>MISS FRIJOLES

https://twitter.com/nbcnews/status/1549355638035300354?s=21

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/miss-frijoles-attack-roils-latino-heavy-congressional-race-texas-rcna38787

'Miss Frijoles' attack roils Latino-heavy congressional race in Texas

Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez is distancing himself from a blogger he paid who's using bigoted language to describe GOP opponent Rep. Mayra Flores.

July 19, 2022, 6:31 AM EDT

A Texas blogger paid by Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez's campaign is attacking Republican opponent Rep. Mayra Flores as “Miss Frijoles” and a "cotton-pickin' liar," prompting a wave of denunciations by fellow Democrats.

The language first surfaced three days after Gonzalez’s campaign wrote a $1,200 check to The McHale Report blog June 24 for “advertising services,” according to the Democrat’s Federal Election Commission finance report.

But the blog, which has called Flores "Miss Frijoles" 21 times since then, has not published any Gonzalez ads.

Flores, in a Twitter post Monday, accused the Gonzalez campaign of paying “a local blogger to run hateful & racist ads against me,” a charge that the Gonzalez campaign and blogger Jerry McHale deny. They both told NBC News that the timing of the attacks were coincidental, that the congressman didn’t pay for any of the inflammatory posts, know about them or have any control over them.

“Of course, the congressman is against referring to Rep. Flores as ‘Miss Frijoles’ or a ‘cotton-picking liar’,” Gonzalez’s campaign manager, Collin Steele, wrote in a text message to NBC News, echoing the state Democratic Party chair and other Texas Democrats who denounced the language as well.

But McHale would not back down.

“I am a liberal Democrat. And it’s war against the Republican … I’m going to be merciless with her,” he told NBC News.

The controversy, which illustrates the blurred lines between paying political bloggers for advertising and advocacy, is the latest flashpoint in the wild and rugged politics of Texas 34th Congressional District, a majority-Hispanic seat that runs along the state’s southeast border with Mexico and has become a national proving ground for GOP outreach to Hispanic voters.

Flores is the first congresswoman born in Mexico. Two years before her victory, then-President Donald Trump improved his margins there — along with most majority-Hispanic districts and counties nationwide — when compared to his 2016 numbers.

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