Election Night 2024: Rural Texas House Candidates Watch List

If you’ve been following the Rural Reporter, you know we’ve taken a special interest in the Texas Legislative races where Gov Abbott has been targeting rural Republicans for their vote on Vouchers.

We’ve been following these races and talking to folks on the ground about what the expectations are for outcomes tonight.

The early voting turnout numbers for rural Texas are very high, according to consultant and media reports. There is neither a movement nor a statewide candidate responsible for driving turnout, including Abbott or Trump. Rural Texans usually doesn’t get this much attention during campaign time, we are usually taken for granted. But this cycle has been different and I would argue that you can attribute high turnout mostly to voter awareness driven by all the millions of dollars spent by the various different candidate and PACS on mail, TV, radio, text messaging, ect into these districts.

I am not entirely confident in these picks because I don't know how to factor in the money or the insanity of this election cycle. Below are my best guesses on how the Primary races for this group of Rural Republican who voted against vouchers will turn out.

In general those I listed in the safe columns are popular incumbents and they are districts where the Governor/Ken Paxton/Sid Miller are split on their endorsements. I think the split endorsements cause confusion amounts the party faithful giving an advantage to the incumbent.

SAFE:

• District 1: Gary VanDeaver

• Dist 4: Keith Bell

• Dist 7: Jay Dean

• Dist 11: Travis Clardy

• Dist 44: John Kuempel

• Dist 71: Stan Lambert

• Dist 72: Drew Darby

• Dist 88: Ken King

• Dist 99: Charlie Geren

In these Battleground seats, there is a huge amount of money that’s been spent to push an organized effort to defeat these candidates. The Gov is aligned with Paxton, Sid Miller and 3rd Party groups such as Defend Texas Liberty PAC and the AFC PAC so these candidates have been in some sense ground zero.

Battleground:

• Dist 18: Ernst Bailes

• Dist 33: Justin Holland

• Dist 55 Hugh Shine

• Dist 58: DeWyane

• Dist 60: Glenn Rogers

• Dist 62: Reggie Smith

• District 121: Steve Allison

The pro-public education folks are calling these safe and battleground seats the “sweet 16”. There are six open seats where an anti-voucher candidate has retired. In four of these open seats, only a voucher candidate has filed. In two of those there are competitive races, one, Dist 87 could go to a run off because there are four candidates in the race.

Open Seats (based on retirements):

• Dist 53: Hatch Smith (Murr's seat)

• Dist 87: Cindi Bulla (run off likely in Price's seat)

I think I remember pro-vouchers folks saying they need 10 pickups. They get 4 seats automatically with open seats where there is only a pro-voucher candidate running, so they need six wins tonight. Can they get them? We’ll be watching and will report in after the results are in. If you want to follow my on Twitter/X @sbellsnyder I’ll try to post scoop there throughout the evening.