Congressional districts have new boundaries, longtime leaders are heading for the exits and a popular former mayor is trying to unseat a sitting county judge from his own party.
The 2026 midterm election may seem far off, but the March primary election where parties choose their nominees for those races is already well underway.
In non-presidential election years like 2026, members of Congress and the Texas House are all up for reelection — election cycles that are often referendums on the party controlling the White House and cause its members to lose seats.
So-called midterm elections are also when Texas elects its governor and other statewide officeholders to four-year terms. Most countywide offices are on that same ballot, plus a portion of Bexar County’s judges and county commissioners, which serve staggered terms.
In a state that’s overwhelmingly red and a county that’s overwhelmingly blue, the primary is often the main event, advancing many candidates who won’t face a competitive race in November.
But as Texas takes on a bigger role in the battle for the control of the U.S. House and Senate, both national parties will also be focused on who emerges as their nominee for tough general elections, with San Antonio voters helping choose the candidates for some of the most hard-fought races in the country.
With so many shifts in the political landscape and high-profile matchups, the faces of Bexar County’s federal, state and local officials are already poised for more change than any election in recent memory.
“You’re looking at, potentially, a new county judge, you’ll have a new district attorney, you have a couple of new congressmen, and as many as four or five new state House members,” said San Antonio political strategist Kelton Morgan, who typically works with Republicans. “That’s a lot more turnover than Bexar County usually sees.”
Candidate filing closed on Dec. 8. Now that the field is set, here are the top eight races the reporters and editors of the San Antonio Report are watching in the March 3 primary.
1. Bexar County Judge — Democratic primary
County judges aren’t subject to term limits in Texas, and historically they’ve tended to stick around. That’s changed some in recent years, however, as ambitious newcomers replaced longtime incumbents, turning a bureaucratic role into more of a political launchpad.
Bexar County looked poised to follow that trend when longtime County Judge Nelson Wolff retired in 2022, but in a three-way primary with several earlier-career, more partisan Democrats running, voters chose Peter Sakai, a longtime district court judge best known for his work on the Children’s Court.
Sakai edged the others out by vowing to refocus the county’s limited resources around core responsibilities like overseeing the courts, the jail and elections, something he says he’s been effective at over the past three years.
Now in his first reelection race, however, Sakai faces an unusual challenge from former Mayor Ron Nirenberg, a fellow Democrat who says the county’s chief executive could take on much more.
The two men seemed to get along when Nirenberg was mayor, but frustration from the business community about Sakai’s cautious approach to a new downtown Spurs arena may have cracked the window of opportunity open just as Nirenberg was terming out of office.
The county ultimately pulled through with its portion of the arena funding, however, leaving a race that’s now more about leadership styles than true policy differences.
Sakai has had three years to stockpile campaign cash without the same restrictive contribution limits as city candidates, and contends Nirenberg should have followed through on plans to challenge one of Texas’ many Republican officeholders instead of creating “a Dem vs. a Dem fray.”
Meanwhile Nirenberg has a PAC he can use to raise money for this race — though its name suggests bigger eventual ambitions.
Interestingly, the candidates’ old political consultants swapped sides for this race.
Excitement should ebb in this race after the primary, since Republicans haven’t won a countywide office in Bexar County for more than a decade.
Their nominee Trish DeBerry took just 39% of the vote in 2022, and after struggling to field a candidate this year, they’re leaning on conservative activist Patrick Von Dohlen.
2. Texas House District 121 — Republican primary
Republicans control a whopping 88 seats in the 150-member Texas House, so most of the policy disputes are with each other, not Democrats.
This year the issues driving a wedge between Texas Republicans are a little different, having already nixed Democratic chairmanships and approved a school voucher program last session. But Texas House District 121 once again finds itself at the center of a GOP proxy war — making it likely to be one of the most expensive legislative primaries in the state.
State Rep. Marc LaHood (R-San Antonio) was one of many successful GOP insurgents in 2022, defeating a once-loyal Republican who bucked Gov. Greg Abbott’s school voucher plan and fell victim to a Texas conservative movement that’s been so successful wiping out moderates in red territory, it’s had to seek out new targets.
Such fights between more business-centric and socially conservative Republicans have taken many shapes over the years, but now seem to be coming down to tort reform advocates, who want to make it harder to extract big payouts from suing businesses, versus trial lawyers, who make their money that way.
LaHood, a criminal defense attorney, was part of a group of lawyers in the House Republican Caucus — including House Speaker Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock) — that bucked powerful business interests on their priority legal reform legislation near the end of his first term.
Now the deep-pocketed group Texans for Lawsuit Reform (TLR), which already had beef with the conservative wing going into the session, has vowed to replace the GOP lawmakers who stopped their momentum.
Meanwhile trial lawyers who benefitted from the move but typically give to Democrats are spending big to help their new allies in the GOP.
LaHood faces a primary challenge from David McArthur, a business consultant and alumnus of the George W. Bush White House who wants to test whether there’s still a lane for a more business-centric Republican in the old Joe Straus district.
McArthur is already getting big help from TLR’s unusually early TV ads attacking LaHood, while a PAC aligned with trial lawyers have been coming to the incumbent’s defense.
It’s unclear whether Abbott gets as involved this time, but LaHood remains popular with conservative groups and seems to have a new ally in Burrows, appearing by his side at a San Antonio fundraiser this month.
The Northside state House district has long favored Republicans. Democrats keep hoping it might swing the other way if the GOP nominees kept getting more conservative, but LaHood still won by 5 percentage points in 2024.
Democrats don’t have a primary in this race, they’ll lean on Zack Dunn, an assistant District Attorney at Bexar County.
3. Bexar County DA — Democratic primary
Democrats piled into this race after District Attorney Joe Gonzales (D) announced plans to retire at the end of his term, and the most likely successor took his name out of contention just before the filing period opened.
Gonzales rode in with a class of progressive DAs elected across the country in 2018, helped by a national justice reform PAC that poured roughly $1 million into his race that year.
It’s unclear whether that kind of outside money still exists for such local races. But in a blue county, many candidates are still talking about progressive justice policies, even as they seek to differentiate themselves from a polarizing incumbent.
Eight candidates are seeking the Democratic nomination: former Fourth Court of Appeals Justice Luz Elena Chapa (D), prosecutors Oscar Salinas and Angelica Carrión Powers, criminal defense attorneys Veronica Legarreta, Shannon Locke and Meredith Chacon, who ran in Republicans’ DA primary in 2022, Jane Davis, who serves as chief of the Juvenile Section in the DA’s office, and James Bethke, executive director of the Managed Assigned Counsel Office.
The Democratic primary is likely to advance to a May 26 runoff between the top two vote-takers, since the winner must take at least 50% of the vote.
Though Republicans remain frustrated with the DA’s office in Bexar County, the GOP primary came down to just one candidate for 2026: former felony prosecutor Ashley Foster, who party leaders are excited about.
4. U.S. Senate race — both Republican and Democratic primaries
Nearly all of Texas’ statewide offices are on the ballot this year, and all of them are longshots for Democrats in November.
Of those, however, the U.S. Senate race is getting most of the attention because national Democrats want to flip a 53-seat Republican majority and don’t have many better options — senators serve staggered six-year terms and the GOP incumbents up for reelection this cycle come from really red states.
Meanwhile, national Republicans are defending a lot of Senate seats up in 2026, and really don’t want to waste money in a state as big and expensive as Texas.
Republican John Cornyn has held one of Texas’ two U.S. Senate seats for more than two decades, and at one point looked headed toward retirement after his bid to replace longtime Majority Leader Mitch McConnell fell flat.
But then Attorney General Ken Paxton’s interest in the race alarmed the party’s largest supporting PACs, whose leaders started openly worrying that his political baggage could cause them problems defending the seat if he’s their nominee in November.
Despite Paxton’s highly public affair and 2023 impeachment vote supported by roughly two-thirds of his GOP colleagues in the Texas House, he’s now cleared of most legal troubles and remains highly influential among GOP primary voters.
While national GOP money is flowing to help Cornyn through the primary, a third candidate who hoped he’d step aside is now also running, further complicating the matter.
U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-Houston) was asked not to run by party leaders, but is now out there making the case that neither Cornyn nor Paxton can hold this seat long-term in a changing state, and getting help from a PAC that spent roughly $6.5 million on his behalf before he’d even joined the race.
As for the Democrats, who haven’t won a statewide race in Texas since 1994, the idea of running against Paxton was so enticing that many of the party’s highest profile candidates all sought to run for Senate this year — messing up plans to spread talent across a slate of statewide races all up in 2026.
And after some last-minute shuffling before the filing deadline, the Democratic primary lost former U.S. Rep Colin Allred (D-Dallas), an ex-NFL player who raised big money for an unsuccessful race against U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in 2024, but dropped out of the race to run for Congress instead.
His decision came as the race added U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Dallas), an outspoken Trump critic who the Democratic base loves, but who Republicans are salivating about running against in a statewide contest.
Crockett faces a primary against state Rep. James Talarico (D-Round Rock), a millennial seminarian with a big social media following, and a third candidate, Ahmad Hassan, who has run for Senate before in Texas and Minnesota.
It once looked like this race could feature a local candidate as well, but U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-San Antonio) filed for reelection to his safely blue U.S. House seat instead.
5. Texas House District 125 — Democratic primary
San Antonio’s Texas House delegation is made up of mostly longtime Democrats who face little opposition returning to Austin each session, even as Republicans further marginalize them in the legislative process.
But this year offers a rare opening for ambitious newcomers, as state Rep. Ray Lopez (D-San Antonio) retires from a deep blue Westside seat.
The four-way Democratic primary includes Lopez’s former chief of staff, Donovon Rodriguez, and an SAISD teachers’ union leader, Adrian Reyna, who are both well known among local party activists.
They’re up against former Bexar County Constable Michelle Barrientes Vela, who was charged with tampering with records and later acquitted, and Carlos Antonio Raymond, a realtor who ran for City Council in 2025 and previously left the Democratic Party to run for the Texas House as a Republican.
6. Texas’ 35th Congressional District — Republican primary
This district is ground zero in the Trump administration’s effort to squeeze more Republican lawmakers out of Texas in 2026, potentially stopping Democrats from taking control of the U.S. House by offsetting GOP losses in other parts of the country.
Texas Republicans’ mid-cycle redistricting turned a solidly blue Austin-to-San Antonio district into a potential GOP pickup on San Antonio’s Southeast side, drawing progressive incumbent Greg Casar (D-Austin) out of the district in the meantime and leaving him to compete for a more Austin-centric seat instead.
The reshaped district stretches east from San Antonio into three counties Trump won in 2024, spurring lots of interest among local Republicans who haven’t had many opportunities to move up.
Top contenders in a five-way GOP primary include state Rep. John Lujan (R-San Antonio), who flipped a blue Texas House district that’s entirely within the TX35’s boundaries, and former congressional staffer Josh Cortez, who has raised the most money so far.
Other Republican candidates include: Carlos De La Cruz, the brother of U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz; Larry La Rose, a former Coast Guardsman and San Antonio City Council candidate; Ryan Krause, a political newcomer and businessman from New Braunfels; and Jay Furman, a retired Navy commander who ran in TX28 last cycle.
Democrats have been on the fence about whether the redrawn district would be competitive for them. One of their largest PACs published a report saying it’s out of reach for this election cycle, and efforts to recruit a high-profile candidate, including local tech entrepreneur Beto Altamirano, fell short.
But two San Antonians, Marine Corps veteran John Lira and former Bexar County Sheriff’s Deputy Johnny Garcia, have each met with House Democrats’ campaign arm, which named the race a top battleground for 2026.
They face a four-way primary with Whitney Masterson-Moyes, who owns a shooting range in Kingsbury, and Maureen Galindo, who ran unsuccessfully for San Antonio City Council after developers planned to raze her apartment complex to build a baseball stadium.
7. Texas’ 21st Congressional District — Republican primary
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Dripping Springs), easily the most outspoken conservative in San Antonio’s five-member congressional delegation, is running to replace Paxton as Attorney General, and the race to replace him once looked like it’d be a brutal GOP primary.
The district includes part of Northwest San Antonio, but also stretches up to the Hill Country to pull in some of the most conservative parts of the state.
Several of San Antonio’s elected Republicans considered the race, but passed on a crowded primary in a district that gave President Donald Trump more than 60% of its vote in 2024.
When filing closed there were two local candidates in the mix: former Bexar GOP Vice Chair Kyle Sinclair, and Weston Martinez, who ran unsuccessfully for Texas GOP party chair in 2024.
But the star-studded GOP primary field includes a number of higher profile contenders likely to raise big money and interest, including Trey Trainor, a former chair of the Federal Elections Commission, Michael Wheeler, a Trump appointee who serves as a senior adviser for the U.S. Small Business Administration, and former MLB player Mark Teixeira.
Most Republicans believe it’s Teixeira’s to lose, but many candidates piled into the GOP primary at the last minute.
8. Texas House District 118 — Republican primary
This Southside state House district was once a blue stronghold before Lujan flipped it for Republicans — something many in the party believed no one else could pull off.
In 2024, however, Trump actually carried the district by a wider margin than Lujan, and now a number of candidates think they can hold it as Lujan moves over to run for Congress.
Interestingly, those seeking the GOP nomination once included two party-switchers, personal injury attorney Desi Martinez and former state lawmaker Leo Pacheco, who once represented the district as a Democrat.
Pacheco dropped out before the filing deadline, something local Republicans are relieved about. Meanwhile Martinez has been embraced by the GOP, and is now sharing a Southside campaign office with Lujan.
The four-way GOP primary also includes a think tank scholar who worked on school vouchers, Jorge Borrego, and coffee company owner, Joseph Shellhart.
Texas House District 118 remains one of just a handful of state legislative seats that’s competitive enough to go either way in November, so both parties are making it a top priority.
Democrats don’t have a primary, however. Their nominee Kristian Carranza is a longtime political operative who ran against Lujan in 2024 and raised more money than any first-time state House candidate in Texas history.
Also worth a watch
Bexar County District Clerk — Former Bexar Democratic Party Chair Monica Ramirez Alcántara is challenging an incumbent, Gloria Martinez, who won the seat by defeating an incumbent Democrat in 2022. Alcántara has faced ethics fines for delinquent campaign finance reports, but her years of work as party chair has helped her rally support from many local elected officials.
They’re in a five-way primary with three other Democrats.
Bexar County Clerk — Incumbent Lucy Adame Clark (D) drew two Democratic challengers who could make this race interesting. Mari Sanchez-Belew is an Army veteran and business strategist, and Cynthia Castro is a senior litigation manager for an insurance and financial services company.
Texas House District 117 — Incumbent state Rep. Phil Cortez (D-San Antonio) faces a primary challenger, Robert Mihara, who says he should have participated in the quorum break aimed at slowing Texas Republicans’ redistricting efforts. It remains to be seen whether progressive outside groups feel the same way.
Texas 23rd Congressional District — U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-San Antonio) narrowly survived his 2024 primary against YouTuber Brandon Herrera, who is now running again this year and raising big money.
Gonzales is projecting confidence after facing major pushback from the state GOP and managing to outrun critics on his right. However, some Republicans are worried about him this year after Gonzales faced questions about his relationship with a former staffer who died by suicide.
In an unexpected twist, former Congressman “Quico” Canseco (R), who represented the district for one term before Will Hurd, joined the GOP primary at the last minute.
Democrats also scrambled to find a solid candidate for this tough district, San Antonio attorney Katy Padilla Stout, just in case things go off the rails for Republicans in the primary.
Texas’ 28th Congressional District — This summer’s redistricting effort removed the Bexar County portion of U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar’s (D-Laredo) district, ostensibly making it more friendly to Republicans, and leaving this region with four congressional seats instead of five.
Republicans consider this one of their best pickup opportunities nationwide, but even under indictment, Cuellar has been unsinkable, and Trump recently pardoned him, clearing up his legal troubles.
Cuellar faces two Democratic primary challengers, and Republicans just notched a top recruit in Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina, who was also a Democrat up until last year.
Texas Attorney General — Texas hasn’t had an open statewide position in a decade, until Paxton decided to run for U.S. Senate. A host of interesting Republicans and Democrats have lined up for it and are worth watching in March.
