Andrew Schneider/Houston Public Media
Acting Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee and former Houston City Council Member Amanda Edwards are leading the field in the latest poll of candidates for the special election to fill Texas’ 18th Congressional District.
Acting Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee and former Houston City Council member Amanda Edwards lead the field of 16 candidates in the Nov. 4 special election for Texas’ 18th Congressional District.
That’s the finding of the latest survey conducted by the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs. Early voting in the contest starts Monday, Oct. 20.
The poll released Thursday shows Menefee with the support of 27% of likely voters, followed by Edwards at 23% and state Rep. Jolanda Jones at 15%. All three are Democrats.
“I think we were expecting Menefee and Edwards to be near the top,” said Mark Jones, political science fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, who co-authored the survey. “But what was somewhat noteworthy is that Jolanda Jones trails and is clearly in a second-tier category compared to Menefee and Edwards. That is, it’s not really a three-candidate race right now. It’s a two-candidate race.”
Texas election law requires a runoff between the top two contenders if no candidate wins more than 50% in the first round of voting.
Previous surveys had shown Jones as a more formidable contender against Menefee and Edwards, potentially splitting the Black vote in a district that has elected Black Democrats to Congress for more than 50 years. While the district’s voting population has recently shifted to a Hispanic plurality, Blacks still make up a larger proportion of likely voters, particularly in special elections that typically garner low turnouts.
“The thing that is really hurting Jones,” Mark Jones said, “is her near complete lack of support among white voters. Only 7% intend to vote for her. She’s relatively comparable in terms of support among Black voters to Edwards and Menefee, but when it comes to white voters, she trails by a substantial margin. But she also does a little worse among Hispanic voters.”
The survey finds that, in a runoff between Menefee and Edwards, the two frontrunners are statistically in a dead heat.
“But the numbers also suggest that if Jolanda Jones somehow leapfrogs either Amanda Edwards or Christian Menefee, that both Menefee and Edwards would probably handily defeat Jones in any type of runoff because the gap is so large between them,” Mark Jones said.
Another finding of the survey was a sharp drop-off in support for Carmen Maria Montiel, a journalist and Republican candidate who previously polled a strong fourth. Mark Jones said the most likely explanation for Montiel’s 6% showing is that this was the first survey to include all five Republican candidates running in the special election, giving conservative voters more than one option.
“There was a time earlier in the summer, when Montiel was the only Republican candidate that was being surveyed about, that there was a possibility that somehow the Democrats could split the vote in such a way that Montiel could get into the runoff,” he said. “Looking at the results now, that does not seem to be a very likely possibility at all.”
Under federal law, the runoff would likely take place in February, in order to allow the full participation of military personnel and other district residents who are overseas.
“This is going to be a nightmare scenario, or at least a very difficult scenario, for Harris County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth, who’s going to have to be running a special election in a significant portion of the county at the same time that she’s preparing for early voting for the March Republican and Democratic primaries that will begin potentially a week or two after, or even potentially concurrently,” Mark Jones said.
The 18th Congressional District has been vacant for much of the past 15 months. It remained empty between the death of then-U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee in July 2024 until that November, when her daughter Erica Lee Carter won a special election to fill out her term and former Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner won a full term to succeed her. Turner died in March after barely two months in office, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declined to call a special election to fill his term until this November.
Whichever candidate emerges from the runoff as the new representative for the Congressional District 18 may quickly face a stark choice, if the recently redrawn Texas congressional map withstands a court challenge. The district has been redrawn to include much of Congressional District 9, represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Al Green for the past two decades. The mid-decade redistricting plan moved Green’s home into the 18th Congressional District, while turning the 9th into a Republican opportunity district.
Green has said he will not run again in the 9th, and while he has not yet declared himself a candidate for next year’s Democratic primary in the 18th, he has said his name will be on the ballot next year. Mark Jones said Green remains highly popular with his constituents and would be the odds-on favorite should he run in the redrawn 18th.
“You actually might be even better off, if you’re Christian Menefee or Amanda Edwards, to run against [U.S. Rep.] Sylvia Garcia in the new Congressional District 29, half of which is effectively the current Congressional District 18, where you would have an advantage in the Democratic primary, where Black voters would outnumber Latino voters,” he said.