HOUSTON (AP) — Rep. Christian Menefee of Texas, the newest member of Congress, started the job Monday – and now has just four weeks to convince Houston voters he already deserves reelection.
The candidate Menefee defeated on Saturday, Amanda Edwards, also is running again for the 18th District seat in next month's Democratic primary. So is Rep. Al Green, who for decades represented a district nearby but now finds himself living in a newly drawn 18th.
The back-to-back elections are among the head-spinning electoral oddities that voters in heavily Democratic Houston have experienced in recent months.
For nearly a year, the district’s residents had no representative in the U.S. House after their member died. And before voters could select a successor, the Texas Legislature redrew the state’s congressional maps to help Republicans' midterm election prospects, further complicating things and raising concerns about disenfranchising voters in the predominantly Black and Hispanic district.
“It has been exhausting. Voters are confused. Voters are tired,” said Shamier Bouie, chairwoman of Black American Democrats of Houston. “Even people who are pretty politically savvy, it’s still confusing for them.”
Taken together, voters’ questions surrounding this pileup of elections and the new House boundaries mark an unwieldy start to the 2026 midterm campaigns for control of Congress. Texas' March 3 primary will be the first using a new U.S. House map drawn at the start of a national redistricting battle spurred by President Donald Trump.
Shampu Sibley, who voted Wednesday at Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, decried the mid-decade redistricting as “a political move” by the GOP-led Texas Legislature.
The 62-year-old novelist, who lives within the current boundaries of the 18th District, was uncertain if his home will still be in the 18th on the new map.
“We’re not going to say they want to steal elections, but they make it very hard for the Black and brown communities to vote,” he said.
A long-vacant seat
The current 18th District is a Democratic stronghold in a Republican state. In 2024, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris won about 69% of the vote. So did the late Rep. Sylvester Turner, who died in March 2025.
After Turner’s death, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott set an all-party primary to fill the seat for eight months later, suggesting it would take Harris County elections officials months to prepare for the vote. Democrats accused Abbott of delaying the vote to help Republican House leader Mike Johnson pass legislation with a thin GOP majority.
When none of the 16 candidates won a majority in November, the race advanced to Saturday's runoff, which Menefee won.
Edwards and Menefee have been vocal in their criticism of leaving the 18th District, including large tracts of the nation’s fourth-largest city, without representation.
In particular, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been active for months in Houston, which has received less publicity than cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and now Minneapolis, in part because of the empty seat, Edwards said.
“If there was advocacy, if there was use of a bully pulpit to get people together and really walk in unison around an issue of justice, this seat was it,” she said. “To have it silenced is not a coincidence.”
New maps to help Trump
Meanwhile, the GOP-controlled Texas Legislature in August adopted redrawn congressional maps at the direction of Trump, who has warned Republicans that if they lose control of the U.S. House in November he will be impeached again. Some other states, including heavily Democratic California, later drew their own new maps.
The 18th District, which is centered around Houston and entirely in Harris County in southeast Texas, was divided among nearly a half-dozen districts. The largest share of the population in the current 18th district will become part of a different district.
That means Menefee and Edwards are turning around and running in a district that includes some new territory. They also will face yet another candidate in Green, an 11-term Democratic congressman whose Houston home was included in a new, Republican-leaning district, prompting him last year to announce plans to run in the the Democratic-leaning new 18th District.
It has set up a generational battle between Green, who is 78, and Menefee, the 37-year-old former county attorney, and Edwards, a 44-year-old former Houston city councilwoman.
Overlapping elections add to confusion
Menefee and Edwards said they had spent as much time answering voter questions in an effort to help voters keep the timing straight as they had talking about their policy positions.
“There have been times where I’ve shown up at community centers and somebody will say, ’Why haven’t you come to my neighborhood or my church? And I’ll say, ‘Where do you go to church at?’” Menefee said, only to learn the person lives in the new 18th District. “That has happened to me at least a dozen times.”
Last week, Houston lawyer and Democratic activist Brandon Cofield met a man who had visited his local polling place hoping to vote in the March 3 primary, thinking the early voting period had begun, only to be turned away.
Because Abbott scheduled the vacancy elections so late in 2025 and 2026, they ended up colliding with the start of the 2026 midterm elections, for the next term that will start in 2027.
Not only were voters seeing campaign signs for the March 3 primary before the Saturday runoff, Harris County began sending out mail-in ballots for the new district primary two weeks before the runoff was finished.
“You literally had people who could vote in two different elections at the same time," Edwards said. “These elections aren't just back to back. They overlap.”
That meant that even as Edwards was urging voters to get out for Saturday’s election, her team had to be looking ahead to the March 3 primary to meet filing deadlines in the new district.
Menefee said he's been trying to encourage people to stay engaged.
It has "definitely made people feel like they can be a pawn in a game,” he said. “I think it has demoralized some people.”
Tobin Hellums, a 57-year-old Houston entrepreneur, said he was confused because his normal early-voting location was different for the runoff. Harris County elections officials offered fewer early-voting stations because the ballot included only one race.
“The overall process was completely confusing,” Hellums said.
Natural forces have also contributed.
The Sunday before the runoff, Bouie's group had planned to blitz 10 of Houston's best-known Black churches to run through details of the coming election sequence for parishioners. With multiple services that day, she was looking at reaching thousands of voters in the district.
Then a winter storm hit, closing the churches. Early voting was extended by two days to make up for the weather-related shutdown of polling places. But that also forced early run-off voting to overlap more with primary mail-in voting.
More election drama may lie ahead. The March 3 Democratic primary ballot will have four names: Menefee, Edwards, Green and Gretchen Brown, a veteran Defense Department senior staffer. If no candidate receives a majority of the vote, the race will move to a May runoff election.
“It feels like it's going to go on forever,” Bouie said.
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Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Leah Askarinam and Hannah Recht contributed from Washington.