The Digital Landscape #006: TX-38

Texas’ 38th Congressional district (TX-38) is an R+10 district according to Cook Political Report. There are currently 3 candidates in the primary.

Primary date: March 3rd, 2026

Theresa Courts

Theresa has a presence on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Her highest follower account is 904 followers on TikTok. She does a great job of creating videos that have solid substance and are stylized to be algorithmically friendly.

Her Instagram could use some work. It’s text-heavy graphics that aren’t really readable. The low-hanging fruit for her would be to just cross-post the videos from TikTok.

Marvalette Hunter

Marvalette has a presence on X, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Her X is mostly cross-posting campaign updates, and so is her Facebook. She has a few reels, but nothing consistent or significant.

She should commit to video 3x a week on her top 3 issues from now until election day.

Melissa McDonough

Melissa has the strongest overall presence of the bunch, with a presence on Threads, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube. She’s the only candidate that has a Threads, which shows she’s social-savvy enough to know that Threads is the new Twitter.

All of her posts are solid. The only thing I’d try more of if I were her is straight up talking head videos with a title caption to hook the viewer.

All in all I feel like there’s a lot of potential to do a social media sprint to GOTV, and any three of the candidates could take the spot. Whoever wins, it’s going to take an elevated social game to make headway in an R+10 district.