2024 Texas House of Representatives election

Based on Wikipedia: 2024 Texas House of Representatives election

A Civil War in Red Country

Fifteen Republican state legislators walked into the 2024 Texas primary season expecting routine reelection. Fifteen walked out unemployed—casualties not of Democratic opposition, but of a brutal intraparty war waged by their own party's most powerful figures.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Texas Republicans held an 86-to-64 supermajority in the state House. They'd just expanded their grip in the 2022 midterms, flipping heavily Hispanic districts along the Mexican border while holding off Democratic gains in the suburbs. By every conventional measure, they were winning.

But conventional measures don't account for what happens when a governor and an attorney general decide to eat their own.

The Impeachment That Lit the Fuse

On May 27, 2023, something extraordinary happened in the Texas House of Representatives. By a vote of 121 to 23, lawmakers from both parties voted to impeach their own attorney general, Ken Paxton. A House committee had uncovered evidence that Paxton had used taxpayer money to settle a legal dispute with whistleblowers from his own office—employees who had accused him of corruption and bribery.

The vote wasn't even close. More than half of House Republicans joined every Democrat in saying enough was enough.

The Texas Senate saw things differently. In September 2023, they acquitted Paxton on all charges. He walked free, and he walked angry.

What followed was political revenge on an industrial scale. Paxton endorsed primary challengers against dozens of Republicans who had voted to impeach him. Forty-seven candidates in total received his blessing—a systematic effort to purge the party of anyone who had dared to hold him accountable.

The Governor's Obsession

Governor Greg Abbott had his own vendetta, though his target was policy rather than personal. Abbott wanted school vouchers—a program that would allow public education funds to flow to private schools. It's the kind of idea that fires up the conservative base but makes rural Republicans nervous, since their communities often have only one school and depend on every dollar of public funding.

Twenty-one House Republicans had sided with Democrats in November 2023, voting for an amendment that stripped voucher provisions from an education bill. The amendment passed. The voucher program died.

Abbott had called four special sessions of the legislature trying to push the bill through. Four times, these rural Republicans held firm. Four times, Abbott lost.

So he did what Paxton did. He started endorsing primary challengers.

When Your Allies Become Your Enemies

Here's where the Texas political circus became truly absurd: Abbott and Paxton frequently endorsed different challengers in the same races. The two most powerful Republican officials in the state couldn't even coordinate their purges.

Consider Collin County, a wealthy suburban area north of Dallas. Multiple races there featured Abbott backing one challenger while Paxton backed another—or backed the incumbent Abbott was trying to oust. Former President Donald Trump added to the chaos by endorsing seven challengers of his own, sometimes agreeing with Abbott, sometimes with Paxton, sometimes with neither.

For Republican incumbents, this created an impossible maze. Vote against impeachment, and Abbott might leave you alone, but you'd still face Paxton's wrath if you opposed vouchers. Support vouchers, and you might survive Abbott's hit list, but your rural constituents might vote you out anyway. And who knew what Trump might do?

The March Massacre

When primary day arrived on March 5, 2024, the casualties piled up fast.

Nine Republican incumbents lost outright. Nine more were forced into runoff elections—a humiliating outcome in a state where incumbents typically cruise to renomination.

The victims included Travis Clardy, who'd been in the House since 2013. Jacey Jetton, who'd served only one term before being ousted. Hugh Shine, a former mayor who'd represented his district for eight years. Reggie Smith, a former school board member. All gone.

Steve Allison lost to Marc LaHood in District 121. Kronda Thimesch lost to Mitch Little in District 65. Glenn Rogers, who'd spent years as a county commissioner before joining the House, lost to Mike Olcott in District 60.

The message was clear: loyalty to Abbott and Paxton now mattered more than seniority, constituent service, or legislative experience.

The Speaker's Fight for Survival

No race drew more attention than District 21, where House Speaker Dade Phelan was fighting for his political life.

Phelan represented everything the insurgent wing of the party wanted to destroy. He'd allowed the impeachment vote against Paxton to proceed. He'd appointed Democrats to chair House committees—a tradition dating back decades that reformers despised. He'd failed to deliver school vouchers despite Republican supermajorities.

His challenger, David Covey, ran on a simple platform: Phelan had to go.

Phelan survived the March primary, but barely. He was forced into a runoff—an almost unprecedented humiliation for a sitting speaker. When he finally won in May, he'd been so weakened that his speakership was effectively dead regardless of the outcome.

The May Runoffs: Finishing the Job

If March was a massacre, May was an execution.

Six of the eight Republican incumbents who'd survived to the runoff stage lost. Justin Holland. John Kuempel. DeWayne Burns. Frederick Frazier. Lynn Stucky. Stephanie Klick. All of them—legislators with years of experience, committee assignments, institutional knowledge—swept away.

The pattern was unmistakable. Three had been targeted for opposing vouchers. The others had voted to impeach Paxton. Either sin was enough to end a career.

Only Gary VanDeaver and Phelan survived. VanDeaver had opposed vouchers but represented a rural district where public schools were popular. Phelan had the advantages of incumbency and name recognition, plus the ability to raise massive amounts of money.

Abbott declared victory. He told reporters the results ensured enough votes to pass vouchers in the next legislative session. The purge had worked.

The Democratic Side: Quieter, But Not Quiet

Democrats had their own internal drama, though it drew far less attention.

Representative Shawn Thierry of District 146 had made enemies by voting with Republicans on legislation affecting LGBTQ rights. In the runoff, she lost to Lauren Ashley Simmons. In a final twist, Thierry responded to her defeat by switching parties entirely, joining the Republicans who'd been her unlikely allies.

Seven Democratic incumbents chose not to run for reelection. Several were seeking higher office—Victoria Neave wanted a state Senate seat, Carl Sherman was running for U.S. Senate, Julie Johnson aimed for Congress. Others, like Tracy King and Abel Herrero, simply retired after decades of service.

But the Democratic exodus didn't create the same chaos as the Republican purges. There was no coordinated effort to oust incumbents, no war between party leaders, no mass defenestration of veteran legislators.

The General Election: Anticlimax

After all that drama, the general election on November 5, 2024, was almost boring.

Republicans were always going to keep their majority. The question was only whether Democrats could flip enough seats to maintain their blocking minority against voucher legislation. They needed a net gain of two seats to keep that power.

They didn't get it.

Donald Trump won 96 Texas House districts in his presidential victory—eleven more than he'd won in 2020. Kamala Harris won only 54, down from the 65 Joe Biden had carried four years earlier. The red wave that failed to materialize nationally crashed ashore in Texas with full force.

Democrats now hold eight districts that Trump carried. The closest is House District 40, where Trump's margin was just one-tenth of one percent. These legislators are survivors on borrowed time, representing constituencies that increasingly vote Republican at the top of the ticket.

The Speaker's End

Dade Phelan had won his primary, but he'd lost the war.

By September, five Republicans had announced they were running against him for speaker. Nearly fifty House Republicans had pledged to vote against any speaker candidate who would continue appointing Democrats to chair committees. Since Republicans held only 86 seats, Phelan couldn't win with Republican votes alone.

His only option was to seek Democratic support—to become speaker of a Republican chamber by relying on the minority party. It was a desperate move, and ultimately, he didn't make it. In November, Phelan announced he wouldn't seek a third term as speaker.

The reformers had won. Sort of.

On January 14, 2025, the House voted for its new speaker. The reformer-backed candidate was David Cook, a hardliner who'd promised to end Democratic committee chairmanships and push through conservative priorities. But Cook didn't win.

Instead, Dustin Burrows—an ally of the departed Phelan—assembled a coalition of 36 Republicans and all 49 Democrats. He won 85 to 55, becoming speaker through exactly the kind of bipartisan deal the reformers had sworn to prevent.

The insurgents had purged fifteen incumbents, terrorized dozens more, and reshaped the ideological makeup of the Republican caucus. And then they lost the speakership anyway.

What It All Means

The 2024 Texas House elections reveal something important about American politics in this era: the most dangerous opponent isn't across the aisle. It's in your own caucus.

Texas Republicans spent 2023 and 2024 fighting each other with a ferocity they rarely showed Democrats. The impeachment of Ken Paxton created lasting wounds. The school voucher fight exposed fundamental disagreements about education policy. And the tools of modern politics—dark money, endorsements from popular figures, social media campaigns—made it possible for insurgents to take down incumbents who would have been safe a generation ago.

The legislature that convened in 2025 looks very different from the one that met in 2023. Dozens of experienced legislators are gone, replaced by newcomers who won by promising to be more conservative, more loyal to Abbott and Paxton, more willing to fight.

Whether that makes for better governance is a question Texas voters will have to answer in future elections. For now, the 89th Texas Legislature begins its work with one certainty: the civil war that shaped its membership isn't over. It's just taking a break.

The Policy Stakes

Lost in all the political drama is what these legislators actually do when they're not running for reelection.

The 2023 regular session produced substantial legislation. Lawmakers expanded armed security measures in schools—a response to the 2022 Uvalde massacre, where nineteen children and two teachers died while police waited in the hallway. They banned diversity, equity, and inclusion offices at public universities, joining a national conservative movement against what critics call ideological conformity in higher education. They allowed school districts to hire chaplains to provide mental health support to students, an unusual mixing of religious and public functions.

They also unanimously expelled one of their own. Representative Bryan Slaton, a Republican, was removed from office after evidence emerged that he'd had an improper relationship with a much younger aide. The vote was 147 to 0—one of the few moments of genuine bipartisan agreement in an otherwise fractious session.

Efforts to legalize gambling made surprising progress. A bill to legalize online sports betting actually passed the House with 101 votes—one more than the two-thirds supermajority required to put a constitutional amendment before voters. Casino company Las Vegas Sands and Dallas Mavericks owner Miriam Adelson lobbied hard for the measures. So did former Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

But the Texas Senate killed both proposals. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, who presides over the Senate, opposed gambling expansion, as did enough Republican senators to ensure the bills never got a vote.

The Geography of the Battle

Texas is a big state—268,596 square miles, bigger than France—and its politics vary enormously by region.

South Texas, along the Mexican border, has been trending Republican. Districts that elected Democrats for generations are now competitive or safely red. Republicans outraised Democrats in competitive races there during the 2024 cycle, a sign of shifting allegiances in heavily Hispanic communities.

The Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs, meanwhile, showed the opposite pattern. Democrats outraised Republicans in competitive races around the metroplex—though in a state as red as Texas, outraising your opponent doesn't guarantee victory.

San Antonio saw similar dynamics. The city itself is Democratic, but the suburbs are battlegrounds where both parties pour resources.

Rural Texas remains deeply conservative, but rural Republicans proved to be the main obstacle to school vouchers. Their constituents depend on public schools in ways suburban families don't. When there's only one school in the county, you don't want state money flowing elsewhere.

A Note on the Numbers

The Texas House has 150 members—one of the largest state legislative chambers in the country. California's Assembly has 80 members. New York's Assembly has 150 but serves a state with half the population.

Each Texas House district contains roughly 194,000 people, meaning each representative speaks for a constituency larger than some Congressional districts were when the Constitution was written. This scale makes Texas politics expensive and impersonal in ways that smaller states don't experience.

The 86-to-64 Republican majority that emerged from 2024 represents a comfortable cushion but not an overwhelming one. Two-thirds of the chamber is 100 members—the threshold needed to pass constitutional amendments. Republicans fell short of that number, meaning they still need some Democratic cooperation on the biggest questions.

Or they would, if they could agree among themselves. As the 2024 cycle demonstrated, Republican unity is far from guaranteed.

Looking Forward

School vouchers will almost certainly pass the 89th Legislature. Abbott's purges worked well enough to flip enough votes, and the new speaker—despite relying on Democratic support to win his gavel—will face enormous pressure from his own party to deliver.

The more interesting question is what comes next. Will the legislators who won by promising to be hardliners actually govern that way? Will the alliance between Abbott's voucher crusade and Paxton's impeachment revenge hold together, or will new fault lines emerge?

And what happens to the Democrats? They're stuck in a seemingly permanent minority, unable to stop Republican priorities but sometimes able to influence them by providing votes to speakers like Burrows. It's an awkward position—relevance without power, influence without accountability.

The 2026 midterm elections loom ahead. Every one of these 150 seats will be on the ballot again. The survivors of 2024's purges will have to prove they can actually legislate, not just campaign. The newcomers will have to build records their constituents can judge.

And somewhere, Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott are already thinking about who else needs to be replaced.