Internal Republican polling must be really bad. I mean really bad, because Greg Abbott just pulled a stunt that can only be described as “desperate.”
After sitting on a Senate vacancy in SD22 for 84 days, he declared a special election yesterday afternoon, giving candidates only TWO DAYS to file. The special election will take place on November 3, the same day as the general election. Since both Republican and Democratic candidates are already on the ballot for the general election on November 3, the SD22 seat will appear twice.
Texas law requires the special election to land on the next uniform election date, and thanks to how long Abbott waited, that date was always going to be November 3 no matter what.
Nobody tied his hands on the other 84 days.
Brian Birdwell resigned in May. Abbott had from Memorial Day to Labor Day to call this election with normal notice, the way his own office has done for other vacant Senate seats this cycle. Kelly Hancock’s SD9 seat was eight days from resignation to proclamation, with a filing window of over two months. Brandon Creighton’s SD4 seat was two weeks to proclamation, with filing lined up with the regular primary so nobody had to scramble.
SD22 got 84 days of silence and then a filing deadline that landed before half the district knew there was a race to file for.
If this sounds familiar, McLennan County, it should. You already lived through it. In 2024, Abbott gave Doc Anderson’s House District 56 seat a three-day filing window after Anderson resigned. And Anderson said, on the record, that the head start would let his successor walk into Austin more senior than every other freshman in the building. It’s just a maneuver, run in the open, and now it’s being run on you again.
This stupid, f*cking district.
(I’m not cursing.) But look at this.
Circled in red is where 360,000 people live, and that part of the district is nearly 70% non-Anglo. It also happens to be the part of the district I live in.
Then, circled in pink is a sundown town county, where they’ve been running Black people out of that area since 1886. They had a billboard sign warning Black people not to go there all the way until the 1970s, and even today the Black population of Comanche County is 0.2%.
Here’s why this is a problem. A State Senator’s incentive to serve a constituency is downstream of whether that constituency’s votes matter to their reelection. Officeholders are responsive to the electorate that can hire or fire them. When SD22 packs 360,000 people in a diversifying, 70%-non-Anglo slice of Tarrant County into the same district as eleven rural counties that are, on average, 75-80% Anglo, including one where the entire premise of the county’s founding-era social order was making sure Black residents didn’t live there. Tarrant’s votes get diluted by design, every cycle, by a bloc of counties large enough and reliably red enough to make the outcome a foregone conclusion regardless of what the 360,000 people in Mansfield and Arlington want.
The mechanism matters more than the history, but the history tells you the mechanism isn’t an accident. A county that organized itself in 1886 around excluding Black residents, and whose current 0.2% Black population shows that exclusion basically held for 140 years, isn’t a district that’s going to outvote Tarrant’s diversifying precincts by coincidence. Strip Comanche and the other rural counties out, and Tarrant’s slice alone starts looking like a seat Democrats can actually win. Leave them in, and the Senator elected from this district never has to answer to the fastest-growing, most diverse part of it.
That’s the actual argument, and it’s the one worth making instead of “sundown county bad.” The sundown history is evidence for why the map works the way it does. It shows the rural anchor counties have a specific, documented history of organizing their communities around excluding exactly the population Tarrant’s slice is diversifying with. The district’s whole structure guarantees the Senator’s actual accountability runs toward Comanche, not Arlington.
What would David Cook get for winning the two-day sprint?
In the Texas Senate, unlike the House, there’s no seniority formula for committee assignments. Dan Patrick picks who chairs what, whenever he feels like announcing it. Which means the real currency Cook is buying with Abbott’s two-day filing window isn’t a title. It’s time in the room.
Pre-filing for the 90th Legislature opens November 9. Only sitting senators can pre-file. A senator elected in the regular November 3 general doesn’t exist as a senator until January 12 and can’t file a single bill before then. Cook, if he wins the special election, gets sworn in weeks before pre-filing even opens. He gets to walk his priority bills in first, claim the low numbers, and spend two full months as an actual member of the Texas Senate, sitting through interim hearings, in the room while Patrick is still deciding who he trusts with what. And that changes if Vikki Goodwin beats Dan Patrick, too.
That’s the whole play. A two-month head start on being someone Dan Patrick already knows by the time assignments get made. In a session that’s going to fight over redistricting fallout and data center regulation, arriving as a known quantity instead of a stranger is worth more than people give it credit for. It’s just how power actually accumulates in that building.
What happens when a voter in SD22 actually opens their ballot on November 3?
They will see David Cook’s name and Amy Martinez Salas’s name. Then, somewhere else on that same ballot, they will see David Cook’s name and Amy Martinez Salas’s name AGAIN.
Same two people. Same office, more or less. Two separate contests, because Texas law treats a special election and a general election as two legally distinct elections even when they land on the same day, for the same seat, with the same candidates.
Texas got rid of straight-ticket voting in 2020. You no longer get to hit one button for your party. You vote race by race, one at a time, top to bottom, making an individual decision on every single line. That means every voter in SD22 has to consciously stop, twice, on what looks like the exact same contest, and decide whether that’s a mistake, a misprint, or something they’re supposed to do on purpose.
Now think about who absorbs that confusion and who doesn’t. A voter who shows up already knowing exactly who they’re voting for and why, because a campaign with money reached them beforehand and told them “yes, you’ll see this twice, vote both times,” sails through it. A voter who’s mildly engaged, intends to vote Democrat, sees the same two names pop up again three lines down, and assumes the machine glitched or they already did this? It’s what “roll-off” is. It’s a documented, decades-old phenomenon in elections with confusing ballot structures, and a doubled-up contest with no advance notice is a textbook trigger.
Abbott built a situation where confusion breaks one direction. The candidate with money to run a “you’ll see my name twice, vote for me twice” education campaign eats the roll-off. The one who doesn’t, doesn’t. Guess which side of SD22 has more money sitting around eighty-four days after the vacancy opened and two days after everyone found out about it.
Amy Martinez Salas is going to need money.
Now. This week. She has to file by tomorrow. The filing fee alone is $1,250. Then she’ll have to educate voters to vote for her on the ballot twice.
She was already running one race, the one that’s been building since March, the one with a filing deadline that gave her normal time to plan a budget, hire staff, and build out a mail program. That race didn’t go anywhere. It’s still happening November 3, same as always.
Now she’s also running a second one. Same seat, same day, filed on a scramble, with a filing fee she wasn’t budgeting for this week, in a race that opened and closed its filing window before most of the district even knew it existed. She had to drop what she was doing and get to Austin today.
And because both races are now stacked on top of each other, she needs two voter education programs, explaining to the same voters why they’re going to see her name twice and need to vote for her twice, because if enough of them get confused and only vote once, David Cook doesn’t even need the seat to be safe, he needs enough of SD22 to shrug at a ballot that looks like a printing error.
Cook has Abbott’s office handing him the runway, the built-in name recognition of already being a sitting state rep, and a party apparatus that’s had this play in the playbook since Doc Anderson ran it two years ago. Amy’s got a former staff job, a boss who’s letting her take a few days off to fight for this, and whatever she can put together in the next 76 days.
So here’s the ask:
Donate to Amy Martinez-Salas here.
Share it. Tell people they’re going to see her name twice on the ballot, and both times mean vote for her. Every dollar for Martinex Salas NOW does more work than a dollar in October, because right now she’s fighting on two fronts with a budget built for one.
She’s running twice as hard on half the notice. The least we can do is show up.
76 days until the November election!
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OMG. He's such an unconscionable creep!!! Thank you, Michelle. Just shared to bsky asking people to READ so they understand they need to vote for her TWICE & asked for donations to help her get the word out.
What a slick move! What will the rethugs think of next?
Thank you for telling us.
I just contributed-