Texas congressman Wesley Hunt told reporters in December that he had a good reason for the worst voting attendance record of any Republican in the House. His premature son, he said, had spent months in neonatal intensive care.
"I missed a large swath of votes because my child was in the NICU for a while when he was first born, when I first got elected to Congress."
There's just one problem. His own words — from 2023, when his son was actually born — tell a very different story.
According to the Daily Mail, Hunt missed 77 votes in 2025, nearly ten times the rate of his Republican colleagues, as reported by GovTrack. That number has made him a ripe target in a three-way Texas Senate primary against Senator John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton. With early voting beginning tomorrow and the first round set for March 3, Hunt's credibility issues couldn't arrive at a worse time.
Hunt and his wife, Emily, welcomed their son, Willie, on December 27, 2022. Emily had announced the pregnancy the previous November with a January 2023 due date. The baby arrived early — but how early depends on when you ask Hunt.
His own 2023 press release said four weeks premature. By October 2025, posting on X, he claimed six weeks.
The hospitalization timeline has drifted even more dramatically. In January 2023, Hunt told C-SPAN his son had spent the following in the NICU:
"A couple of weeks."
He added that "everyone is doing perfectly well." Days later, he assured Steve Bannon that his son was "out of the NICU, gaining weight."
But by 2025, when Hunt needed an explanation for his absenteeism, those couple of weeks had transformed. A press release from his office described the same child as having spent "the first months of his life in the neonatal intensive care unit."
"A couple of weeks" became "months." A baby born four weeks early became six weeks early. A child who was home and thriving by early January 2023 was retroactively cast as having endured a prolonged medical crisis.
Hunt missed three votes on January 6, 2023 — but stated at the time that his son was already home. Three votes are not a "large swath" by any definition.
The only actual cluster of missed votes in early 2023 fell between January 26–27 and February 2–9. During that same window, Hunt's family was taking the baby on outings, and Hunt himself was telling interviewers that everyone was doing great.
No one begrudges a father time with a sick child. But you don't get to rewrite the severity of your child's illness years later to cover for a voting record you can't otherwise explain. That's not fatherhood — it's spin.
The NICU story isn't Hunt's only credibility gap. Documents have surfaced showing that Hunt cast a provisional ballot on November 4, 2016 — one that was never counted because he was not registered to vote at the time.
Records indicate he was informed at the polling place that he wasn't registered. In an affidavit completed that day, Hunt attributed the oversight to having been discharged from the military in October 2016, just one month prior.
His congressional biography, campaign materials, and military discharge documents all list his separation from service as occurring in 2012.
That's a four-year discrepancy on an affidavit — one that Hunt's team reportedly tried to clean up in a Friday press release, only to draw further attention to the contradiction. Matt Mackowiak, a senior adviser to Cornyn's campaign, accused Hunt of voter fraud and called for an investigation by Paxton.
Hunt never attempted to cure the provisional ballot. No vote was counted. But the question lingers: why did he tell an election judge he'd left the military in 2016 when he'd been out since 2012?
Additional reports have also placed Hunt, then serving on the board of a Houston private school, providing emotional support to students upset by the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. For a candidate now running on his alignment with President Trump, this is at minimum an awkward chapter.
Whatever Hunt's reasons, the absenteeism hasn't been confined to 2023 or to any family emergency. In 2024, he missed votes while serving as what he described in an October 2025 interview as "a top surrogate for President Trump." Last month — January 2026 — he skipped more than 90 percent of the votes he was scheduled to cast.
One series of votes was held open specifically so Hunt could provide a tie-breaking vote after a police escort rushed him from Dulles airport. The House of Representatives is not a job you show up to when it's convenient. It's the one thing voters actually send you there to do.
A University of Houston poll released this week tells the story that the numbers always eventually tell. Paxton leads the primary at 38 percent. Cornyn sits at 31. Hunt trails at 17.
In a potential runoff scenario, the poll shows Paxton over Cornyn, 51 to 40.
President Trump has not endorsed in this race. Hunt's pitch — that his loyalty as a surrogate should be rewarded — hasn't yet landed. And with each new revelation about shifting timelines and contradicted claims, that pitch gets harder to make.
Texas voters head to the polls starting tomorrow. They'll have to decide whether a candidate who can't keep his own story straight deserves a promotion — or whether the job he already has was more than he could handle.