Voters in Texas’ 18th District have elected Democrat Christian Menefee to fill a seat that’s been vacant for nearly a year, following the death of Rep. Sylvester Turner. His victory Saturday in the solid-blue Houston-area district will further cut into Republicans’ slim majority in the House, at least temporarily. Menefee, the former Harris County attorney, was leading former Houston City Council Member Amanda Edwards 67 percent to 33 percent in the all-Democratic special election runoff when The Associated Press called the race around 10 p.m. Central time. He will serve the rest of Turner’s term, which expires next January. Menefee finished in first place in the November all-party first round of the special election, with Edwards right behind, but, under Texas law, with no one taking a majority, the election moved to the runoff. Menefee and Edwards have both filed paperwork to run for a full term in the March 3 Democratic primary, where they will be joined by Texas Rep. Al Green. That election will be held under the new lines of the 18th District, one of several Texas seats that state Republicans redrew last year as part of an effort to help the party make gains in the midterms. Green, who has represented the 9th District since first taking office in 2005, pivoted to run for the new 18th, which includes much of the territory he currently represents. The 9th District was redrawn as a safe Republican seat. The 18th District has a storied legacy and was held by a number of prominent Black Democratic leaders with national profiles, including Sheila Jackson Lee, anti-hunger activist Mickey Leland and Barbara Jordan, who made history in 1972 when she became the first Black woman from the South elected to the House. Jackson Lee served three decades in Congress before she died in 2024. She was briefly succeeded by her daughter, Erica Lee Carter, who won a special election to fill her mother’s remaining term. Turner, a former Houston mayor and the winner of the regular election for Lee’s seat, took office last January but died just two months later. Menefee was first elected as Harris County attorney in 2020. During his time as the top civil attorney for Texas’ most populous county, Menefee filed multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration, including one in April 2025 to claw back public health funding after the administration had terminated $19 million in public health grants for Harris County. A district judge ordered that funding be restored two months later. “My general approach is, if Trump doesn't care about the rule of law, you have to be the opposition party,” he said in an interview before the runoff. “You have to stop him.” Menefee had the backing of Carter and much of the local Democratic establishment, as well as prominent Texas Democrats such as state Rep. James Talarico and Rep. Jasmine Crockett, both Senate hopefuls, and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke. Menefee also picked up endorsements from the Houston Chronicle editorial board and Leaders We Deserve, a Democratic political action committee that promotes generational change in politics. Once Menefee is sworn in, the House GOP majority will drop to 218-214, which means the conference can generally afford to lose only one Republican on party-line votes. There are three other vacancies in the House: New Jersey’s 11th District, which is holding a primary Thursday for the seat Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill vacated after she was elected governor; Georgia’s 14th, where Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned on Jan. 5; and California’s 1st, where the GOP incumbent, Doug LaMalfa, died on Jan. 6. The House is scheduled to return Monday. It’s unclear when Menefee will take office, though most members who began their tenures via special elections this Congress have been sworn in within a few days of their wins. The one notable exception, Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva, waited for nearly two months to be sworn in. She won a September special election to succeed her late father, but Speaker Mike Johnson, who’d kept the House in recess during the government shutdown, ignored Democratic demands to seat her during pro forma sessions.
