Texas District Heads to Runoff Between 2 Well-Known Local Democrats

House Republicans’ narrow margin of control in the U.S. House will soon get smaller when this Houston-area district’s vacant seat is filled.

Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee announced he was leading in the Texas 18th Congressional District race at a watch party held at The Spot Eado lounge in Houston, on Nov. 4, 2025. Darlene McCormick Sanchez /The Epoch Times

HOUSTON—Two well-known local Democrats will face each other in a runoff election to fill Texas Congressional District 18, which has remained vacant since Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-Texas) died in office.

The top two vote getters were Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee and former Houston City Council member Amanda Edwards. With 78 percent of the votes counted, Menefee received 29.4 percent of the total, compared to Edwards’s 25.7 percent.

The Associated Press determined that the race will advance to a runoff election since no candidate will receive more than 50 percent of the vote.

State Rep. Jolanda Jones (D-District 147), who was also considered a top candidate for the seat, received 18.7 percent of the vote total.

Menefee spoke briefly at a standing-room-only watch party in downtown less than two hours after polls closed, telling his supporters he looked forward to a runoff against his Democratic opponent.

“I’m Christian Menefee, and we’re in first place for Congress,” he said.

Menefee thanked God for his success along with campaign workers, those who helped him raise campaign funds, and all who endorsed him.

His platform included favorite Democratic talking points such as raising wages, relieving student loan debt, and universal health care.

“So my message to MAGA Republicans and Donald Trump in Washington D.C. [is] we got just one more election left, and you guys can see me,” he said.

A runoff was all but inevitable with a crowded field of 16 candidates vying for the seat. Most were Democrats, but contenders included five Republicans and three independents, including George Foreman IV, son of boxing legend George Foreman.

Businesswoman Carmen Maria Montiel ranked as the top Republican in the race with 6 percent of the vote.

Jay Reed told The Epoch Times he was eager to vote because he felt the seat had been held open on purpose to benefit House Republicans, who narrowly control the chamber.

He noted the seat has been vacant since March, when Turner died. Reed added that even after the election, there could be delays in swearing in Texas’s latest congressional member.

Reed pointed out that Adelita Grijalva, who won Arizona’s Seventh District election to fill her father’s seat after he died in office this spring, has yet to be sworn in. For the past six weeks, she has lobbied House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to do so.

Reed said he voted for Jones because of her “fighting spirit,” as one of the Democrats who fled the state to break quorum this year, temporarily blocking Texas’s redistricting effort favoring Republicans.

Phil Yeh, an immigrant from Taiwan in 1989, told The Epoch Times he voted for Montiel because he thought she would make changes that would benefit the business community.

Menefee took to X on election day, urging supporters to get out and vote and touting endorsements from the likes of Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), who once ran for presidential nomination.

Meanwhile, Edwards posted videos of herself working outside polls on Election Day. Another prominent video posted on Nov. 1 on X showed her distributing food to needy families. She drew attention to the government shutdown and the impact on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients.

A tight race was predicted by an October survey of 1,200 likely voters in the district, conducted by the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs.

Results showed Menefee was the top contender, followed by Edwards and Jones.

Renée Cross, a researcher and senior executive director of the Hobby School involved in the poll, said in a University of Houston report that three of the candidates are well-known to voters. That made it extremely unlikely that anyone would receive more than 50 percent of the vote.

Menefee and Edwards have been the front-runners since they announced their run, but Jones remains a close third, Cross stated in the report.

Cross added that a sizeable majority of voters said they don’t know enough about the other 13 candidates to have an opinion about them.

The survey showed Republicans trailing far behind in Houston’s first black congressional district, established in 1972 after the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Turner, a Houston Democrat and former mayor, was elected to represent the district in November 2024 after longtime Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee died that year.