By Molly English, CNN
(CNN) — In the heart of Houston and its surrounding areas, the residents of Texas’ 18th Congressional District had long counted on one person to fight for them in Washington.
Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee represented the district for more than 30 years and set a precedent as a strong voice for Black Americans and someone intimately involved in the community and its issues.
It’s a stark change from what the district has in representation now: No one.
Jackson Lee’s death in July 2024 set off a saga that’s left roughly 800,000 people without a consistent voice in the US House ever since. The story involves different tides of national politics crashing into each other: the long-running Democratic debate over the age and health of the party’s officeholders, the Republican imperative to protect a razor-thin House majority and a redistricting fight that’s pitting candidates of the same party against each other.
By the time of a January 31 runoff election to fill the seat, the district will have been without a representative for 13 of the preceding 18 months. And the winner of that runoff could lose in a primary five weeks later.
“The congressional 18th is being used like a pawn in a game,” said Joetta Stevenson, the president of the Greater Fifth Ward super neighborhood.
“We are historically an African American community. We have a huge population of Hispanics in this community. We have people in need, and without the federal representation, we are all going to suffer because of that,” Stevenson said.
One by one, important votes in the House like the one that passed President Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic agenda bill in July have gone by without a say from Texas’ 18th District, where there are more than 150,000 people enrolled in Medicaid and about 293,000 households receiving SNAP, or food stamp benefits. Both programs saw significant changes and cuts with the passage of the bill.
“Having Sheila Jackson Lee as our representative all these years, I think we were spoiled, spoiled rotten,” says Ken Rodgers, a Houston-area activist and president of the greater Third Ward super neighborhood. “There were things that kind of got to my ear and on my table for concern and she was already on it, already doing it.”
How did it come to this?
July 2024: Jackson Lee dies
In June 2024, Jackson Lee announced she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
The 74-year-old acknowledged she would be “occasionally absent” from Congress and admitted that “the road ahead will not be easy.”
“I stand in faith that God will strengthen me,” she said.
Just over a month later, Jackson Lee died. Up until that point, the district had not been without representation in 35 years, when former Democratic Rep. Mickey Leland died in a plane crash on a relief mission in Ethiopia and the seat was vacant for four months.
November 2024: Sylvester Turner is elected
Erica Lee Carter, Jackson Lee’s daughter, won the special election that November to serve out the remainder of her mother’s term in Congress, which ended on January 3, 2025.
That same election night, Sylvester Turner, the former Houston mayor who also served 27 years as a state representative, won a separate vote to serve the next full term starting in January. He became the Democratic nominee by a narrow vote of party leaders in Harris County because Jackson Lee died within too tight a window to hold another primary.
Turner had revealed in November 2022 that he had undergone treatment for bone cancer.
Bill Pesota, a retired attorney and a Harris County Democratic precinct chair, says he argued against Turner to other county Democrats.
“I tried reasoning with the chairs who supported Sylvester Turner to say, look, you know, we just had one elderly cancer patient in office pass away. Do we really want to put another one there? And by a very slim majority, my side lost,” Pesota said.
March 2025: Turner dies
Turner took office in January 2025.
He attended his first presidential joint address on the evening of March 4, just hours after the 70-year-old congressman apparently suffered a “medical emergency” in the basement of a Capitol office building earlier that day, according to NBC News. At the speech, he sat with his fellow Democrats and his guest of the night, a mother from Houston reliant on Medicaid for her daughter’s rare genetic disorder.
It was a shock to both his House colleagues and his constituents, then, when it was announced that Turner had passed away on the morning of March 5. It had only been 61 days since he had taken office.
Pesota rues having lost the vote to make Turner the nominee.
“If that vote had gone the other way, if just two people had changed their votes … we would have a representative in Washington right now,” he told CNN.
April 2025: Texas governor sets a special election seven months away
A month after Turner’s death, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott set the special primary election to fill the seat for November 4. The decision to wait seven months was widely panned by Democrats, some of whom accused the governor of delaying the election to help House Republicans.
House Republicans have a tiny majority. Each seat is important enough that another special election in Arizona – won by Rep. Adelita Grijalva to replace her father, the late Rep. Raul Grijalva – took on national importance because she provided the final signature on a discharge petition to force the successful vote on releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files.
CNN reached out to the governor’s office for comment on why the elections were not scheduled sooner. Abbott has previously said the delay was to allow Harris County “adequate time to operate a fair and accurate election,” calling the county’s ability to do so a “repeat failure.” Republicans have long accused the Democrat-led county of mishandling elections, allegations Harris County officials strongly deny.
November 2025: A special election leads to a January 2026 runoff and ‘absolute confusion’
The top two vote-getters on November 4 were former Houston City councilmember Amanda Edwards, who narrowly lost out on the 2024 party nomination to Turner, and Harris County attorney Christian Menefee. They advanced to a runoff that Abbott set on January 31.
But things have gotten even more complicated.
In August, Abbott and Texas state House Republicans kicked off what ended up being the first domino in a nationwide mid-decade redistricting effort. Abbott eventually signed into law a new map that aimed to give Republicans at least five more House seats in 2026. The 18th District was made even more Democratic and absorbed much of the current 9th District, which became Republican leaning.
Then two members of a three-judge panel this month invalidated the new map, arguing ruling Texas Republicans had proven they wanted to aimed to discriminate by race in changing the district boundaries. The state has appealed to the US Supreme Court, which has paused the the panel’s ruling.
“It’s just absolute confusion and mayhem,” Menefee said. “A lot of my campaign isn’t even to get people to vote for me, it’s to get people to understand what the hell is going on. And all of this is intentional by the governor. It’s to throw our elections into a tailspin.”
Edwards echoed the same concerns, emphasizing that the confusion will lead to voter fatigue and more voters opting out of election after election.
“And I think that is, in fact, the intention is for people to stay at home,” Edwards said. “It’s the plan. You get chaos involved, and you have too much chaos. People get overwhelmed. When they get overwhelmed, they disengage, and then they stay at home.”
March 2026: Another primary and a potential Democratic fight
If the US Supreme Court steps in and allows the new map to go into place, whoever wins in January would be an incumbent for five weeks before running in the March primary against another stalwart of Houston politics: Rep. Al Green, who was first elected to Congress in 2004 and served alongside Sheila Jackson Lee. Green’s home has been placed under the new map into the 18th District instead of his current 9th District.
“It makes sense for me to run where my home is and where hundreds of thousands of people that I have been representing are, and I will be faithful to them in doing this,” Green told CNN. “I am not moving.”
A 78-year-old Green would be up against both Menefee, 37, and Edwards, 43, both of whom intend to file for the race. If no candidate wins over 50% of the vote in the primary, there would be yet another election, this time a runoff for the top two finishers.
“I encourage people to run,” Green said. “I’m not trying to push anybody out of a race. Let them run.”
Green told CNN that he had not heard any concerns about his age from constituents, and that reports about concerns were “a fiction of the press.”
Among the community activists to voice those concerns was Fred Woods, a Democratic precinct chair.
“We are so far behind because we didn’t get a knowledge transfer from Sheila,” Woods told CNN. “We are so far behind because we didn’t get a knowledge transfer from Sylvester Turner.”
“If we do not learn from history, we are failed to repeat it,” he said.
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