Wood County Republican Party

Why should you vote in the upcoming March 3, 2026 primary? (Early voting begins Feb.17th)

You should vote in a primary election because it’s your shot to pick the candidates who’ll represent your views in the general election—before the options get locked in. Primaries decide who carries your party’s flag, and since turnout’s usually low (often 20% or less of registered voters), your vote packs a bigger punch than in November. Skipping it hands that choice to a smaller, sometimes more extreme slice of the electorate—like how Trump snagged the 2016 GOP nod with just 14 million primary votes out of 62 million total voters in the general.

It’s also where real ideological battles happen. If you care about steering your party, whether toward pragmatism, principle, or something else, primaries are your leverage. Plus, in places like our Texas House District 5, where the general election is a Republican lock, the primary is the real contest.  Our current representative’s 2024 primary win over two challengers basically sealed his seat.

Not voting in the primary? You’re sitting out the whole game.

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This spring, Republican voters will choose their nominees in the Republican primary, who will go up against the Democrat this November. If a race on the March ballot has 3+ candidates, but fails to produce a clear majority-winner with at least 50%+1 of the votes, there will be a top-two-runoff in May 2026 to decide the Republican nominee. Early voting begins February 17th, at the Carroll Green Civic Center. March 3rd is election day, and there are nine locations, organized by voting-precinct. You can find out what your voting-precinct you belong to — and verify you ARE registered to vote — on the postcard the election office mails out, or by looking yourself up at the county level or at the statewide level.

To help inform the electorate of which candidates are on the ballot, and give you an idea of which way your officials in the local Republican Party are leaning at the moment, we have written up a one-pager listing most of the candidates and propositions which will appear on your Republican primary ballot:

Tap here: Candidates and Propositions
on the 3/3/2026 Republican ballot,
with informal straw-poll results.

Click the link above, then click the print-button to send the one-pager to your printer — for candidates that have a known website (or campaign social media or campaign-email), you can also click the names in blue to visit their campaign site. If you want to KEEP this one-pager open in your browser rather than using the back button during your research, you can longpress or rightclick upon one of the blue links, and then select ‘Open In New Tab’.

Note that you CANNOT use your cell phone, laptop, tablet, or other electronic devices for research-notes WHILE you are actually voting (this is a security measure designed to keep voters from recording or photographing the ballot of anyone else to protect the secrecy of the ballot … as well as recording or photographing their OWN ballot for later use in an illegal bribery scheme where politiqueros pay for proof-of-voting-as-promised!).

However, you CAN print out this one-pager, and take that piece of paper in with you, while you vote (along with other printed or handwritten materials if you wish). Just like paper ballots are a more secure way to RUN an election, paper-voter-guides are a secure way to HELP yourself remember your research-notes WHILE voting. Once you have printed out the one-pager, there is whitespace to the left of the candidate-names, if you would like to write in an arrow pointing at the candidate you prefer to support, onto the printed paper.

The numbers in green are the tally of people who picked that candidate, in an informal straw-poll. Note that in some races, more than one candidate-name will have a green number, because sometimes folks have different opinions about which candidate they are leaning towards supporting … but on YOUR actual ballot when YOU cast your actual vote, you will ONLY VOTE FOR ONE SINGLE CANDIDATE per race (with rare exceptions like multi-member districts for school board slots you must pick ONE name for Senator, ONE name for Governor, and so on.) Some participants in the straw poll left a particular race unmarked/blank, because they were still deciding on who they lean towards supporting, and some participants gave part of their support to multiple candidates. Also, a couple folks decided not to participate in the straw-poll. We will be running another informal straw-poll as part of the February CEC meeting — these meetings are open to the public — Wednesday Feb.18th at 11:30am, Anconna Italian Restaurant, 1067a TX-37, Quitman TX (about 1.5 miles south of the county courthouse on Hwy 37 southbound towards Mineola). As usual, any elected official or candidate that attends will be given some time to address the group, at the start.

To be 100% crystal clear, receiving a numeric tally with a green number in this informal straw poll of local Republican party officials, DOES NOT in any way constitute an official endorsement of that candidate, or indeed, some sort of non-endorsement of any other candidate. Neither statewide party rules nor local party by-laws PROHIBIT your local party officials from endorsing candidates (as a group or in their individual capacity), if they wish, and if you look at candidate-websites you will see that some of our local party officials DO exercise their 1A right to express their voice by officially endorsing, as current or former or upcoming officeholders themselves often do. However, although some individual members are explicitly endorsing, this one-pager is just a straw-poll, informally taken, with plenty of opportunity for individuals that participated to change their minds prior to actual casting their votes. (Some of the local Republican clubs in the county are explicitly endorsing as well — WCRW officially endorsed Don Huffines for comptroller and also Sid Miller for agriculture commissioner at their January meeting.)

This is the first time in recent memory that the local party has published a straw-poll (and the first time in club history that WCRW has endorsed as well), but in March 2026 there are many interesting races, chock-full of candidates that many Republican primary voters have never heard of: in federal races alone, there are 8 names running for U.S. Senate in a hotly contested battle, as well as 9 names for the “brand new” U.S. Rep for our area (Wood county has Lance Gooden as our incumbent Rep until the end of 2026 … but his district-lines for CD 5 were shifted further southwards during the legislative special session last summer and we cannot vote for him in March 2026 or in November 2026 … instead we are in the newly-redrawn CD 32 which was a democrat-stronghold in Dallas county, and is now a Republican-stronghold stretching all the way from Dallas to Gilmer/Pittsburg region of East Texas).

In statewide races, there are 11 candidates for governor, 4 for lieutenant governor, an open-seat for Texas Attorney General, and open seat for Texas Comptroller, and four more strongly-contested statewide races. There is also an open-seat #9 for the State Board Of Education: the new SBOE member will represent Wood County and 23 other counties stretching from Dallas all the way to the deep-East-Texas border with Louisiana, helping determine what curriculum is used in public schools, among other things. We additionally have six or seven contested races for our local elected officials, a bit more than usual.

The purpose of the straw-poll is to help Republican primary voters DO THEIR OWN research, prior to actually going in and voting. Rather than explicitly endorsing, or remaining silent, the local GOP this election-cycle decided to try providing a list of candidate-websites (in ballot-order) and running a straw-poll. In past cycles, local clubs have sometimes done a more traditional voter-guide, which gave the candidate-names in ballot order, the candidate-websites, and some background-details that we copied from the candidate-websites or their application-for-a-place-on-the-ballot. However, the result was a ten-page full-color document, cumbersome for voters to actually take with them to the polling-place, and without giving any indication of which candidates were ‘likely to gain voter support’ it was fair to the candidates in some sense (albeit unfair in another sense), but forced the voters to DO THEIR OWN research. That is fair to the voters in some sense… but also pretty unfair!

The straw-poll still strongly encourages voters to do their own research, and we provide links for races where we have them. (If you want to research the local candidates without a website, please email kw.wcrp@gmail.com and we will try to get you in touch with those candidates you care about.) The advantage to the straw-poll is that it does allow voters to START by researching candidates that are ‘likely to gain voter support’ as indicated by the green boxes, rather than forcing the voter to research all candidates. Anecdotally, we have found that very few voters do THAT much research.

The 2022 voter-guide from RWWC gave detailed information on eight candidates for Governor of Texas in the 2022 Republican Primary, but in Wood County, only four candidates ACTUALLY gained much support from actual voters: 5700 votes for Greg Abbott, 1100 votes for Allen West, 600 votes for Don Huffines, 350 votes for Chad Prather. Most of the other candiates for governor that year got fewer than 50 votes in the Wood County Republican primary (the exception being 243 people who voted for “Rick Perry” … but the person running was NOT actually that Rick Perry the former cabinet-member under Trump and former Texas Governor … but instead another guy named Rick Perry from the DFW area).

The 2026 straw-poll currently lists two candidates for Governor (of the nine) that are ‘likely to gain voter support’ — the incumbent current governor Greg Abbott, and challenger Doc Pete Chambers. It is worth mentioning that former statewide candidate for comptroller Mark Goloby and outgoing member of the SBOE Evelyn Brooks are also running for Governor in 2026. Voters can click the website-links above for all 9 candidates to learn more about them — all the candidates for Governor listed above are running as Republicans, and all of them worth looking into, if you have the time. But if you are pressed for time, the straw-poll may help you to make your research-process a bit more efficient.

In addition to voting in the Republican primary, and researching the Republican candidates, we urge you to get more involved. Running for office costs money, and so does getting the conservative message out. Candidates and PACs need donations to push for OUR beliefs in the public square, and to push back against the Dems. There are campaign-limits for federal *candidates*, but not for Texas candidates, and not really for federal PACs, either. Democrats have a LOT of out-of-state money pouring into Texas from places like the quality ‘learing’ centers in Minnesota, and our candidates need the firepower to fight back.

More important than money, however, is time: candidates need volunteers, people to help them knock on doors, people to help them make phone calls, even the old-fashioned stuff like helping to write letters and stuff envelopes. Candidates need your help to get the message out online: x.com, facebook.com, nextdoor.com, even your encrypted signal.org chats … help the good candidates via word-of-mouth. Candidates need you to put up their yardsigns — on your fence, in your grass, outside your business, and during the voting-schedule outside the polling-locations (must be 100′ away from the entrance… NOT in the right-of-way of the road either… look for the distance-marker to be sure you are far enough out). Candidates also need poll-watchers, see the link below. We have several local Republican clubs, and local precinct-chairs, which can help you get involved. Let us know if you appreciate the straw-poll idea, or if you have any other great ideas to help keep America great!

The candidates in the one-pager are placed in a randomly-selected ballot-order for each of the 254 counties in Texas; our one-pager above is for Wood County specifically — Texas… not Ohio… not West Virginia either — and only includes candidates running as Republicans, plus only if they are in contested races. If you need another county’s ballot-order, or want to see the full ballot-list (select 2026 + republican primary + name of county) including all unopposed candidates on your March ballot — who MAY end up being opposed in November. Note that the Texas Secretary of State is now contracting with Civix for their software, the old links to their old software no longer function. The official ballot propositions are a bit more formal than what is shown in the one-pager above, you can see the full ballot-proposition-language at TexasGOP.org, the statewide Republican Party website.

The official sample-ballots are now online at the Wood County Elections Office site (same ballot-order but a bit closer to the actual ballot-layout including all propositions and Spanish instructions and such). Texas Secretary of State has a list of helpful 2026 election-links, including a poll-watcher’s instruction manual (these can be appointed by any candidate on the ballot or by the county chair of a political party to help ensure honest elections) and other useful election-law links.

Last but not least, our congratulations and our thanks to the unopposed nominees-elect, who will be the Republican party champions on the November general election ballot:

Position Sought	Republican Nominee
Land Commissioner	Dawn Buckingham
Supreme Ct #1	Jimmy Blacklock
Supreme Ct #2	James P. Sullivan
Supreme Ct #7	Kyle Hawkins
Supreme Ct #8	Brett Busby
Ct. Crim App. #4	Kevin Patrick Yeary
State Senator, SD 1	Bryan Hughes
15th Ct. App. #1	Scott Brister
15th Ct. App. #2	Scott K. Field
15th Ct. App. #3	April Farris
12th Ct. App. #1	Brian Hoyle
6th Ct. App. #3	Charles Van Cleef
12th Ct. App. #3	Michael Davis
County Judge	Kevin White
District Clerk	Suzy Richards Wright
County Clerk	Kelley Robinson Price
Cty Commish #2	Jerry Gaskill
J.P. #1	Tony Gilbreath
J.P. #4	Jody Paul Hettich

Thank you for being an informed voter, and thank you for being a Republican!