WASHINGTON – A conservative will win the Republican nomination to replace longtime Rep. Michael Burgess in a Denton-based congressional district.

The question is what flavor of conservative.

Brandon Gill, a 29-year-old unknown to local activists until a month ago, is already basking in former President Donald Trump’s endorsement. His biggest rival is Scott Armey, the former Denton County judge and son of Dick Armey, the tea party godfather and House majority leader who held the seat before Burgess.

Gill worked with his father-in-law Dinesh D’Souza on 2000 Mules, a film purporting to expose massive fraud in the 2020 election. Rivals widely assume D’Souza is bankrolling the pro-Gill super PAC that surfaced the day after Gill entered the race, boasting $1 million in anonymous pledges and calling Gill “THE America First candidate in this race.”

Armey says he is focused on fiscal responsibility and getting things done in Congress.

“I don’t have to introduce myself for the first time to folks. They know me. They’ve seen my proven record. I’ve served here at the county level and built the roads that we drive on today,” he said. “There are too many members of Congress that are more concerned with being mouthpieces for the conservative movement or being the echo chamber for the president. I don’t think that we really need any more of that.”

The tussle for the direction of the party mirrors the crosscurrents buffeting the GOP nationally. Even if the 26th Congressional District isn’t a perfect microcosm or bellwether, it’s at least a test site where a conservative electorate can hasten or stall the party’s Make America Great Again makeover.

Eleven GOP candidates filed for the seat after Burgess abruptly announced his retirement a month before the Dec. 11 filing deadline. Most have no website, money, staff or political experience.

“Armey’s name recognition is going to be hard to beat,” said Wise County GOP chair Mike Drury, whose county accounts for about one in eight voters in the heavily Republican district.

A month after Gill jumped into the race, the chairman — like some other key players who discussed the race — had yet to hear from Gill. Drury couldn’t recall if the candidate was D’Souza’s nephew or related some other way.

Still, Drury said, “This county is Trump all the way. It’s hard to find anybody that’s not a Trump supporter” and “those endorsements are going to be massive.”

Gill did not respond to numerous attempts to reach him over two weeks, through the DC Enquirer, by phone and through several intermediaries. His website offers no contact information.

Denton County accounts for three-fourths of the district’s voters. The rest are in rural Wise and Cooke counties.

Lacey Riley, the new Denton County GOP chair, said D’Souza “is a well known name and I think it would give Brandon some clout with the more conservative side of the Republican Party.”

She noted that Trump’s backing is no guarantee of victory. Rep. Jake Ellzey, R-Midlothian, defeated a Trump-backed rival in a nearby district, for instance. The endorsement does mean “some people will give him a closer look,” Riley said.

“Will it overcome the fact that he’s only been here in Denton County for a year, and he doesn’t have any experience with the voters?” she said.

The race could hinge on the answer.

“You usually think the name or the money is going to do it,” said Chris McNamara, Cooke County GOP chair.

Name ID is no guarantee, either, as Armey knows well.

Armey was four years older than Gill is now when his dad retired in 2002. The county’s top elected official and a rising star, he led a six-way primary to take the seat with 45% of the vote, twice the haul for Burgess, an obstetrician who’d never held office.

Burgess nabbed the seat in the runoff.

“Trump does have a lot of support,” said McNamara, though he described his county’s electorate as more traditional conservatives than diehard Trumpers.

“Some voices are going to be louder than others,” he said.

‘Nice young man’

Gill, 29, grew up on a cattle ranch near Abilene. At Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, he was president of the conservative Dartmouth Review. He worked briefly on Wall Street, then launched the DC Enquirer, billed as an “America First news outlet” that would support the Trump agenda more than other conservative media.

His wife, Danielle, is a conservative author and media personality.

They moved to Flower Mound a year ago and he didn’t register to vote in Texas until March.

“Seems like a very, very nice young man. He and I are probably fairly closely aligned on the issues,” Armey said. “It’s just going to be a matter of what separates us — having been part of the community for more than 50 years. Having served here, lived here. Voted here and raised a family here. I think that’s an important piece of representation.”

Luke Thompson, executive director of Right Texas — the super PAC supporting Gill — rejected accusations he’s a carpetbagger.

Yes, Gill is running for Congress a year after moving to the district, he said, but “nobody had a clue” Burgess wouldn’t run again.

“They’re living there and the door opened,” he said. No candidate wants a 100-day campaign “starting from a name ID zero. That’s not anybody’s idea of ideal.”

Thompson runs independent expenditure committees for a living, including one that helped elect Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance in 2022.

He declined to say how much D’Souza has given or identify any donors.

D’Souza is a prominent Trump booster and has showcased his son-in-law on his podcast in recent weeks. In 2014, D’Souza pleaded guilty to federal campaign law violations, admitting he’d directed two associates to donate $10,000 to a Senate candidate, then reimbursed them. Trump pardoned him in 2018.

Most pledges to the PAC won’t be collected until after Jan. 1, Thompson said.

That ensures the donor list remains secret until late July — two months after the primary runoff.

He’d never met Gill until a month ago when the candidate enlisted him to oversee the PAC. The PAC filed with the FEC the day after Gill.

“He comes to the race with a track record in the [conservative] movement,” Thompson said, “especially around the DC Enquirer.”

Gill calls abortion “an abomination that needs to be abolished,” asserting in a Christmas post on Facebook that “the pro-abortion Left would have been big supporters of King Herod and his Slaughter of the Innocents.” He warns of “cultural Marxism” infesting schools. In a DC Enquirer column in August, he mocked “Joe Biden’s geriatric sloth.”

“President Trump is the Party’s undisputed leader. He founded the America First movement and resurrected a dying Republican caucus from the ash heap of Bush-era irrelevancy. If it weren’t for Trump, it’s hard to imagine a nationally viable Republican Party,” he wrote.

“Brandon is MAGA all the way,” Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., said in another of several endorsements Gill touts.

“Brandon’s alignment with the MAGA movement is part of his strategy,” said David Rettig, mayor of Northlake and until recently, vice chair of the Denton County GOP.

“It seems like Gill is a darling of the grassroots” but “he’s an outsider,” said David Wylie, a member of the state Republican executive committee.

The field also includes a former congressional aide, Luisa Del Rosal, and Burt Thakur, a project engineer who also pitches himself as an America First Republican. Thakur won $20,000 on Jeopardy! three years ago on the final show aired before the death of longtime host Alex Trebek.

“That’s got to count for something in this world,” Wylie quipped. “Send the smart people to Congress.”

The mayor

John Huffman, the mayor of Southlake, is also running. Just 2% of Southlake is in the 26th district. The rest is in the 24th, whose representative, Rep. Beth Van Duyne, R-Irving, has endorsed Huffman.

He’s one of the few contenders who’s won elections, and he starts with a donor base in Southlake.

“I’ve got almost a decade of elected service of delivering conservative results to the people of North Texas. So what I’ve done as mayor, that’s what I’m going to do as the congressman in the 26th district,” he said, touting tax cuts and a balanced city budget.

Huffman readily says Biden won the 2020 election.

“Joe Biden is in office. He won the election,” he said, and “I will be running on the fact that he is the president and he is intentionally destroying this country.”

The judge

Doug Robison, 69, served 15 years as a trial court judge in Denton, elected four times after a stint on the Argyle school board. He stepped down from the bench when Burgess announced his retirement.

After nearly four decades in Denton County, Robison is well known in local GOP circles. He describes himself as a firm believer in the rule of law, and prefers the label “constitutionalist” to MAGA or establishment Republican.

“People want someone who will be bold and will fight for conservative values. The No. 1 point on the MAGA agenda is ‘secure the border.’ I agree with that point 100%,” Robison said. “I do think people look at things like experience, maturity, commitment, your roots in the county.”

He’s unfazed by Gill’s endorsements.

“The people in this district are independent and strong thinkers,” he said. “People in the district like Trump, but I wasn’t even in the race when Trump issued his endorsement.”

The engineer

Another engineer in the race, Joel Krause — who pioneered video playback tools used first by the Dallas Cowboys in the late 1980s — wants a greater emphasis on “truth.”

“Americans more and more don’t care about the facts anymore. They just care about their feelings. We can’t be putting ourselves before the country,” he said.

It’s Krause’s third try for the seat. He drew 16% against Burgess in the 2014 primary, and 14% two years later.

Krause proposes “stiff penalties” for politicians and government employees who express falsehoods, and says the country is in desperate need of a “truth-certified news outlet that is based on facts and not opinion.”

His critiques are not aimed only at the other side of the spectrum. “The news is telling people how to think, how to act,” he said. “Fox News is probably the worst. I’m a conservative but I don’t like Fox News.”

He’s reluctant to pass judgment on what lies are polluting the nation’s discourse.

“Was the election stolen? I don’t know what the truth is,” he said.

D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules, blaming fraud for Trump’s defeat, struck him as plausible, Krause said. But liberal friends and relatives utterly disagree and he respects their views, too.

“Those friendships are getting frayed,” Krause said. “This is our biggest issue. It’s not border security.”