Republican sweep in Texas also extended to state’s appellate courts

In Tuesday's elections for the state's appellate courts, Republican judges won all but one of the contested races. (Credit: Marjorie Kamys Cotera for The Texas Tribune)

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Republicans swept Texas’ state appellate courts in Tuesday’s election, with Republican judges knocking out Democrats in 25 out of 26 contested races.

While the red wave that washed over the state’s courts of appeals reflected the GOP’s broader strength in races up and down the ballot, it wasn’t immediately clear that the election results portended a vast difference in the courts’ decisions.

Here’s what you need to know.

What do the state courts of appeals do?

Texas has 14 courts of appeals, known as intermediate appellate courts, with jurisdiction over all civil and criminal cases appealed from district or county courts within their geographic region. (Texas also recently created a statewide 15th Court of Appeals that hears business disputes and any civil appeals involving the state government.)

The courts handle disputes ranging from real estate and oil and gas cases to entertainment law, criminal cases and beyond. All intermediate appellate courts serve multiple counties, including the one in which they are based.

Judges serve six-year terms.

Tuesday’s red wave

This election, Republican judges flipped 23 seats on the intermediate appellate courts, beating several Democratic incumbents, in some cases by the narrowest of margins.

The GOP took all but one contested seat, and even there, the Democrat won narrowly: Maggie Ellis, on the 3rd Court of Appeals based in Austin, triumphed with just 50.9% of the vote.

Republicans won every seat up for grabs on the Dallas-based Fifth District Court of Appeals, gaining a Republican majority on the previously all-Democratic bench. The GOP also took over the Houston-based 14th District Court of Appeals. And Republicans swept other appellate courts based in Houston, San Antonio and Corpus Christi.

Judicial Fairness PAC, a conservative super PAC, pumped millions of dollars into the low-profile races, running ads and endorsing Republican judicial candidates that ultimately won seats on courts based in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and Corpus Christi.

“We need judges who will keep violent criminals behind bars by imposing meaningful bail before trials, instead of letting them out to commit additional violent crimes,” the PAC’s website reads.

The PAC received more than $18 million in contributions, including $2 million from Elon Musk, and sizable donations from energy companies, billionaire investors, oil magnates and property developers.

Still, Chad Ruback, a Dallas-based appellate lawyer, attributed Republican wins on the bench to the GOP’s broader strength and Democrats’ disastrous performance across the state.

“A lot of people were carried in on President Trump’s coattails,” Ruback said on Wednesday, noting that the judicial red wave aligned with the wider margins of victory that Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz enjoyed in Texas this year relative to previous election cycles. “I don’t believe that the change we’re seeing in the appellate races last night should be viewed in a vacuum.”

He said Tuesday’s GOP appellate court takeover felt like “déjà vu” from 2018, “but in reverse.” Six years ago, Democrats swept the state appellate bench. This year, many of those same seats flipped red.

What do these results mean?

Ruback argued that Tuesday’s judicial election results would lead to a “perceptible change” in how the courts ruled, but that the change would be limited.

“It will be a noticeable change, but in my experience, it’s not likely to be a dramatic change,” he said, noting that the heavily Democratic benches elected in 2018 did not result in vast differences in the courts’ decisions.

Republican judges may be more receptive to arbitration and summary judgments than Democratic judges, Ruback said, leading to potential differences in how close cases are decided. But he said that appellate judges are bound by precedent and state law, and that the “vast, vast majority” of cases before the state’s appellate courts are not close calls.

“They’re ones where there’s an obvious right or wrong answer, and it doesn’t matter whether there’s an R or a D by someone’s name — the law is the law,” Ruback said.

He also argued that elected appellate judges were more inclined to avoid the appearance of partisanship and interpret the law objectively because they face reelection and their decisions are subject to review by the state’s Supreme Court and Court of Criminal Appeals.

“There is more of an inclination to follow the law as it’s written by the high court or by statute,” he said, “when an individual on a bench is having his or her papers reviewed routinely by the electorate every few years.”