Congressional Races to Watch: Texas
Ground Zero in Battle for the Majority

Texas House & Senate Races Rankings - Crystal Ball for 2026 Texas Elections

Capitol Inside
January 8, 2026

Texas will be the epicenter of the congressional battlefield in the U.S. in the fall when Republicans could lose the U.S. House majority if they fail to flip all of five seats that were targeted for partisan conversions on a map GOP lawmakers approved last summer.

The Capitol Inside crystal ball sees the GOP adding two or three House seats to its side of the ledger in the Lone Star State in the general election in 2026. While the national political climate has never been as voltaic and harder to predict than it is on President Donald Trump's second watch, the tentative forecast here has Republicans with a three-seat gain at best in November.

And that's being generous when considering that GOP leaders and lawmakers in Austin made a fundamental mistake by basing their projections on Trump's support in Texas in 2024 when his popularity was peaking. One seat in the Dallas area and a second in Houston appear to be locks for the Republicans in the district-flipping competition.

But Democrats look like favorites from this particular vantage in two other targeted U.S. House districts that stretch through South Texas to the Mexican border. Democratic U.S. Reps. Henry Cuellar of Laredo and Vicente Gonzalez of Brownsville both expect to win in November based on the recent polling and other significant trends.

The GOP currently holds 218 seats in the U.S. - the minimum number necessary to pass legislation - while Democrats control 213 districts. There are four vacancies including one that will be filled by a Houston Democrat after a special election runoff later this month. Another opening is in a district that's solid blue in New Jersey.

But one of the House districts that's open now as a result of California Republican Doug LaMalfa's death this week is expected to go blue in November as a consequence of the Proposition 50 redistricting plan that Democrats in Sacramento conceived to nullify GOP gains in Texas.

Some of the hottest first-round action in the competition for Congress in Texas can be found in the GOP primary with a half-dozen races for seats that Republican representatives are giving up without re-election bids and several in districts that were targeted on the new map.

The Republicans with the early inside tracks in open contests in the March 3 primary election include State Rep. Briscoe Cain of Deer Park in Congressional District 9, former professional baseball star Mark Teixeira in Congressional District 21 and Trump-endorsed military veteran Chris Gober in Congressional District 10.

The most intriguing and potentially confusing primary fight on the Democrats side can be found in the Houston area in Congressional District 18, which Governor Greg Abbott has allowed to remain without representation for more than 10 months since Sylvester Turner's death in March.

CD 18 will get the representative that's long overdue when Christian Menefee and Amanda Edwards square off in a runoff on January 31. But U.S. Rep. Al Green is competing in the primary election for the nomination in CD 18 with Menefee, the leader in the initial special vote, and Edwards as his foes. That means that two incumbents will be on the ballot in the same race in the primary election that's less than two months away.

Two other Democrats who were targeted on the new GOP map - U.S. Reps. Julie Johnson of Dallas and Greg Casar of Austin - will be on the primary ballot as well this year in districts they don't currently represent.

The Capitol Inside races to watch for the Texas Legislature, the U.S. Senate and House and statewide officers will be updated as needed to reflect the way the contests evolve between now and the vote.