LONGVIEW, Texas (KLTV) – Pine Tree ISD Superintendent Steve Clugston will not appear on the November ballot after falling short of the required signatures needed to run for Texas Senate District 1, a seat currently held by Republican State Sen. Bryan Hughes.<\/p>\n
Clugston had planned to run as a conservative independent. He said he submitted 640 signatures to the Texas Secretary of State, but the state invalidated 162 of them, leaving him with 478 \u2014 short of the 500 required to qualify. It was not immediately clear why the state invalidated the signatures. <\/p>\n
\u201cI apologize for coming up short,\u201d Clugston said. \u201cWe believed 140 extra signatures was more than enough to meet the required number.\u201d<\/p>\n
RELATED STORIES: <\/p>\n
Pine Tree ISD Superintendent campaigns for Texas Senate<\/a>EAST TEXAS POLITICS: Steve Clugston Interview<\/a><\/p>\n Copyright 2026 KLTV. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONGVIEW, Texas (KLTV) – Pine Tree ISD Superintendent Steve Clugston will not appear on the November ballot after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":372583,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[127739,13349,125498,131891,27,7116,29,28,1863],"class_list":["post-372582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-blake-holland","tag-bryan-hughes","tag-east-texas-politics","tag-steve-clugston","tag-texas","tag-texas-elections","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news","tag-texas-senate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/372583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}