Three Republicans keep their seats on Texas Supreme Court, despite efforts from pro-abortion groups

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All three incumbent Republicans on the Texas Supreme Court were reelected Tuesday, delivering a blow to Democrats who had hoped that backlash to the court’s abortion rulings would deliver them their first victory to the high court in 30 years.

The victories of justices John Devine, Jane Bland and Jimmy Blacklock mean that Republicans will continue to hold all of the court’s nine seats until 2026, when three other justices are up for reelection.

Democrats had in past election cycles not even run candidates in races for the all-GOP Texas Supreme Court. That all changed in 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, thereby moving the fight over abortion access to statehouses and courts.

Since then, the Texas Supreme Court has issued two major rulings on abortion, fueling the creation of a new Democratic political action committee, Find Out PAC. Dubbed the “Jimmy, John and Jane” strategy, Find Out PAC began airing statewide commercials attacking Blacklock, Devine and Bland over their votes on abortion, often accompanied with testimonials from Texas women who were denied abortion access.

Polling shows that Texas voters are generally dissatisfied with the strictness of the state’s abortion laws. But Find Out PAC’s internal polling found that nearly half of likely voters did not recall seeing or hearing anything about the Texas Supreme Court in the year prior — and that contests for the state court moved to a statistical tie once voters were shown stories of those women harmed by recent rulings on abortion laws.

The six candidates have poured in more than $2.1 million to their races this year — most of it coming from two incumbent Republicans in the month before early voting began. Since Jan. 1, Blacklock spent roughly $804,000 — almost seven times that of his opponent, Harris County District Court Judge DaSean Jones. Over the same period, Bland spent about $440,000 more than her challenger Bonnie Lee Goldstein, an intermediate state appeals court judge. Of the incumbents, only Devine was outraised by his Democratic challenger, Christine Vinh Weems, a Harris County District Court judge.

Bland was appointed to the court by Gov. Greg Abbott in 2019 and reelected in 2020 with more votes than any other elected official in Texas history.

Blacklock worked under Abbott at the Office of the Attorney General and the Governor’s Office, where he led many of the state’s most high-profile cases, including defending abortion restrictions.

Devine is a longtime figure in Texas’ conservative Christian legal movement who, in his 2011 campaign for the court, bragged about having been arrested 37 times at anti-abortion protests in the 1980s and 1990s. As a district judge in the 1990s, he fought to have the Ten Commandments posted in his courtroom, and has for years falsely claimed that the separation of church and state is a “myth” meant to obscure the nation’s true, Judeo-Christian roots.

Devine was perhaps the most vulnerable of the three Republican incumbents; in March, he narrowly survived a primary in which his opponent attacked him for, among other things, missing more than half of oral arguments before the court last year as he campaigned for reelection, and recently auctioning off tours of his chambers for a GOP fundraiser.

In February, the Texas Tribune reported that Devine did not recuse himself from a high-profile lawsuit against Southern Baptist leader Paul Pressler and Pressler’s former law partner Jared Woodfill. Devine worked for their firm at the same time that the plaintiff in the suit alleged he was molested by Pressler while also an employee of the firm.

Last month, the Tribune reported on new ethics concerns involving Devine surrounding his oversight of a trust belonging to a millionaire with dementia despite Texas’ judicial conduct code explicitly prohibiting judges from serving in such roles. Devine has denied any wrongdoing, saying the woman considered him like a son for decades.