Texas primary runoffs to set House nominees for November midterms

Texas voters will decide the winners of more than a dozen U.S. House primary runoffs on May 26, settling races across the state that the March 3 primary left unresolved and setting the slate of nominees who will carry each party’s banner into the November midterms.

Nine Republican and eight Democratic contests will effectively determine who goes to Congress from several Texas seats. In districts drawn to give one party a commanding advantage, the runoff winner is almost certain to carry the general election.

“For most of these, it is a 60%, 80% Republican seat and so really, if you win the primary, you won the election,” Brian Hamel, a political scientist at the University of Houston, told Houston Public Media.

Among the most closely watched races is the Democratic contest in Texas’s 18th Congressional District, where two sitting members of Congress — Representatives Al Green and Christian Menefee — are competing for the same Houston seat. A redistricting cycle that placed both incumbents inside one newly drawn district has forced a rare matchup between two elected Democrats with overlapping constituencies.

Green, a more than 20-year veteran of the House and a senior member of the Financial Services Committee, faced Menefee in the March primary after Menefee completed the unexpired term of the late Representative Sylvester Turner. Neither cleared the 50% threshold required to avoid a runoff.

Turnout will decide it.

In the Republican field, the 9th Congressional District features Alex Mealer, a West Point graduate and Afghan War veteran who won 36% of the vote in a nine-candidate March field. Mealer, who carries an endorsement from former President Donald Trump, is competing in a district where 60% of the voting-age population is Latino — a demographic Republicans have targeted aggressively as part of the party’s broader South Texas push.

Republican lawmakers in Austin redrew the state’s congressional boundaries after the 2024 census with the stated aim of flipping five Democratic-held House seats. State lawmakers approved the map in 2025 after a contentious legislative session in which Democrats accused the Republican majority of carving up minority communities to protect GOP incumbents. It survived a series of legal challenges and has reshaped the partisan calculus in several districts.

“Runoffs aren’t won with money. They’re won with sweat and shoe leather,” Briscoe Cain, a Republican state representative and former runoff candidate himself, told Houston Public Media. “This is where the grassroots candidate comes into play.”

In the newly open 33rd Congressional District, former Representative Colin Allred holds an 11-point lead over state Representative Julie Johnson after taking 44% of the March vote. Allred, who ran for Senate against Ted Cruz in 2024, has name recognition that Johnson is working to overcome with an information-heavy ground campaign.

“The more information the voter has, the more likely they vote for me,” Johnson told Houston Public Media. “Our polling has been very clear on that.”

The map behind the races

This year’s runoffs are the first to be held under Texas’s post-census congressional map, which state lawmakers approved in 2025 after a contentious legislative session. Republicans hold 25 of the state’s 38 U.S. House seats. Under the new lines, GOP strategists see a path to 28 or more.

Several Republican fields contracted sharply after the March primary, the Texas Tribune reported, including in the 32nd District where pastor Ryan Binkley dropped his bid and cleared the way for a two-way runoff. Across the map, Republican infighting in the primaries has drawn millions in outside spending from factions aligned with and opposed to Trump.

Democrats, meanwhile, are defending seats where the new boundaries have shifted the partisan lean by several points. The Texas Secretary of State’s office has published the final candidate list and early voting schedule for the May 26 election.

What happens next

Early voting begins May 18 and runs through May 24. Turnout in primary runoffs historically runs well below the March primary — in 2024, fewer than 5% of registered voters cast ballots in some runoff contests — a dynamic that gives organizational muscle and door-knocking operations outsized influence over the result.

Control of the U.S. House currently rests with Republicans by a margin narrow enough that a shift of four or five seats would flip the chamber. Democrats need a net gain of just three seats nationally to install their own Speaker, and Texas, with its newly configured districts and multiple competitive runoffs, is one of the few states where both parties see a plausible path to picking up ground.

Those stakes are not confined to Texas. In a chamber where the majority has swung on a handful of seats in each of the last three cycles, the nominees Texas voters select this month could help determine which party holds the Speaker’s gavel in January 2027.