Texas Senator Sarah Eckhardt speaks at the Constitution Day Rally at the Texas Capitol on Saturday. Sep. 20, 2025 in Austin.
Aaron E. Martinez/Austin American-Statesman
State Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, a Democrat from Austin who formerly served as Travis County judge, will announce Monday that she is running for Congress in a newly drawn district designed to give a Republican a 10-point edge.
The 61-year-old lawmaker, whose Senate term does not expire until after the 2028 election cycle, acknowledged that she would be the underdog in a general election. But Eckhardt said she is undaunted by the uphill race and will rely on independent-minded voters who have grown weary of tribal politics to bridge the gap if she is nominated for Congressional District 10 in the March 3 Democratic primary.
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“I’ve spent most of my adult life in Austin, and that’ll come up, but in reality, I’m a public servant who came up through local government,” Eckhardt said in an interview into the run up to her formal announcement. “I went from the commissioner’s court to state government because I saw that things could be done better. Now I’m in the state government and we really need this federal partnership, and we’re not getting federal partnership right now. We’re going in the wrong direction.”
She is running to for the seat being vacated by Republican Congressman Michael McCaul, who was first elected in 2004 and said last month he is retiring. Several Republicans, including Elon Musk’s lawyer Chis Gober, have already announced they will run. During the 2024 presidential election, Gober helped Musk’s political action committee raise more than $200 million on behalf of Donald Trump.
District 10, under the recently enacted congressional redistricting plan, rambles from Travis County, through Bryan-College Station and out past Huntsville in the East Texas Piney Woods.
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Eckhard said she plans to lean into her experience as a county judge from 2015 until she won a special election to the Texas Senate in May 2020 as she seeks to connect with voters outside of the Democratic stronghold of Austin. And in the process, she would have to convince rural voters in the district to sever their long-held loyalty to Trump and his fellow Republicans.
“We’re seeing a growing number of people feeling unmoored from their party, Democrat or Republican,” she said. “I think a lot of people who lean Republican threw a protest vote for Trump because they thought that it would change something. Well, it has, but it’s changed it for the worse.”
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Eckhardt said voters, regardless of party, can look no further than the partisan stalemate in Congress that has brought about the ongoing shutdown of the federal government to see that politics as usual must be changed. While the two sides point fingers, she said, people all across the country are on the verge is seeing the collapse of the social safety net and the continuing erosion of the public trust.
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“The top issue is health care. Our health care outcomes are not good, and when you are the richest nation ever in the history of the world, and we have these kinds of health care outcomes, that’s clearly the wrong direction,” she said.
If she wins election to Congress, Echkardt would follow in the footsteps of her father. The late former U.S. Rep. Bob Eckhardt, a labor lawyer, represented a section of Houston from 1967 until 1981. Her late mother, Nadine Eckhardt, was an aide to Lyndon B. Johnson during his time in the U.S. Senate majority leader.
“I’ve been training in public service since I could walk,” she said.
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