Lone Star Left reminds me of an upcoming race I’d overlooked.
Ron Angeletti
I’m usually pretty good at staying on top of these, but for some reason, I had lumped Texas Senate District 04 into the districts with regular elections. When, in fact, SD04 is having a special election. And sneaky Greg Abbott lumped it into the same dates as the city elections (updated the dates below) to improve Republican odds.
The election is between:
Why is SD04 going into a special election on May 2?
This was Senator Brandon Creighton’s seat. And if y’all remember, Creighton was a hillbilly lawyer who championed legislation to remove diversity from higher education. So, he was recently appointed Chancellor of the University of Texas Tech, leaving his Senate seat open.
SD04 isn’t a race that Democrats should treat as impossible, especially not fresh off their SD09 win, but we need to be realistic about how hard this district is. The district’s political gravity lies in Montgomery County, which accounts for the largest share of the seat. The district is made up of all of Chambers County, most of Montgomery County, plus smaller pieces of Harris, Jefferson, and a sliver of Galveston.
In 2024, Trump carried SD04 with 66.6% to Kamala Harris’ 32.4%, and Ted Cruz carried it 63.8% to Colin Allred’s 34.0%. But that was 2024. Politically, it feels like a lifetime ago. For Ron Angeletti to win this special, Democrats would need something in the neighborhood of a 15-point overperformance compared with Allred’s number to get to even, or roughly a 30-point swing from the 2024 Cruz margin.
That’s less than the swing Taylor Rehmet just did in SD09, but it’s still a huge swing.
So what would it take to flip SD04?
I’ll stop there because the answer is somewhere between “an act of God” and “a political earthquake measuring something like 8.7 on the Richter scale”. I’ll get into that in a minute, but first I would like to note that May 2 is the uniform election date and as such the normal date on which this election would fall, by law. Brandon Creighton resigned on October 2. That seat will be vacant for seven months by the time the May election rolls around. Greg Abbott is a shitweasel and the vacancy in SD04 is of little consequence (especially compared to CD18) given that the Lege is not in session, but when else would this election have been? It would have been highly unusual – and again, by law, would have required some kind of emergency justification – to have had it at another time. Sometimes these things are just normal business.
Anyway. I say that this race is an extreme longshot not to be a bummer or to cast any aspersions at all at Ron Angeletti, but simply to note that SD04 is about as impervious a district as there is. Lone Star Left gave the 2024 numbers above, which are daunting enough. Here’s another number to consider: In 2018, Beto O’Rourke lost SD04 by a margin of 65.7 to 33.6, only two points closer than the Trump/Harris margin and slightly worse than the Allred/Cruz margin. In other words, even in the most favorable environment we’ve had in a long time, SD04 was a 65% red district. That’s rough.
“But what about Taylor Rehmet and what he did in SD09?”, I hear you cry. Well, SD09 in 2018 was only 55.6 to 43.6 for Cruz over Beto, which is a lot closer than SD04. Let’s assume that 2026 is at least as positive an environment for Dems as 2018 was. How much better could it get from there? A swing from the 2018 SD09 numbers to the 2026 SD09 runoff numbers (57.0 to 43.0 for Rehmet) would still yield a 52.1 to 47.2 win for Brett Ligon in SD04. I don’t know how much sunnier an assumption you can make.
Now, I do think we should keep an eye on this race, and we should help Ron Angeletti to whatever extent we can. I hope the TDP is helping him, and I hope folks in that district are helping him. If Angeletti can make this a closer race, even just holding Brett Ligon under 60%, that should keep the GOP’s anxiety level ratcheted up. They won’t be able to dismiss SD09 as a one-off fluke as easily if Angeletti beats the spread. Angeletti’s campaign platform has similarities to Rehmet’s but isn’t identical to it, and that’s fine – he’s a different candidate in a different district. Are the voters there open to something other than the same old, same old, which a longtime Montgomery County politician like Brett Ligon represents? Let’s find out.
For what it’s worth, Ligon (who had a primary opponent) had $248,135 on hand as of February 21, the end date for his 8-day report. He raised $303K in the period between his 30-day and his 8-day, so he will be able to top that up as needed. Angeletti had literally five dollars on hand as of his January report; he was not required to file a 30-day or 8-day as an unopposed candidate in his primary. I hope he can raise a few bucks between now and May 2. He would have a better chance at moving the needle if he can do that. And in case you were wondering, about 88K votes were cast in the Republican primary in SD04, while 47K were cast in the Democratic primary. In SD09, it was 67,705 on the Democratic side and 67,562 on the Republican side. These are not the same districts. Let’s keep that in mind.
SD04 was a little different in 2018, but your point there is taken that a 65/35 in 2018 became 70/30 in 2022 with Misty Bishop running against Creighton. I’m thinking anything less than 60% for Ligon is a tremendous moral victory.
I do take some exception to Michelle calling Creighton a “Hillbilly lawyer”. He is absolutely not that – I believe he was the lawyer for one of the largest commercial land development companies in Texas. That doesn’t read as hillbilly lawyer to me.
Marc, thanks for the feedback. Please note that the 2018 numbers I cited are for the current district – the Texas Redistricting site recalculates them all for the new boundaries. However you want to slice it, this is the kind of district where one aims for a moral victory.