Vacant for 11 months, one of Texas’ bluest congressional districts will pick new representative Saturday

HOUSTON — On an overcast Friday afternoon, Amanda Edwards, armed with campaign literature and a wide smile, knocked on voters’ doors to ask for their support.

“Amanda Edwards, running to be your next congresswoman!” Edwards, a Democrat, told Steve Kolodziej on his porch in The Heights.

“I voted for you yesterday,” Kolodziej said. “All done!”

The two conversed about the upcoming runoff election in the 18th Congressional District and, inevitably, the circumstances that have led to it — the death of longtime Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee in 2024, the anointment by Harris County Democrats of then-Mayor Sylvester Turner to be the party’s nominee in a narrow vote that summer, his unexpected death in March 2025, and the 11-month wait for representation for residents in one of Texas’ most solidly Democratic districts.

In November, eight months after Turner’s death, voters went to the polls to pick his replacement in a special election. With none of the 16 candidates reaching 50%, Edwards and the first-place finisher, Christian Menefee, advanced to Saturday’s runoff, which will decide who represents the district until the next Congress is seated in January.

“You guys haven’t had representation for 18 months over a 24-month period,” Edwards, a former member of Houston City Council, told Kolodziej. “It’s really just awful…you’ll get your voice back very soon!”

A few hours later, in Houston’s Third Ward, Menefee arrived at Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church to cast his own ballot and rally with early voters doing the same.

Greeting voters by name, Menefee paused for photos, conversations and to hop on FaceTime with one man’s family, who had called them to show them who he had run into at his polling place.

“It’s been a long, long year,” Menefee, a Democrat who was Harris County attorney until recently, told a group of cheering supporters. “It’s meant the world to me to have y’all by my side supporting me. So, January 31, let’s go win this thing!”

While the contest to fill out the remainder of Turner’s term will end Saturday, a new one will begin immediately for a full two-year term representing the district through January 2029.

Both candidates will immediately be thrust into a primary with longtime Democratic Rep. Al Green, whose home, along with the vast majority of his constituents, was drawn into a new iteration of the 18th Congressional District by Republicans in the Texas Legislature, as part of a gerrymander aimed at picking up five seats in Texas, including one in Houston.

Because Texas’ candidate filing deadline was in December, both Edwards and Menefee signed up for the March 3 primary — which is being held under the new district lines — without knowing which of them would represent the 18th District for its final months under the existing boundaries.

The winner of Saturday’s runoff will have the advantage of incumbency for all of two weeks before early voting begins in the primary between Edwards, Green, Menefee and a fourth candidate, Gretchen Brown. And the two runoff contestants will have to ask a mostly different group of voters for a full two-year term, with about a quarter of the district’s current constituents remaining under the new lines.

But for now, voters will just be glad to have their representation restored in a district that has been without a long-term answer since Jackson Lee’s death 18 months ago. Beyond adding a Democratic vote to a narrowly divided Congress, the election of a new representative also will mean the return of constituent services — Jackson Lee’s hallmark.

Houston Democrats said Jackson Lee’s strength was never more evident than after a disaster, when her team would be on the ground quickly, coordinating recovery efforts and passing out resources.

The 18th District still has a constituent service operation. But with no member of Congress to direct it, voters were nervous.

“It almost sends a panic through us to know, when it was hurricane season … who was going to be the person getting the funding to us and the things we needed to be able to survive?” said Jackie Anderson, president of the Houston Federation of Teachers and a Menefee supporter. “We have no representation really.”

And the power of one member’s vote has rarely been more potent, as House Republicans navigate the chamber’s slimmest majority in nearly a century.

Houston Democrats recall, with frustration, that Trump’s signature legislative achievement, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed by just one vote — with no Democrat seated from the 18th District to force a tie.

​​”We don’t have a voice in D.C. where last year we desperately needed it,” said Shamier Bouie, the chair of the Houston Black American Democrats, in an interview at a Third Ward coffee shop. “One vote could have changed some things. We could have had someone there being that voice for us. But of course, that was all by design.”

Republicans currently have a 218-213 majority in the U.S. House, meaning they can afford two defections on party-line votes. Once Edwards or Menefee is seated, the loss of two votes would result in a tie — 216-216 — which amounts to a defeat in a chamber with no tiebreaking procedure. With Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky, frequently bucking his party, the path for Democrats to stop legislation will become easier after Saturday’s election.

Just last week, Republicans advanced a funding bill that included money for the Department of Homeland Security and rejected a war powers resolution to prevent the Trump administration from taking further action in Venezuela without congressional approval, each measure passing by exactly one vote.

For Democrats in the deep-blue district who have spent 11 months without representation, as their anger at the president has grown, Saturday’s election will be an opportunity to finally push back.

“I knocked the door of an eighty-year-old woman the other day, and I just knew exactly what she was going to be thinking about,” Menefee said. “She’s going to want to talk to me about Medicare, about Social Security.

“She looks at me, she goes, ‘Young man, what are you going to do about Donald Trump?’ It’s what’s fresh on people’s minds.”

The stakes

A bastion of Black political power for over 50 years, the 18th District has launched the careers of towering icons including Barbara Jordan, Mickey Leland and Jackson Lee, who represented Houston in Congress for nearly 30 years.

Voters in the 18th take deep pride in their historic communities and are accustomed to a high standard of service from their elected officials, and the absence of a representative has been painfully felt — particularly amid a bevy of national headlines that bothers residents in the district that voted for Democrat Kamala Harris by a 40-point margin in 2024.

“Since Trump has been elected, everybody opens their door,” Edwards said. “It’s totally different. They want to talk. They want to feel like something can change.”

Gov. Greg Abbott set the special election to fill out Turner’s term for November — to the chagrin of Democrats — giving residents of the district months to reflect on who should fill the shoes of two titans of Houston politics. But they were thrown for a loop by redistricting, which combined the 18th District with the neighboring 9th Congressional District.

Nearly three-quarters of registered voters in the district were moved elsewhere, meaning most of the voters Edwards and Menefee have been courting for the better part of a year won’t be able to vote for them beyond the runoff. Currently shaped like a ring, the 18th District takes in downtown Houston, Third Ward, MacGregor, the Heights and Acres Homes, reaching north to George Bush Intercontinental Airport and Humble. The boundaries wrap back around to parts of East Houston, Kashmere Gardens and Fifth Ward.

But the redrawn version moves areas north and northwest of downtown out of the district, while folding in neighborhoods in the southern part of the city and portions of Fort Bend County, including the Texas Medical Center, Sunnyside, Missouri City and Fresno.

“I’m going to probably see a lot of tears in March when they look at that ballot, unclear why they’re no longer in the 18th,” said Erica Lee Carter, the daughter of Jackson Lee and a representative of the district for two months after winning a 2024 special election to finish out her mother’s term.

The March primary will be Green’s first competitive contest since his initial congressional race in 2004, when he beat then-Rep. Chris Bell, a white Democrat, after Texas Republicans’ last experiment with mid-decade redistricting made the 9th Congressional District a majority-minority district.

Green’s two-decade hold on his solidly blue seat is reminiscent of the scant intra-party competition faced by Jackson Lee — and others before her — while representing the 18th District. Edwards or Menefee could effectively lock up the seat well into the future if either is able to make it past Green in the upcoming primary — and a win in Saturday’s runoff would be a jolt of momentum toward that goal.

The runoff

Both Edwards and Menefee have remained diligent about focusing on the election in front of them.

In November, neither came close to the 50%-plus-one-vote threshold needed to avoid a runoff; Menefee finished first with about 29% of the vote, with Edwards close behind at about 26%.

Menefee did best inside the Loop, including Downtown, Macgregor and in the Heights. Edwards was strongest in the northern part of the district, where she’s from — Acres Homes, Carverdale and Inwood.

State Rep. Jolanda Jones, who finished third in the special election with 19% of the vote, endorsed Edwards in the runoff.

Menefee has raised more money — $2.2 million to Edwards’ $1.7 million — and spent more on advertising, airing two ads referencing “MTV Cribs” and “Martin,” both millennial pop culture touchstones. The former Harris County attorney has the backing of much of Houston’s Democratic establishment, from unions to local elected officials, and big names outside the district like Rep. Jasmine Crockett and Beto O’Rourke.

Both candidates said they’ve seen significant interest from voters throughout the campaign, many of whom are eager to discuss their problems with the Trump administration and frustration about the long wait for representation in a district that was used to Jackson Lee’s steady, engaged leadership.

“We have a lot of pride in the 18th,” said Anderson, the teachers union president. “A lot of that pride was instilled in us from the late Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee…I don’t have to tell you how much we miss her and her service to the constituents.”

Voters, multiple Democrats said, are looking for someone who can replicate Jackson Lee’s visibility in the district, especially during crises, and her ability to direct federal funds back to their neighborhoods.

“We’re kind of spoiled,” Bouie said. “We had a representative who went to the bargaining line, someone who did show up. She was everywhere.”

Even so, turnout — given that it’s a January election, on a Saturday, for a special election runoff — is expected to be low. Through Tuesday — early voting was closed for inclement weather on Sunday and Monday — 13,620 people had cast ballots. The November election, in which statewide ballot initiatives and municipal candidates were also on the ballot, had just over 76,000 votes — about half cast during early voting — in a district with about 400,000 registered voters.

Houston Democrats interviewed for this story had positive things to say about both candidates. Edwards, who was an at-large city council member from 2016 to 2020, is remembered fondly by many for her leadership during Hurricane Harvey. A lawyer with a background in public finance, Edwards is well-versed in the city’s infrastructure needs and where federal funding could help.

Her experience, she argued, is more relevant for Congress than Menefee’s.

“In this job, you don’t file lawsuits,” Edwards said. “That’s the county attorney role. That’s not what you do in D.C. You advocate, you bring home lots of federal dollars and you pass policy. You insert amendments and changes — all of which I’ve had extensive amounts of experience doing well and effectively.”

Greeting voters at their doors, Edwards emphasized her focus on health care and creating economic opportunity, and her experience with disaster recovery. She’s run digital ads touting her endorsement from Jones, the third-place finisher, over the past month.

In a video promoted by the Edwards campaign, Jones praised her former opponent for her independence from the Democratic establishment.

“Amanda Edwards is the best option for this moment in time,” Jones said. “I watched her campaign. She listened to constituents and tried to help them. She worked for the runoff spot. She’s independent — nobody’s puppet.”

Menefee has been elected more recently than Edwards, having served from 2021 through 2025 as county attorney — a previously sleepy office he elevated by suing Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, building his profile as a Democratic foil to the two and winning battles over environmental and public health issues.

In an era in which Democratic voters are looking for fighters, Menefee argued his record as county attorney showed he can meet the moment.

“I was doing the fight before it was cool,” Menefee said. “It’s become kind of cliche in the Democratic Party now, for everybody to say that they fight.”

Upon taking office, Menefee noted, he was met with skepticism from some party figures over his adversarial stance against Abbott and Paxton in battles over voting and environmental rights.

“Now everybody’s kind of giving the fighter message,” Menefee said. “So it’s good for me in that I’m not pretending. I’m not selling a product. This is who I am, and this is how I believe that opposition has to work when you’re dealing with the Trump administration.”

Responding to the charge that his litigation record is not applicable to the work of a Congress member, Menefee argued that his time as Harris County attorney demonstrated he would use the tools at his disposal in Congress — from questioning witnesses at hearings to maximizing leverage in negotiations over bills — to achieve results.

Ashleigh Rickertsen, the president of the Greater Heights Democratic Club, said she knew Menefee would be a strong leader at the watch party for his first primary in 2020, when he unseated the Democratic incumbent.

That night, early voting results indicated Menefee would win comfortably. Instead of celebrating, Rickertsen said, Menefee left his own party to pass out water and encourage voters to wait out the hourlong line that had formed at Texas Southern University’s polling place.

Lee Carter, who is backing Menefee, said he would bring the same doggedness to Congress that her mother was known for.

“I know his core,” she said. “My mother was someone who could not easily be moved. She was steady. And I see that in him.”