Congressional Primary Races
The primary election is March 3. It’s going to be nasty!
In this post we just cover the Congressional primaries.
First a look at the current districts. These are going away, but right now Irving is currently split between CD-24 (Beth Van Duyne, R), CD-33 (Marc Veasey, D), and CD-6 (Jake Ellzey, R). District 24 is north Irving, 6 is central and south Irving, and 33 wraps around 6 in a strange fashion:
Weirdola.
At the turn of the millennium, after political consultants got access to the TIGER database and GPS tools, they really went to town on these redistrictings.
(It’s not ultimately their fault, though. It was the SCOTUS of the 1960s that forced redistrictings to be done at all. They did this, hilariously, by making up a principle of “one man, one vote” out of thin air and reading it into the US Constitution, even though the Constitution says the exact opposite, insofar as the only de facto unamendable part of the entire Constitution is Article V where it says “no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”)
Redistricting normally happens after the Census and new maps take place in the election year ending in “-2,” and mid-decade redistrictings are rare. However, in 2025 Governor Abbott called a special session to pass new maps in Texas. Republicans have only a 2-seat majority in the US House, and as the party of the president usually loses seats in midterm elections, the Republicans in WDC were really up against the wall. The new maps were billed as flipping up to five U.S. House seats from Democrats to Republicans — no new governing or campaign strategies necessary! … those things are hard. The plan was fought over in federal court, but in December SCOTUS allowed Texas to use the 2025 map for the 2026 elections.
Here’s Irving under the new maps:
The blown-up view of those districts:
Here’s the analysis from Inside Elections, showing their measure of the baseline partisanship in each district, as well as how 2024 shook out, for the old and new maps:
The partisanship margins are wide, aren’t they? The Congressional primary elections are the real election. You can count the competitive seats in all of Texas on one hand. And we wonder why our politics seems so polarized… spoiler alert: it’s because politicians pick voters rather than the other way around. Also, these districts are of a ridiculous size: 766,000 in each of them. You can’t run a campaign without raising a ton of money when districts are huge, so the system is built for the corporate domination of Congress.
Looking at Irving’s Congressional representatives, you can see that Ellzey’s district CD-6 gets marginally less Republican, Van Duyne’s CD-24 district marginally more Republican, while Veasey’s CD-33 stays the same. However, Veasey was drawn out of his district. His home base of Fort Worth was chopped off and given to Republican Rep. Roger Williams CD-25. He nearly decided to run for Jasmine Crockett’s CD-30, but changed his mind at the last minute after Pastor Frederick Haynes III decided to run. Then, he flirted for a week about running for Tarrant County Judge, but decided to just serve out his term in Congress and not run for reelection.
A lot more of Irving is now in CD-6, from 131,000 people to 195,000 people with 46,000 more voters, from 51% to 76% of Irving’s population. Current CD-6 Representative Jake Ellzey needs to introduce himself to those voters. He was not seen much in Irving under the old map, but now he has started showing up, sending block walkers out this summer and doing big events, like he did on November 10 at Grace Pointe Church in Irving. “Irving’s always been a favorite part of my district!”
Here are the candidates running in each primary, starting with Ellzey’s CD-6.
In CD-6 Republican voters will choose either the incumbent Rep. Jake Ellzey ($2.2 million on hand), Covington mayor Brian Stahl ($40,000 on hand), or Grand Prairie pastor and business owner James Buford, who didn’t report raising any money as of September. On the Democratic side, we have sales representative Danny Minton and Aiden Morgan, who did not raised much of anything, running for the nomination.
In CD-24, Irving’s former mayor, Rep. Beth Van Duyne, is sitting pretty, literally and figuratively, as she is unopposed in the Republican primary and is sitting on a campaign war chest of $2.6 million. On the Democratic side, primary voters will chose between tech entrepreneur Jon Buchwald ($80,000 on hand), IT security specialist Kevin Burge ($24,000 on hand), corporate strategist Nathan Hawks ($6,000 on hand), activist Aaron Hendley (no cash on hand), and Marine veteran TJ Ware ($9,000 on hand).
In CD-33, Democratic primary voters will choose between incumbent congresswoman Julie Johnson ($807,000 on hand), former congressman Colin Allred ($1.8 million on hand), tech executive Zeeshan Hafeez (no recent cash on hand reported), and activist Carlos Quintanilla (no cash on hand reported). Republican primary voters will choose between physician Monte Mitchell, entrepreneur John Sims, marketing consultant Kurt Schwab, credit specialist Payton “No Taxin’ With” Jackson, and GOP activist Patrick Gillespie — none of whom raised money before the September filing.
The Democratic primary in CD-33 will be spicy! It’s a rare “predecessor-vs-successor” primary. The background:
Colin Allred served three terms in the US House and is a proven money-raiser. He first flipped the old Dallas-based TX-32 in 2018, ousting longtime Republican Pete Sessions 52%–46%, then won comfortably in 2020 and 2022 before giving it up to run for Senate in 2024, where he lost to Ted Cruz decisively 53%–45% despite raising $80 million (!).
A significant portion of the old CD-32 is in the new CD-33, represented by Julie Johnson. Johnson flipped GOP-held Texas House District 115 in northwest Dallas County in 2018 (57%–43% over Irving resident Matt Rinaldi) and then held it in 2020 and 2022 with about 57% of the vote. She went on to win Allred’s open TX-32 seat in 2024, taking just over 50% in a crowded Democratic primary and then over 60% in the general.
Allred and Johnson do not like each other.
Johnson backed James Talarico over Allred for the US Senate, but then Allred blindsided her by dropping that race to run against her.
The campaign is already fun!
Allred hammered Johnson for her stock trades and claiming she enriched herself in Congress.
Johnson said Allred is a parachuting opportunist and a man trying to reclaim a job from a woman.
Allred: “It’s kind of outrageous for anybody to think that they’re entitled to any district anywhere, especially one that’s not theirs, but particularly to a majority-minority one.”
The demographics of the district favor Allred:
A couple final notes.
Republicans were planning to use paper ballots, hand counted for this primary in Dallas County as an election integrity measure, but apparently they could not get a fair contract from the Elections Department, so are not moving forward with this plan.
The Dallas County Commissioners Court changed some election precincts. Around 175 precincts were removed, some of them in Irving. This consolidation a good move as some of the precincts would have very low numbers of voters.