3 elections in 4 months and new US House map lead to confusion and voter fatigue in Texas district

HOUSTON (AP) — Rep. Christian Menefee of Texas, the newest member of Congress, started the job Monday – and now has just four weeks to convince Houston voters he already deserves reelection.

The candidate Menefee defeated on Saturday, Amanda Edwards, also is running again for the 18th District seat in next month's Democratic primary. So is Rep. Al Green, who for decades represented a district nearby but now finds himself living in a newly drawn 18th.

The back-to-back elections are among the head-spinning electoral oddities that voters in heavily Democratic Houston have experienced in recent months.

For nearly a year, the district’s residents had no representative in the U.S. House after their member died. And before voters could select a successor, the Texas Legislature redrew the state’s congressional maps to help Republicans' midterm election prospects, further complicating things and raising concerns about disenfranchising voters in the predominantly Black and Hispanic district.

“It has been exhausting. Voters are confused. Voters are tired,” said Shamier Bouie, chairwoman of Black American Democrats of Houston. “Even people who are pretty politically savvy, it’s still confusing for them.”

Taken together, voters’ questions surrounding this pileup of elections and the new House boundaries mark an unwieldy start to the 2026 midterm campaigns for control of Congress. Texas' March 3 primary will be the first using a new U.S. House map drawn at the start of a national redistricting battle spurred by President Donald Trump.

Shampu Sibley, who voted Wednesday at Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, decried the mid-decade redistricting as “a political move” by the GOP-led Texas Legislature.

The 62-year-old novelist, who lives within the current boundaries of the 18th District, was uncertain if his home will still be in the 18th on the new map.

“We’re not going to say they want to steal elections, but they make it very hard for the Black and brown communities to vote,” he said.

The current 18th District is a Democratic stronghold in a Republican state. In 2024, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris won about 69% of the vote. So did the late Rep. Sylvester Turner, who died in March 2025.

After Turner’s death, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott set an all-party primary to fill the seat for eight months later, suggesting it would take Harris County elections officials months to prepare for the vote. Democrats accused Abbott of delaying the vote to help Republican House leader Mike Johnson pass legislation with a thin GOP majority.

When none of the 16 candidates won a majority in November, the race advanced to Saturday's runoff, which Menefee won.

Edwards and Menefee have been vocal in their criticism of leaving the 18th District, including large tracts of the nation’s fourth-largest city, without representation.

In particular, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been active for months in Houston, which has received less publicity than cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and now Minneapolis, in part because of the empty seat, Edwards said.

“If there was advocacy, if there was use of a bully pulpit to get people together and really walk in unison around an issue of justice, this seat was it,” she said. “To have it silenced is not a coincidence.”

Meanwhile, the GOP-controlled Texas Legislature in August adopted redrawn congressional maps at the direction of Trump, who has warned Republicans that if they lose control of the U.S. House in November he will be impeached again. Some other states, including heavily Democratic California, later drew their own new maps.

The 18th District, which is centered around Houston and entirely in Harris County in southeast Texas, was divided among nearly a half-dozen districts. The largest share of the population in the current 18th district will become part of a different district.

That means Menefee and Edwards are turning around and running in a district that includes some new territory. They also will face yet another candidate in Green, an 11-term Democratic congressman whose Houston home was included in a new, Republican-leaning district, prompting him last year to announce plans to run in the the Democratic-leaning new 18th District.

It has set up a generational battle between Green, who is 78, and Menefee, the 37-year-old former county attorney, and Edwards, a 44-year-old former Houston city councilwoman.

Menefee and Edwards said they had spent as much time answering voter questions in an effort to help voters keep the timing straight as they had talking about their policy positions.

“There have been times where I’ve shown up at community centers and somebody will say, ’Why haven’t you come to my neighborhood or my church? And I’ll say, ‘Where do you go to church at?’” Menefee said, only to learn the person lives in the new 18th District. “That has happened to me at least a dozen times.”

Last week, Houston lawyer and Democratic activist Brandon Cofield met a man who had visited his local polling place hoping to vote in the March 3 primary, thinking the early voting period had begun, only to be turned away.

Because Abbott scheduled the vacancy elections so late in 2025 and 2026, they ended up colliding with the start of the 2026 midterm elections, for the next term that will start in 2027.

Not only were voters seeing campaign signs for the March 3 primary before the Saturday runoff, Harris County began sending out mail-in ballots for the new district primary two weeks before the runoff was finished.

“You literally had people who could vote in two different elections at the same time," Edwards said. “These elections aren't just back to back. They overlap.”

That meant that even as Edwards was urging voters to get out for Saturday’s election, her team had to be looking ahead to the March 3 primary to meet filing deadlines in the new district.

Menefee said he's been trying to encourage people to stay engaged.

It has "definitely made people feel like they can be a pawn in a game,” he said. “I think it has demoralized some people.”

Tobin Hellums, a 57-year-old Houston entrepreneur, said he was confused because his normal early-voting location was different for the runoff. Harris County elections officials offered fewer early-voting stations because the ballot included only one race.

“The overall process was completely confusing,” Hellums said.

Natural forces have also contributed.

The Sunday before the runoff, Bouie's group had planned to blitz 10 of Houston's best-known Black churches to run through details of the coming election sequence for parishioners. With multiple services that day, she was looking at reaching thousands of voters in the district.

Then a winter storm hit, closing the churches. Early voting was extended by two days to make up for the weather-related shutdown of polling places. But that also forced early run-off voting to overlap more with primary mail-in voting.

More election drama may lie ahead. The March 3 Democratic primary ballot will have four names: Menefee, Edwards, Green and Gretchen Brown, a veteran Defense Department senior staffer. If no candidate receives a majority of the vote, the race will move to a May runoff election.

“It feels like it's going to go on forever,” Bouie said.

———

Beaumont reported from Des Moines, Iowa. Leah Askarinam and Hannah Recht contributed from Washington.

Texas Congressional Candidate Christian Menefee talks with voters as he visited a polling location at Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church on Election Day, in Houston, Saturday, Jan. 31, 2026. (AP Photo/Karen Warren)

Texas Congressional Candidate Christian D. Menefee gets a photo with poll worker, Jessica Barraza, as he visited a polling location at Acres Homes MultiService Center on Election Day, in Houston, Saturday, Jan. 31, 2026. (AP Photo/ Karen Warren)

Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, joins Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, left, as she leads a group of House Democrats to the Supreme Court in support of Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook ahead of oral arguments about the Trump Administration's attempt to remove from her position, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Texas Congressional Candidate Amanda Edwards waves at a voter at a polling location at Acres Homes MultiService Center on Election Day, in Houston, Saturday, Jan. 31, 2026. (AP Photo/ Karen Warren)

Texas Congressional Candidate Christian Menefee greets supporters during his watch party at The Post Houston on Election Day, in Houston, Saturday, Jan. 31, 2026. (AP Photo/ Karen Warren)

Texas Congressional Candidate Christian Menefee speaks to supporters during his watch party at The Post Houston on Election Day, in Houston, Saturday, Jan. 31, 2026. (AP Photo/ Karen Warren)

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran's president said Tuesday he instructed the country’s foreign minister to “pursue fair and equitable negotiations” with the United States, the first clear sign from Tehran it wants to try to negotiate as tensions remain high with Washington after the Mideast country's bloody crackdown on nationwide protests last month.

The announcement marked a major turn for reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian, who had broadly warned Iranians for weeks that the turmoil in his country had gone beyond his control. It also signals that the president received support from Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for talks that the 86-year-old cleric previously had dismissed.

Turkey had been working behind the scenes to make the talks happen there later this week as U.S. Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff is traveling in the region. A Turkish official later said the location of talks was uncertain but that Turkey was ready to support the process. The official did not provide further details.

Foreign ministers from Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have also been invited to attend the talks, if they happen, according to the official who spoke on condition of anonymity as they did not have permission to speak to journalists.

But whether Iran and the U.S. can reach an agreement remains to be seen, particularly as President Donald Trump now has included Iran's nuclear program in a list of demands from Tehran in any talks. Trump ordered the bombing of three Iranian nuclear sites during the 12-day war Israel launched against Iran in June.

Writing on X, Pezeshkian said in English and Farsi that the decision came after “requests from friendly governments in the region to respond to the proposal by the President of the United States for negotiations.”

“I have instructed my Minister of Foreign Affairs, provided that a suitable environment exists — one free from threats and unreasonable expectations — to pursue fair and equitable negotiations, guided by the principles of dignity, prudence, and expediency,” he said.

The U.S. has yet to acknowledge the talks will take place. A semiofficial news agency in Iran on Monday reported — then later deleted without explanation — that Pezeshkian had issued such an order to Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who held multiple rounds of talks with Witkoff before the 12-day war.

Late Monday, the pan-Arab satellite channel Al Mayadeen, which is politically allied with the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, aired an interview with Ali Shamkhani, a top Khamenei adviser on security.

Shamkhani, who now sits on the country’s Supreme National Security Council and who in the 1980s led Iran's navy, wore a naval uniform as he spoke.

He suggested that if the talks happened, they would be indirect at the beginning, then move to direct talks if a deal appeared to be attainable. Direct talks with the U.S. long have been a highly charged political issue within Iran's theocracy, with reformists like Pezeshkian pushing for them and hard-liners dismissing them.

The talks would solely focus on nuclear issues, he added.

Asked about whether Russia could take Iran's enriched uranium like it did in Tehran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, Shamkhani dismissed the idea, saying there was “no reason” to do so. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov on Monday said Russia had “long offered these services as a possible option that would alleviate certain irritants for a number of countries.”

“Iran does not seek nuclear weapons, will not seek a nuclear weapon and will never stockpile nuclear weapons, but the other side must pay a price in return for this," he said.

Iran had been enriching uranium up to 60% purity, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels. The International Atomic Energy Agency had said Iran was the only country in the world to enrich to that level that wasn't armed with the bomb.

Iran has been refusing requests by the IAEA to inspect the sites bombed in the June war.

“The quantity of enriched uranium remains unknown, because part of the stockpile is under rubble, and there is no initiative yet to extract it, as it is extremely dangerous," Shamkhani said.

Witkoff is expected to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli security officials on Tuesday, according to a White House official who was not authorized to comment publicly about the talks and spoke on condition of anonymity.

While in Israel, Witkoff will meet with the head of the Mossad intelligence service and the Israeli military's chief of staff, according to another official who was not authorized to speak to the media and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Israel is expected to ask that any agreement with Iran include removing enriched uranium from the country, stopping the enrichment of uranium, limiting the creation of ballistic missiles and ending support for Tehran's proxies.

However, Shakhani in his interview rejected giving up uranium enrichment — a major obstacle in earlier talks with the U.S. In November, Araghchi said Iran was doing no enrichment in the country because of the U.S. bombing of the nuclear sites.

Witkoff later will travel to Abu Dhabi, the UAE capital, later in the week for Russia-Ukraine talks, the official said.

“We have talks going on with Iran, we’ll see how it all works out,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. Asked what his threshold was for military action against Iran, he declined to elaborate.

“I’d like to see a deal negotiated,” Trump said. “Right now, we’re talking to them, we’re talking to Iran, and if we could work something out, that’d be great. And if we can’t, probably bad things would happen.”

Mike Pompeo, a hard-liner on Iran who served as CIA director and secretary of state in Trump's first term, said it was “unimaginable that there can be a deal.”

“I think they may come away with some set of understandings,” Pompeo said at Dubai's World Governments Summit. "But to think that there’s a long-term solution that actually provides stability and peace to this region while the ayatollah is still in power is something I pray for but find unimaginable.”

Also Tuesday, a ship transiting through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf, reported being hailed on the radio “by numerous small armed vessels,” the British military's United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said.

There was no identifying information on the vessel, which continued into the Persian Gulf. The position of the incident appeared to be in Iranian territorial waters, where officials had warned of a naval drill by the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard in recent days.

Associated Press writers Melanie Lidman in Jerusalem, Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, and Aamer Madhani, Matthew Lee and Konstantin Toropin in Washington contributed to this report.

FILE - Masoud Pezeshkian, the President of Iran, attends the United Nations General Assembly at United Nations headquarters, on Sept. 25, 2025. (AP Photo/Angelina Katsanis, File)