Former oil executive Alex Mealer beat Texas state Rep. Briscoe Cain to claim the Republican primary for the state’s 9th Congressional District on May 26.
Mealer will face the Democratic challenger for the seat in November’s general election.
The Republican nominee is favored to win the seat, due to the district’s significant GOP leanings, following the Texas Legislature’s mid-decade redraw of its congressional districts.
Mealer outraised Cain substantially during the primary phase.
According to pre-primary Federal Election Commission data, Mealer raised roughly $1.8 million in campaign resources.
Cain’s committee brought in about $600,000.
According to a February 2026 Hobby School of Public Affairs poll, Mealer led Cain by around 8 percent going into the election.
A May 12 poll conducted by the same University of Houston group found Mealer ahead by 9 percentage points in the Republican District 9 runoff at 50 percent to 41 percent.
Mealer received almost 36 percent of the vote during the March primary, while Cain received around 31 percent.
The district was redrawn last year and changed enough that incumbent Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) is now running for office in District 18. Green has represented District 9 for 20 years.
The U.S. Supreme Court in April upheld Texas’s redrawn congressional map, allowing it to be used in the 2026 election.
The new map could result in five congressional districts being flipped from Democrat to Republican. This would offer Republicans a slight cushion in the lower chamber of Congress, which is currently held by a small majority.
Mealer, a former oil and gas finance executive, was a combat veteran, and a graduate of West Point, Harvard Business School, and Harvard Law School.
She is also a former Harris County Republican judicial nominee and was endorsed by President Donald Trump, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), and a number of others.
She has been married for 17 years to a fellow West Point graduate and has two children.
Cain is a five-term Texas state representative from the Houston-area Deer Park/La Porte region who was backed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the National Rifle Association, and others.
According to his campaign website, Cain has been ranked the most conservative legislator for multiple sessions, and he says he was banned from Twitter, now X, “for confronting Beto O’Rourke on gun rights.”
He has been married for 14 years, and has five sons, all of whom are named after Texas counties.