Alma Arredondo-Lynch

Alma Gloria Arredondo-Lynch (Dentist, rancher, and political activist in Uvalde County, Texas)
Born	December 14, 1954 Starr County, Texas Resident of Concan in Uvalde County, Texas
Political Party	Republican
Spouse	Widow of Ernest Daniel Lynch (1945–2008) Son: Ernest Christian Lynch
Religion	Christian

Alma Gloria Arredondo-Lynch (born December 14, 1954),^[1] is a rancher in Concan and a dentist who practices in Uvalde, Texas. She ran unsuccessfully as a constitutional conservative Republican for Texas' 23rd congressional district in the primary elections held on March 6, 2018,^[2] March 3, 2020,^[3] and March 1, 2022, when she polled 15.3 percent of the vote against the one-term incumbent, Tony Gonzales.

Originally from liberal Starr County, a machine county in south Texas, Arredondo-Lynch is the daughter of the late Mr. and Mrs. Domingo Arredondo. She described her father as "a trailblazer for those without a voice." Domingo was an active participant in farm labor issues. She was formerly a civilian dentist for the United States Navy. She resides twenty-four miles to the north of Uvalde in rural Concan, She lives near the popular John Nance Garner State Park on her Rancho Canon Perdido, at which she tends to her own livestock and crops and is an active outdoorswoman.

Arredondo-Lynch is the widow of Ernest Daniel Lynch (1945–2008),^[4] a United States Army veteran, a former White House police officer, Secret Service firearms instructor and sharpshooter, and a U.S. Customs Patrol supervisor. The couple formerly resided in Mount Vernon, Washington, and Bryan, Texas.^[5] Prior to his death, they also resided in several locations near the Mexican border.^[6]

Arredondo-Lynch frequently opens her ranch to the public on special occasions, such as Thanksgiving Day. She encourages those without families to come visit for a few hours and to enjoy a meal. She also hosted a gathering after the 2018 primary election attended by her die-hard supporters.

2018 campaign

In August 2017, Arredondo-Lynch announced her congressional candidacy with an appearance at The Alamo in San Antonio, a monument which she regards as a beacon of Texas liberty. She opposes efforts led by Land Commissioner George P. Bush to refurbish the structure in ways that Bush critics claim would undermine its historical integrity. In many of her campaign appearances, she appears in a wide-rimmed white hat and reminds potential supporters that "I am Texas." Unlike former opponent Will Hurd, she is a strong Trump supporter.^[7]

Arredondo-Lynch was handily defeated by the Moderate Republican and then two-term incumbent Will Hurd, an African American who supports amnesty for illegal aliens and is a vigorous opponent of building the border wall proposed by U.S. President Donald Trump. Hurd has been allied with former Texas House Speaker Joe Straus, an acolyte of Sen. John Tower and another Moderate Republican, and is personally close friends with the unsuccessful Democratic U.S. Senate nominee in 2018, the strongly liberal Robert F. "Beto" O'Rourke of El Paso. On her Facebook page, Arredondo-Lynch also opposes O'Rourke's successor in the U.S. House, Democrat Veronica Escobar, an outspoken Trump critic whose husband is an immigration judge.^[8]

On August 1, 2019, Hurd announced that he would not seek a fourth consecutive term as U.S. Representative. Dr. Arrendo-Lynch is still seeking the Republican nomination, and Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones has confirmed her second candidacy for the seat in 2020.^[9]

In her energetic but underfunded 2018 campaign, Arrendo-Lynch questioned why Hurd was the "only 'Republican from the State of Texas to vote in favor of Obama’s transgender bill, forcing employers to allow these transgenders to use the women’s bathrooms. It had never been a problem before. I grew up using transgender bathrooms; they were called outhouses."^[10] Arredondo in her early years was a migrant farm laborer who work mainly in California. She claimed that illegal aliens working for starvation wages put her family out of the crop-gathering business.^[6]

In her criticism of Hurd for his attention to illegal aliens, Arrendo-Lynch said:

Fellow Americans, don't fret if we have to pay for the [border] wall. We spend $135 billion of taxpayers dollars on 12.4 million illegals ... The wall is $20 billion. We can build 6.5 walls. We can settle for one wall, spend the rest to increase boots on the ground and technology [in those locations in which] we can't put a physical wall. And the best part, those Mexican illegals here that financially drain our communities of $26 billion and send it Mexico, will dry up. Thus, Mexico will wind up paying for the wall indirectly. The rest of the money, use it on our veterans Americans for a change. You will never hear Will Hurd espouse such ideas. HE PUTS DACAS AND DREAMERS FIRST!^[6]

Arredondo-Lynch was endorsed in the race against Hurd by the San Antonio Family Association and the Pastors PAC.

The 23rd district encompasses a wide swath of mostly rural counties from western San Antonio to easterm El Paso. Hurd twice defeated the liberal Democrat Pete J. Gallego of Alpine, Texas, who held the seat from 2013 to 2015. Hurd polled 24,843 votes (81.2 percent) in the March 6, 2018 primary to Arredondo-Lynch's 11,997 (19.7 percent).^[11] Arredondo-Lynch ran only slightly better than William "Hart" Peterson, Hurd's 2016 intra-party opponent, who drew 17.79 percent of the ballots cast that year.

On March 10, 2018, Arredondo-Lynch wrote on her Facebook page that she would not support Hurd in the November 6 general election, in which Hurd defeated by 1,150 votes the Democratic liberal Gina Ortiz Jones, a former intelligence officer with the United States Air Force. Arredondo-Lynch said that she considers Hurd to be an actual Democrat because the lawmaker has voted with Republicans only 25 percent of the time in Congress, and when he did back the GOP position, it was usually on less significant matters. Arredondo-Lynch said that it would be a betrayal of her constitutional principles to support Hurd.

2020 campaign

On June 21, 2018, Arredondo-Lynch confirmed that she would again seek the Republican nomination in House District 23 in the primary held on March 3, 2020. Meanwhile, she endorsed Pete Flores, a Republican who won the July 31, 2018, special election to choose a successor to the resigned state Senator Carlos Uresti, who left office after criminal convictions. Flores turned back a determined challenge from the liberal Democrat Pete Gallego, formerly of Alpine in Brewster County and Hurd's predecessor in the District 23 U.S. House seat. Then Flores was unseated in his bid for a full term in the November 3 general election by the Democrat Roland Gutierrez.

On July 4, 2019, Arredondo-Lynch sustained a head injury in Washington, D.C., while she was riding her horse in a parade with the group, Cowboys for Trump. She sought treatment in an emergency room and on her return to San Antonio, she was treated at the trauma center of Wilford Hall Hospital. The head injury required about fifteen titanium metal sutures. After falling, she has no memory of the accident.^[12]

In the 2020 primary, Arredondo-Lynch faced eight intra-party rivals, including fellow conservative Sharon Breckenridge Thomas (born November 14, 1960), a San Antonio attorney who carried the endorsement of the Pastors PAC, which had endorsed Arredondo-Lynch in the 2018 congressional race.^[13] Thomas finished with 2,500 votes (6.1 percent).

A runoff election pitted Tony Gonzales of San Antonio, who led the primary with 11,530 unofficial votes (28.1 percent) against Raul Reyes, who jumped into an early lead but finished in second place with 9,570 votes (23.4 percent). Arrendondo-Lynch finished third with 5,404 votes (13.2 percent), half in raw votes of what she had received in a two-candidate race in 2018 against Hurd; Jeff McFarlin fourth with 4,240 votes (10.3 percent); Ben Van Winkle, fifth with 4,424 (10.8 percent). Reyes' platform stances are nearly identical to those of Arredondo-Lynch and Sharon Thomas, according to their campaign brochures. A native of the border city of Del Rio, Reyes served for twenty-two years as a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army in which he was assigned to Central and South America. Tony Gonzales of San Antonio, a twenty-year veteran of the United States Navy, carried the endorsement of the three previous representative for District 23 (Henry Bonilla, Francisco Canseco, and Will Hurd), along with Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, Land Commissioner George P. Bush, and former San Antonio City Council member and unsuccessful mayoral candidate in 2019, Greg Brockhouse.^[14] Gonzales or Reyes will face the Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones of San Antonio, in the November 3 general election. Ortiz Jones polled 41,560 votes in the Democratic primary against four opponents, having finished with two-thirds of the 62,346 votes cast. The Republican primary turnout was just under 41,000 ballots, some 22,000 less than the total Democratic vote. The tabulations seem to indicate that Ortiz Jones, an avid backer of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Affordable Care Act, was the favorite to claim the seat from the Republicans in the fall campaign. In May, Arredondo-Lynch endorsed Gonzales in the runoff in which Gonzales defeated Raul Reyes, Jr., of Del Rio, by only seven votes. Gonzales then defeated Ortiz Jones in an upset in spite of election "prediction" sites like the Cook Political Report that anticipated a flip for the Democrats, polling 149,395 votes (50.6 percent) to 137,693 (46.6 percent).^[15]

2022 campaign

Arredondo-Lynch waged her third consecutive unsuccessful campaign for House District 23 in the Republican primary held on March 1, 2022. She lost to Representative Tony Gonzales, whom she had endorsed in 2020 after she was eliminated from the runoff competition, which Gonzales won by the narrowest of margins against Raul Reyes.^[16]

On her Facebook page, Arredondo-Lynch spoke against Tony Gonzales's vote for the Federal Oversight Vaccine Database. Another establishment Moderate Republican from Texas, Dan Crenshaw, voted in the same way as Gonzales.^[17] "I don’t need the government knowing anything about my private life. Its time for Tony to go!!! He does not have our District's best interest!!! Who is advising him?", she asked.