The field is set for the Texas primary — making way for a dramatic few months ahead of the March election.
At the top of the ticket, Texans will vote on who they want as their party’s presidential nominee — where Donald Trump has a landslide lead for Republicans and President Joe Biden has no serious competition among Democrats.
That means the most interesting action in Texas will be down-ballot.
With both Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton out for revenge, Republican members of the Texas House are the top target on the ballot. But Democrats are also facing ample drama as political dominoes fall in Dallas and Houston, creating new opportunities for ambitious members of the party.
The candidate filing deadline for the March primary was 6 p.m. Monday.
Republicans
On the GOP side, much of the primary drama is being driven by Abbott and Paxton.
Paxton is working to unseat the dozens of House Republicans who voted to impeach him in May, while Abbott wants to defeat a smaller group of House Republicans who thwarted his yearlong push for school vouchers. That has created a rare dynamic where two of the most powerful Republicans in the state are backing primary challengers to House Republicans, sometimes aligning behind the same challenger and sometimes not.
It has led to a marked increase in primary challengers. After 43% of House Republicans faced opposition in 2022, at least 57% have primary challengers this time.
The Texas GOP said Tuesday it had “a record-breaking 387 candidates file in Austin, plus many more in their local county offices, marking the second-highest candidate turnout in the history of the” party.
The attorney general has endorsed nearly two dozen primary challengers to state House Republicans who voted to impeach him. Those candidates, like Paxton, have positioned themselves as further right than House leadership and could prove to be antagonistic toward Speaker Dade Phelan — should he win his own primary. The Texas Senate acquitted Paxton after a trial in September.
Paxton’s endorsees include Republicans like Mitch Little, a Frisco lawyer who represented Paxton at the trial and is running against Rep. Kronda Thimesch, R-Lewisville. Paxton also backed Wes Virdell, a primary challenger to Rep. Andrew Murr — the Junction Republican who chaired the House board of impeachment managers — before Murr announced his retirement last month.
Abbott is targeting a narrower group of 16 House Republicans who are seeking reelection and voted last month to strip a voucher program out of a broad education bill. Abbott has endorsed six primary challengers to those members so far.
There otherwise are few notable primary challenges on the Democratic side. U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, who went through intense primary battles in 2020 and 2022, drew no opposition this time.
As for open-seat primaries, at least 10 Democrats filed to succeed Allred in the 32nd Congressional District, a group that includes state Rep. Julie Johnson, D-Carrollton; Brian Williams, a prominent Dallas trauma surgeon; and Callie Butcher, whose campaign says she is the first transgender Texan to run for Congress in a major-party primary in Texas.
In Houston, at least six Democrats have filed for Whitmire’s seat in Senate District 15, which has not been open since 1982. The field includes state Rep. Jarvis Johnson, D-Houston; Molly Cook, Whitmire’s 2022 primary challenger; Karthik Soora, a Houston renewable energy developer; Todd Litton, the 2018 Democratic nominee for a nearby congressional seat; Michelle Anderson Bonton, executive director of the Anderson Center for the Arts; and Alberto “Beto” Cardenas Jr., a prominent Houston attorney who filed at the last minute Monday.
Whitmire defeated U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee in the mayoral runoff, and she quickly decided to seek reelection afterward. But she will face a primary challenge from at least one fellow Democrat, former Houston City Council member Amanda Edwards.
In both Houston and Dallas, the big open-seat primaries have triggered other vacancies, providing for significant turnover among Democrats in the state’s two biggest metropolitan areas. Julie Johnson’s run for Congress left her state House seat open, Jarvis Johnson’s campaign for state Senate created a vacancy in his state House seat — and Neave Criado’s late primary challenge to Johnson left her state House seat open.
At least one other Democrat, Linda Garcia, filed for Neave Criado’s seat.
In other late developments, a Democratic member of the State Board of Education, Melissa Ortega, announced Monday morning she would not seek reelection. That left Democrats without a candidate for the seat with hours left until the filing deadline — a Republican had already filed — though it had become clear by Tuesday afternoon that at least two Democrats, Jessica Cerda and Gustavo Reveles, had managed to file at the last minute.
Source: Texas Tribune BY Patrick Svitek
Photo: Credit: Michael Gonzalez/The Texas Tribune