Republican Susan Wright, the widow of the late Texas Rep. Ron Wright, will head to a runoff election in her campaign to fill her husband’s 6th Congressional District seat.
Wright will face state Rep. Jake Ellzey, a fellow Republican, in a runoff election to be scheduled no earlier than May 24.
Wright, a longtime Republican party activist, was winning about 23% late Saturday in the “jungle primary” special election to fill the seat. Ellzey won about 14%, a few hundred votes ahead of Democratic activist and journalist Jana Lynne Sanchez. Not making the runoff proved a disappointment for Democrats hoping that Texas has become a competitive, two-party purple state, rather than staying as a reliably red one.
“Democrats have come a long way toward competing in Texas but we still have a long way to go,” Sanchez said in a statement Sunday.
Ron Wright, who was 67 and battling cancer, died on Feb. 7 after contracting the coronavirus. Susan Wright previously told the Washington Examiner that running for Congress was “nothing that I had ever thought about doing” until she was encouraged to after her husband’s death, but she received endorsements from former President Donald Trump and the fiscally conservative Club for Growth.
‘GUTTER POLITICS’: ROBOCALL SAYING CANDIDATE SUSAN WRIGHT ‘MURDERED’ HUSBAND REPORTED TO FBI
Though Trump won the Dallas-area district with 50.8% of the vote and Republicans have held it since 1983, Democrats see the special election as a key opportunity to pick up a seat and give House Democrats, who have the slimmest majority since the 1930s, some breathing room.
A total of 23 candidates competed to fill the seat, including 10 Democrats and 11 Republicans, contributing to mixed polling.
Ellzey, a former Navy fighter pilot who came in second against Ron Wright in the 2018 GOP primary for the 6th District, had the biggest fundraising advantage with $400,000 in cash-on-hand as of April 19. Former professional wrestler Dan Rodimer, who ran for Congress in Nevada last year, moved to Texas in order to seek the special election seat, finished in the low single digits.
So did another Republican, combat veteran Michael Wood, who ran on an anti-Trump platform but barely registered in polls. He reportedly received financial support from three House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump: Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger gave his campaign $7,000 and helped him raise another $31,000, and Ohio Rep. Anthony Gonzales and No. 3 House Republican Liz Cheney of Wyoming also contributed. (Cheney gave the same amount to Wright’s campaign.)
An eleventh-hour robocall to voters shook Wright’s campaign. The call to voters from an unidentified source accused Wright of “murdering her husband” by intentionally giving him the coronavirus in order to collect insurance money and then running for Congress in order to cover it up. Wright and her campaign reported the call to local and federal authorities on the eve of the election.
“When we heard reports of this criminal smear of a voicemail attacking Susan, we immediately referred the matter to law enforcement and started cooperating with authorities,” Wright campaign consultant Matt Langston said in a statement Friday. “Susan’s opponents are desperate and resorting to disgusting gutter politics because they know she’s the front-runner. I’m looking forward to someone going to jail over these robocalls.”
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Wright was one of two Republican women to seek their late husbands’ seats in special elections after they died from COVID-19. Louisiana Rep. Julia Letlow earlier this year won the seat that her husband, the late Rep.-elect Luke Letlow, won in 2020. He died in December before being sworn in.
