Meet Katy Padilla Stout, the former kindergarten teacher running against the ‘manosphere’ in TX23

As her mom tells it, Katy Padilla Stout has kept nearly every friend she’s ever made.

A child she nannied for as a UT undergrad two decades ago was her intern last summer. The boyfriend she met in law school is now her husband of 13 years. The two children they fostered were adopted into their family in 2016 — months before Padilla Stout gave birth to their first biological child.

Now in the final stretch of a nationally ranked congressional race, the 41-year old Democrat is banking on her close personal relationships to overcome long odds.

Padilla Stout is running in one of the largest districts in the country, Texas’ deep-red 23rd Congressional District, which supported President Donald Trump by roughly 15 percentage points just two years ago.

This piece is part of a two-story series on the candidates in Congressional District 23. Read our companion profile of Republican candidate Brandon Herrera here.

In an uphill race, officials she’s worked as a child welfare attorney are helping the first-time candidate make connections across the district’s 27 counties, meanwhile friends who’ve know her since grade school are cheering her on at events, including a packed the Performing Arts Center at Palo Alto College for a campaign rally last month.

Republicans have also taken notice. In a district they should have a lock on, a Trump-aligned PAC and other conservative groups are now running ads attacking her to shore up their nominee, gun rights activist Brandon Herrera.

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“What [my opponents] are trying to spend money on is this — which you can’t buy,” Padilla Stout said as she gestured to a room of roughly 200 supporters at Palo Alto College on Sept. 20.

“It is community. It is your relationships. It is your friendships.”

But Padilla Stout’s opponent has friends, too — about 4.3 million of whom follow his gun-centric YouTube channel.

The 30-year-old social media influencer is revered among an online audience known as the manosphere, which celebrates ultra-masculinity, often in ways that degrade women at the same time.

Herrera famously referred to motherhood as keeping “your c*m trophy,” joked about whether the country is worse off for allowing women to vote and posted AI-generated photos of Padilla Stout eating cookies.

“I don’t think we’ve seen the full culmination of what that shock-manosphere-influencer lifestyle could possibly lead to, but Herrera’s kind of been at the forefront of that,” said Brielle Insler, a San Antonio progressive strategist who has known Padilla Stout for years from the Child Welfare Board.

“He’s the epitome of being willing to say anything to get that attention, and feeling like he’s not even penalized for it.”

In the congressional race, Herrera’s fans have also let loose on Padilla Stout.

“This election really is a Mandalorian versus Jabba the Hutt,” one of his supporters joked at a Comic Con convention in August — comparing Herrera and Padilla Stout, respectively, to a fictional warrior and giant slug from the Star Wars series.

If the digs are bothering Padilla Stout, she isn’t showing it.

The mother of four joined the race when returning President Donald Trump was slashing school lunch programs for children and rumors about then-Republican Congressman Tony Gonzales’ affair with a staffer were swirling in the 23rd Congressional District.

A year later, Gonzales has resigned, GOP leaders have embraced his divisive successor, and once hesitant Democrats are growing excited about a former kindergarten teacher whose allies say she doesn’t suffer any bullies.

“It doesn’t bother her. She’s strong-willed,” Alfred Padilla Stout said of the attacks being lobbed against his daughter. “She’s capable of handling anything they throw at her. It’s just a game and it doesn’t faze her.”

A focus on children

As a girl, Katy Padilla Stout grew up splitting time between her home in San Antonio, where she lived with her mom, and her dad’s family home in South Texas, where they have a ranch in Carrizo Springs.

Even at a young age, her parents said, she was selfless, full of kindness and driven by a passion for kids.

“When she was five or six years old, she said, ‘I want to have 12 children,’” Padilla Stout’s mom, Linda Guajardo, said in an interview. “She’s always been children-oriented.”

She graduated from Lee High School, attended the University of Texas at Austin and returned home to teach kindergarten at Northside ISD’s Colonies North Elementary School that same fall.

Two days before starting the job, the school received an influx of refugee students from all over the world, and Padilla Stout was reassigned to teach English as a Second Language.

“The new principal came in and shut the door,” Padilla Stout recalled learning of the change. “She said, ‘Listen, we had some refugee students that came in. We’re expecting about 120 kids to enroll tomorrow … we’d like you to welcome them into your class.’”

She wound up teaching 15 kids from 12 different countries in her first year.

Almost no one spoke the same language, and even spending time inside of a school building was a learning curve for children born in refugee camps.

“At the end of the year, every single child met promotional standards,” Padilla Stout recalled with pride in a June 6 interview. “Like, every single one.”

The experience was so moving that she soon found herself working with refugee families through Catholic Charities, arranging transportation so that younger kids could enroll in Head Start early childhood education and refugee moms could find work.

At that point, Padilla Stout decided she needed a law degree — something she didn’t tell her family until after she’d already taken the LSAT.

She got her law degree at South Texas College of Law in Houston, returned to teaching at Northside ISD and started fostering children with her husband, a former Bexar County prosecutor who now teaches legal courses at UT.

When the couple was starting a family, Padilla Stout said she decided to go into private practice, with a focus on representing children in foster care.

“She’s really committed to advocating for children,” said Naomi Elizabeth Miller, a former district director for former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus (R-San Antonio) who served with Padilla Stout on the Bexar County Child Welfare Board.

“I think she’d be great to serve in Congress because she has that servant heart.”

‘She surprised us’

How her career pivoted to politics remains something of a mystery to Padilla Stout’s family.

She spent a summer in D.C. during law school, splitting time between working with then-DNC Finance Chair Henry Muñoz and the Obama White House’s Initiative for Excellence in Education in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Education.

But unlike others in her family, Padilla Stout’s mom said she wasn’t particularly interested in politics before this race.

“She surprised us,” Guajardo said. “One morning she texts me and her sister saying, ‘I’m going to run for Congress. It was [because of] the SNAP being taken away from children.”

Before this election cycle, Democrats had all but abandoned ship on the once-swingy 23rd Congressional District.

Their candidate Gina Ortiz Jones suffered two major losses in 2018 and 2020, and the enormous San Antonio-to-El Paso district was made even redder after the 2020 Census.

At that point, even a well-organized campaign couldn’t get the national attention needed to put such a race in play — until rumors of Gonzales’ affair turned the situation on its head.

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Suddenly Democrats were desperate for someone who could take advantage of the GOP turmoil, and Insler said Padilla Stout’s name kept coming up.

“She is a very busy advocate for children in the child welfare system, she drives all over the state for cases, she had four kids,” Insler said. “She didn’t need to go and run for office, but she got the call, and she was willing to do it.”

The GOP’s mid-cycle redistricting effort left Texas Democrats scrambling for candidates in tough GOP-leaning districts this cycle, but the circumstances with Gonzales were so unusual.

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Relief over finding Padilla Stout was palpable at a Democratic primary forum in January, where Tejano Democrats organizer Sonya Walker said her daughter woke her up with a late night phone call to share the news.

“She said, ‘Mom, Mom, guess what? This friend of mine from high school is running for Congress!’” Walker told the crowd at the Jan. 10 forum. “… When she told me [the district], I said, ‘Oh, that’s great!’ I reached out to Katy, and I’m very proud of her.”

Redistricting scrambled San Antonio voters. Here’s how to find your sample ballot.

Just before the March primary, Padilla Stout received another call with words of encouragement, this time from the Democratic National Campaign Committee.

The group that oversees strategy for congressional Democrats said they were watching her race. Padilla Stout cried in disbelief.

Days after that call, in one of the clearest signs of Democratic optimism, their party’s voters went on to cast more ballots than Republicans in TX23 during the primary.

Padilla Stout won her four-way race with 52% of the vote, and soon Bold PAC, Emily’s List and Moms Demand Action and a long list of Democratic groups were lining up to help.

Standing alongside leaders of Giffords gun safety group in June, Padilla Stout said they’d formed their own coalition to take on Herrera — an army of women who are stepping up to help her regardless of party affiliation.

“I am happy to report that since we launched our campaign in November, I have had hundreds of moms join me on this journey,” Padilla Stout said.

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Now in the final weeks before the election, the DCCC has sent in a team of closers for a race that was on no one’s radar at the beginning of the cycle.

It was a bittersweet moment for a candidate who values close relationships. But ousted campaign staff said it’s the surest sign yet this deep-red district could really flip.

“It’s my understanding that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee saw an opportunity to win this race and was willing to become more involved if changes were made to the campaign operation,” said San Antonio Democratic organizer Robert Vargas III, who was laid off from Padilla Stout’s original team just weeks out from the election.

“I remain proud of the work we did, and wish Katy and the campaign success.”

Eleanor Fitzgerald contributed to this report.