GOP candidate who filmed offensive ‘weak and gay’ ad loses Missouri primary election by huge margin
Controversial GOP candidate Valentina Gomez has become notorious for anti-LGBTQ+ posts. (Instagram: Valentinaformissouri)
It turns out that burning LGBTQ+ books with a flamethrower and telling locals that they’re “weak and gay” if they don’t vote for you wasn’t the recipe for success that Valentina Gomez hoped it would be.
The controversial Republican candidate lost the 2024 Missouri Secretary of State primary election, which took place on August 6, by a huge margin. Her defeat follows the release of a bizarre campaign video in which she told voters not to be “weak and gay” while jogging through a historically LGBTQ+ neighbourhood.
The clip, which tagged conservative influencer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, concluded by showing a photo of Gomez proudly holding a gun before ending on her “woman on a mission” campaign poster.
In June, she took to social media to hit out at Democrat Barbara Phifer, a former United Methodist pastor who now sits in the state house of representatives and is also running to be secretary of state, tweeting: “You have a trans grandchild. That means you raised a groomer. You failed your children, and they failed your grandchildren. Also, you’re irrelevant and belong in a nursing home.”
Also in June, Gomez implied that WNBA player Brittney Griner is anti-American, calling her an “unpatriotic lesbian” who should be “rotting in Russian prison”.
She previously posted photos on X and Instagram showing herself using a flamethrower to burn LGBTQ+ literature, describing them on Instagram as “grooming books in our libraries,” “pornographic books” and “sex books for kids.” Her X bio reads: “Christ is King. MAGA. America First.”
One of the burned books was Queer: The Ultimate LGBTQ+ Guide For Teens. Amongst many other things, the guide covers abusive relationships and what signs and red flags young people should look out for.
More recently, she posted an Instagram reel that described cisgender female Olympic boxer Imane Khelif as a man, and used the F-slur to describe her, which was flagged for breaking Meta’s community guidelines.
However, despite all of her far-right, extremist homophobic and transphobic rhetoric, Gomez, 25, only received 47,931 votes in the primary, accounting for 7.4% of the total, The New York Times reported, with the race called by The Associated Press.
On her most recent Instagram video, titled “I just voted for myself”, the top comment reads: “I’m not sure if you saw but you lost. By a lot.”
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