Texas women on November ballot

Texas women roar onto November ballot

The state will have at least two new female members of Congress next year.

By RENUKA RAYASAM

 A groundswell of female candidates in Texas has resulted in a record number of women on the ballot in November — and a guarantee that the state will have at least two new female members of Congress next year.

With the state primary and runoffs now completed, the general election will also feature twice the number of women as in 2016 — from 10 women running for Congress to 20 in 2018.

That puts Texas at the forefront in a year when a surge of women as candidates has reordered the political landscape in state after state.

During the first round of primary voting in March, 14 women — including three incumbents — won their primary battles outright. Tuesday, six additional women survived runoff contests to win party nominations.

Those preliminary gains for female candidates are certain to translate into seats in the House come 2019 — it’s just a question of how many. Texas is poised to add anywhere from two to four new full-time female members to its congressional delegation, which now has only three women.

The state hasn’t added a new congresswoman since 1996, when Republican Rep. Kay Granger was first elected.

“This year in Texas, we’re on our way to making up for lost history,” said state Sen. Sylvia Garcia, a Houston Democrat who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 1992, but won her Democratic primary and is heavily favored to win in November. “It’s just exciting.”

Mirroring the success of women seeking office in the rest of the country, those potential gains will almost certainly come from Democratic candidates. Two Republican women, including Granger, will be on the congressional ballot in Texas this year, compared with 18 Democratic female candidates.

Two women, Garcia and El Paso’s Veronica Escobar, won their primary bids in March and are vying for seats in comfortably Democratic districts. Escobar is looking to replace Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who is leaving his House seat to take on Sen. Ted Cruz, while Garcia is running to replace retiring Rep. Gene Green. Both are well-positioned to become the state’s first Latinas elected to Congress.

Democratic women also won primary contests in two red districts that they hope to turn blue come November — Lizzie Pannill Fletcher will take on incumbent GOP Rep. John Culberson in the Houston-area 7th District, and Gina Ortiz Jones will take on incumbent GOP Rep. Will Hurd in the border region’s 23rd District.

On the Republican side, Bunni Pounds, who had the backing of Vice President Mike Pence and other heavy-hitting GOP players, failed to pull off a victory in Tuesday’s runoff.

The lack of women on the Republican ballot means that, despite record primary wins by female candidates, at least 31 of the state’s 36 House seats will remain in the hands of men.

“It’s a long way away from parity,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University.

Anti-Trump sentiment, opportunities presented by some members’ retirements and indignance over sexual harassment claims against officeholders have been factors in the wave of female candidates to seek office this year.

And Democrats turned out in record numbers — more than a million Democrats voted in the gubernatorial race in the March primary — nearly double the number that voted in the 2014 primary, a comparable election since there was no presidential candidate on the ballot. About 57 percent of those Democratic primary voters were women, according to Ryan Data & Research.

The surge wasn’t enough to top total Republican primary election turnout in this still deep red state — more than 1.5 million Republicans turned out to vote in March, a slight uptick from 2014. But many women who are running on the Democratic ticket this year say that regardless of the November outcome, the surge of female candidates won’t fizzle out. They say that their campaigns are laying the groundwork helping build a network of female candidates, voters and donors for coming years.

“If I lose, I will be running in 2020 regardless,” said Linsey Fagan, who won her Democratic primary and is fighting an uphill battle to unseat incumbent Republican Michael Burgess in a north Dallas district. “I am dead set on that.”