Michael Adkison/Houston Public Media
A sign outside of a polling location in south Houston on March 4, 2026.
When Rose Bennett came to the Sunnyside Multi-Service Center in south Houston to vote in the Democratic primary on Tuesday, she was tired of having to advocate for representation.
“Absolutely, I am,” she said. “I don’t really understand why it took having to go so many rounds doing this. And I’m not so politically — how do I say — on top of everything. But I just thought, apparently, we needed it.”
She’s one of tens of thousands of voters who cast their ballot in the Democratic race for the 18th Congressional District. Thousands of them may have voted multiple times in recent months: This election was the third since November for the Houston district, which has been represented by a Black Democrat since the early 1970s.
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Now, the fourth election in less than seven months is due. Congressmen Al Green and Christian Menefee are heading for a runoff election on May 26 after finishing as the top two candidates in Tuesday’s primary, with neither garnering more than 50% of the vote.
The victor of that runoff election will still have to run in the general election in November against the Republican nominee, Ronald Whitfield.
“I think what it says is the governor wanted people to have voting fatigue,” Menefee told Houston Public Media. “And that’s part of the reason why they set the election when they set it. I will have now been on the ballot three times in the past five months. But I trust in our democracy, I trust in the people who are empowered to be able to make voting decisions, and I think they’re going to see it through and go cast their ballot.”
AP Photo/ Karen Warren
Texas Congressional Candidate Christian D. Menefee gets a photo with poll worker, Jessica Barraza, as he visited a polling location at Acres Homes MultiService Center on Election Day, in Houston, Saturday, Jan. 31, 2026.
Green did not immediately return a request for comment. In a Facebook post, he wrote: “I ask you to stand with us again in the runoff election. This fight isn’t over — and together, we will win.”
A tumultuous two years
Between March 2024 and the upcoming primary in May, the 18th Congressional District will have gone through seven elections, the deaths of two presumptive and elected members of Congress and two congressional maps that have drastically changed the scope of the race. In the midst of that, constituents in the district went nearly a full year without representation.
That tumultuous two-year period began when the late U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who represented the 18th Congressional District for nearly 30 years, lost her bid for mayor of Houston and quickly filed for reelection to her seat in Congress. In March 2024, she won the Democratic nomination over former Houston City Council member Amanda Edwards.
In July 2024, Lee died after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer weeks before. That left Democrats without a nominee for the general election that November — and constituents of the 18th District without a representative.
That August, the Harris County Democratic Party selected former Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner as its nominee for the 18th Congressional District in the November general election. In that same cycle, a special election was held to represent the 18th District from November 2024 through January 2025. That race was won by Jackson Lee’s daughter, Erica Lee Carter.
Turner won the general election and was sworn in to office in January 2025, giving the 18th Congressional District its first full-term representation since the previous July. Just two months into his term, though, Turner died in March 2025.
That began nearly a full year without representation for the 18th District. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called a special election for November 2025, saying Harris County needed plenty of time to prepare for the election.
Soon thereafter, Republicans in Texas began planning a controversial special session for the state legislature to redraw the state’s congressional maps in the middle of the decade. New maps were approved in August, and the 18th District was drastically redrawn. Green, who had represented the 9th District, was moved into the new 18th District.
Lorianne Willett/KUT News
U.S. Rep. Al Green speaks to a crowd of protesters in the rotunda of the Texas Capitol on Wednesday, August 20, 2025. Green is a Democrat who represents Texas’ 9th Congressional District.
Legal challenges to the redrawn maps began almost immediately. Eventually, the case went up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ultimately permitted the redrawn maps to take effect for the 2026 election cycle.
That left the 18th District in a position that candidates said befuddled voters: the November special election used one congressional map, while the March primary used a different one.
In November, Menefee and Edwards came to a runoff, which Menefee won in January. He was sworn in last month, bringing an end to the 11 months without representation for the 18th District.
Both Menefee and Edwards had also filed to run in the March Democratic primary — as had Green. Following her runoff defeat, Edwards dropped out of the race, leaving Menefee and Green as the clear frontrunners.
Edwards, however, still received almost 8% of the vote Tuesday, despite having suspended her campaign. That voting bloc will potentially be up for grabs when Menefee and Green head to their runoff in May.