Former Texas Rangers first baseman Mark Teixeira won a seat in Congress on Tuesday, defeating Democrat Kristin Hook to keep Texas’ 21st Congressional District in Republican hands. With 99% of the expected vote counted Wednesday morning, Teixeira led Hook by roughly nine percentage points. The World Series champion will succeed Republican Rep. Chip Roy, who beat the same Democratic challenger by a considerably wider margin two years ago.
Voters from northern San Antonio to southwest Austin and west into the Texas Hill Country were choosing a new representative for the first time since 2018. Roy, a Republican from Dripping Springs, gave up the seat to run for Texas attorney general and lost his bid for that office. His departure opened a race in a district that has elected Republicans to the House in every congressional election since 1978.
Hook knew much of the territory from her first campaign, though the boundaries had changed between elections. Roy had taken 61.9% of the vote against her in 2024. Teixeira had about 54.5% in Wednesday morning’s count, a drop of more than seven points in the Republican share. Between Hook’s first and second runs, Texas lawmakers redrew the district in a way that gave San Antonio voters a larger say.
Teixeira already knew the man whose seat he would seek. “Chip’s kids and my kids go to school together,” he told the San Antonio Report in September. Friends encouraged him to run when Roy decided to leave the House, and Teixeira entered before the new congressional map won approval. The new lines left both men living north of the district. Teixeira told the paper he was building a house inside its boundaries.
His first contest was against Republicans with years of experience in party politics. As the Texas Tribune reported, the field included former Federal Election Commission Chairman Trey Trainor, former Kendall County GOP Chairman Mike Wheeler and Kyle Sinclair, a former vice chair of the Bexar County Republican Party. Teixeira went to the White House to seek President Donald Trump’s endorsement and secured it in February, ahead of the March primary.
Teixeira laid out what he wanted to do in Washington in a February interview with KSAT. He put election security and securing the border among his priorities and called for cutting waste and fraud in the federal government. His campaign described one of his goals in Congress as helping to “champion President Trump’s America First agenda,” according to campaign materials quoted by KUT.
Watch Teixeira discuss his priorities in the KSAT interview here:
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Hook came to the race with a background in federal oversight. A former middle school teacher from Corpus Christi, she earned a doctorate in behavioral biology from Cornell and worked at both the National Institutes of Health and the Government Accountability Office. She also served as an oversight investigator for Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, according to Texas Public Radio. She made health care costs an issue in her campaign, taking aim at lobbying by insurers and drug companies.
Teixeira raised more than $4 million for his congressional run and met with Republican groups around the district, including the Young Republicans of Bexar County at San Antonio’s Magic Time Machine restaurant. He and Hook never met on a debate stage during the campaign. After his win, the first-time candidate thanked the volunteers who had hosted events, knocked on doors and worked the polls. “Tonight’s victory belongs to the people of Texas’s 21st District,” he wrote on X.
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video.