on June 28, 1919, Texas became the first Southern state to ratify the 19th Amendment.
That is more than a century of Texas women voting. Women now register and vote at higher rates than men in every presidential election since 1980 — in 2024, there were 8.7 million more registered women than registered men.
His opponent is a woman, and his party is all in
Herrera faces Democrat Katy Padilla Stout, a former teacher and attorney, on November 3. He got the nomination without winning a runoff — Rep. Tony Gonzales dropped out of the race after admitting an affair with an aide, then resigned from Congress during a House Ethics investigation into sexual misconduct allegations.
Republicans know who they nominated. In 2024 the Republican Jewish Coalition called him "a goose-stepping extremist." Now President Trump has endorsed him, and Speaker Mike Johnson has raised money for him and campaigned with him in San Antonio. Democrats put the district on their target list in August because of him — in a seat Trump carried by 15 points.
What the record shows
On a 2023 podcast about a UFC fighter's call to take the vote away from women, Brandon Herrera said he wasn't saying the 19th Amendment was a mistake — "I'm just saying the country went to shit after" — and then described a prank to get people in Austin to sign petitions to "end women's suffrage." He is now the Republican nominee in Texas's 23rd District, endorsed by Trump and backed by Speaker Johnson, running against a woman in a state whose women have voted for more than a hundred years.
Source
"Republican Candidate: 'The Country Went to Shit After' Women Got Voting Rights," MeidasTouch, via AOL, October 1, 2026.
