In the guts of Houston and its surrounding areas, the residents of Texas’ 18th Congressional District had lengthy counted on one particular person to combat for them in Washington.
Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee represented the district for greater than 30 years and set a precedent as a sturdy voice for Black Americans and somebody intimately concerned in the group and its points.
It’s a stark change from what the district has in representation now: No one.
Jackson Lee’s death in July 2024 set off a saga that’s left roughly 800,000 individuals without a constant voice in the US House ever since. The story entails totally different tides of nationwide politics crashing into one another: the long-running Democratic debate over the age and health of the party’s officeholders, the Republican crucial to guard a razor-thin House majority and a redistricting fight that’s pitting candidates of the identical get together towards one another.
By the time of a January 31 runoff election to fill the seat, the district may have been without a consultant for 13 of the previous 18 months. And the winner of that runoff may lose in a major 5 weeks later.
“The congressional 18th is being used like a pawn in a game,” stated Joetta Stevenson, the president of the Greater Fifth Ward tremendous neighborhood.
“We are historically an African American community. We have a huge population of Hispanics in this community. We have people in need, and without the federal representation, we are all going to suffer because of that,” Stevenson stated.
One by one, essential votes in the House just like the one which handed President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic agenda bill in July have passed by without a say from Texas’ 18th District, the place there are greater than 150,000 individuals enrolled in Medicaid and about 293,000 households receiving SNAP, or meals stamp advantages. Both applications noticed vital adjustments and cuts with the passage of the invoice.
“Having Sheila Jackson Lee as our representative all these years, I think we were spoiled, spoiled rotten,” says Ken Rodgers, a Houston-area activist and president of the higher Third Ward tremendous neighborhood. “There were things that kind of got to my ear and on my table for concern and she was already on it, already doing it.”
How did it come to this?
In June 2024, Jackson Lee announced she had been identified with pancreatic most cancers.
The 74-year-old acknowledged she can be “occasionally absent” from Congress and admitted that “the road ahead will not be easy.”
“I stand in faith that God will strengthen me,” she stated.
Just over a month later, Jackson Lee died. Up till that time, the district had not been without representation in 35 years, when former Democratic Rep. Mickey Leland died in a airplane crash on a reduction mission in Ethiopia and the seat was vacant for 4 months.
Erica Lee Carter, Jackson Lee’s daughter, gained the particular election that November to serve out the rest of her mom’s time period in Congress, which ended on January 3, 2025.
That similar election evening, Sylvester Turner, the previous Houston mayor who additionally served 27 years as a state consultant, gained a separate vote to serve the subsequent full time period beginning in January. He turned the Democratic nominee by a slim vote of get together leaders in Harris County as a result of Jackson Lee died inside too tight a window to carry one other major.
Turner had revealed in November 2022 that he had undergone therapy for bone most cancers.
Bill Pesota, a retired lawyer and a Harris County Democratic precinct chair, says he argued towards Turner to different county Democrats.
“I tried reasoning with the chairs who supported Sylvester Turner to say, look, you know, we just had one elderly cancer patient in office pass away. Do we really want to put another one there? And by a very slim majority, my side lost,” Pesota stated.
Turner took workplace in January 2025.
He attended his first presidential joint handle on the night of March 4, simply hours after the 70-year-old congressman apparently suffered a “medical emergency” in the basement of a Capitol workplace constructing earlier that day, according to NBC News. At the speech, he sat together with his fellow Democrats and his visitor of the evening, a mom from Houston reliant on Medicaid for her daughter’s uncommon genetic dysfunction.
It was a shock to each his House colleagues and his constituents, then, when it was introduced that Turner had handed away on the morning of March 5. It had solely been 61 days since he had taken workplace.
Pesota rues having misplaced the vote to make Turner the nominee.
“If that vote had gone the other way, if just two people had changed their votes … we would have a representative in Washington right now,” he instructed NCS.
A month after Turner’s dying, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott set the particular major election to fill the seat for November 4. The determination to attend seven months was extensively panned by Democrats, a few of whom accused the governor of delaying the election to assist House Republicans.
House Republicans have a tiny majority. Each seat is essential sufficient that one other particular election in Arizona – won by Rep. Adelita Grijalva to exchange her father, the late Rep. Raul Grijalva – took on nationwide significance as a result of she offered the ultimate signature on a discharge petition to pressure the profitable vote on releasing the Jeffrey Epstein recordsdata.
NCS reached out to the governor’s workplace for touch upon why the elections weren’t scheduled sooner. Abbott has previously said the delay was to permit Harris County “adequate time to operate a fair and accurate election,” calling the county’s capability to take action a “repeat failure.” Republicans have lengthy accused the Democrat-led county of mishandling elections, allegations Harris County officers strongly deny.
November 2025: A particular election results in a January 2026 runoff and ‘absolute confusion’
The high two vote-getters on November 4 have been former Houston City councilmember Amanda Edwards, who narrowly misplaced out on the 2024 get together nomination to Turner, and Harris County lawyer Christian Menefee. They superior to a runoff that Abbott set on January 31.
But issues have gotten much more sophisticated.
In August, Abbott and Texas state House Republicans kicked off what ended up being the primary domino in a nationwide mid-decade redistricting effort. Abbott finally signed into regulation a new map that aimed to offer Republicans not less than 5 extra House seats in 2026. The 18th District was made much more Democratic and absorbed a lot of the present ninth District, which turned Republican leaning.
Then two members of a three-judge panel this month invalidated the new map, arguing ruling Texas Republicans had confirmed they wished to aimed to discriminate by race in altering the district boundaries. The state has appealed to the US Supreme Court, which has paused the the panel’s ruling.
“It’s just absolute confusion and mayhem,” Menefee stated. “A lot of my campaign isn’t even to get people to vote for me, it’s to get people to understand what the hell is going on. And all of this is intentional by the governor. It’s to throw our elections into a tailspin.”
Edwards echoed the identical considerations, emphasizing that the confusion will result in voter fatigue and extra voters opting out of election after election.
“And I think that is, in fact, the intention is for people to stay at home,” Edwards stated. “It’s the plan. You get chaos involved, and you have too much chaos. People get overwhelmed. When they get overwhelmed, they disengage, and then they stay at home.”
March 2026: Another major and a potential Democratic combat
If the US Supreme Court steps in and permits the brand new map to enter place, whoever wins in January can be an incumbent for 5 weeks earlier than operating in the March major towards one other stalwart of Houston politics: Rep. Al Green, who was first elected to Congress in 2004 and served alongside Sheila Jackson Lee. Green’s residence has been positioned underneath the brand new map into the 18th District as an alternative of his present ninth District.
“It makes sense for me to run where my home is and where hundreds of thousands of people that I have been representing are, and I will be faithful to them in doing this,” Green instructed NCS. “I am not moving.”
A 78-year-old Green can be up towards each Menefee, 37, and Edwards, 43, each of whom intend to file for the race. If no candidate wins over 50% of the vote in the first, there can be yet one more election, this time a runoff for the highest two finishers.
“I encourage people to run,” Green stated. “I’m not trying to push anybody out of a race. Let them run.”
Green instructed NCS that he had not heard any considerations about his age from constituents, and that studies about considerations have been “a fiction of the press.”
Among the group activists to voice these considerations was Fred Wood, a Democratic precinct chair.
“We are so far behind because we didn’t get a knowledge transfer from Sheila,” Wood instructed NCS. “We are so far behind because we didn’t get a knowledge transfer from Sylvester Turner.”
“If we do not learn from history, we are failed to repeat it,” he stated.