US House, District 38
About this race: A US House seat on the 120th Congress map, covering part of north-west Harris County. No cannabis or hemp record was found for any candidate on this ballot, in Congress or in the Texas Legislature. Each was checked against the sources listed on their pages.
Which map this is. This seat is drawn on the
120th Congress map, the one on the 3 November ballot. Measured by area — not by
population — 82% of it was inside district 38 on the
119th Congress map, which stands until the end of 2026; the rest came from district 8 (15%), district 18 (2.1%), district 7 (0.5%) and district 2 (0.5%). Your own district may have changed number without your address changing.
Check your own address in the district finder.
Melissa McDonoughDemocrat
100/100
support for legal access — top band, 67 to 100
thin — one or two records produced this number · 1 of 1 records scored
How this score is worked out
Seven kinds of act move this number, and they do not count equally. A recorded vote
counts 3, and so does authoring a bill or signing an executive action; signing on to
somebody else’s bill counts 2. A statement or a questionnaire answer counts 2 as
well, and an organisational endorsement counts 1. A vote takes its direction from the
bill, whose effect is set out in advance; the rest take it from our reading of what was
said, and each one below shows that reading and the reason for it. Acts shown with no
number were examined and deliberately left out of the arithmetic, with a reason given.
- 2024-02-26 questionnaire — Answered Support to legalising and regulating marijuana like alcohol for adults and to removing cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act, and wrote in favour of decriminalisation, regulation and taxation, counted as +2 at weight 1.2
-
Questionnaire2024-02-26
Answered Texas NORML's candidate survey as a candidate in the Democratic primary for U.S. House District 38, printed in its 2024 Texas Marijuana Policy Voter's Guide, Primary Election Edition. Her row records "Support" in all four of the survey's federal columns: legalising and regulating marijuana like alcohol for adults 21 and over, removing cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act, giving state-licensed cannabis businesses legal access to the banking system, and allowing Veterans Administration doctors to recommend cannabis to treat service-related injuries.
Her written comment reads: "Marijuana is harmless, and all the current dangers around it are due to its status as an illegal substance. Decriminalization, regulation, and taxation provide benefits that overwhelmingly outweigh any perceived benefits of keeping it illegal."
⚠️This is 2024 evidence, not 2026. The guide prints no publication date; the date recorded here is 2024-02-26, the day the guide file was placed on texasnorml.org (the server's Last-Modified date for the file, Mon, 26 Feb 2024 18:09:38 GMT, and the upload date in the site's own media library), ahead of the 5 March 2024 primary.
⚠️The guide's table is printed sideways, so her row was confirmed by its position on the page, not by the order of the extracted text: the four answers and every line of the comment sit inside the band between the drawn row of Wesley P. Hunt (Incumbent) above and that of Gion Christopher Thomas below, in the block labelled U.S. Rep. District 38.
⚠️Identity rests on the same name, party and district as the 2026 Democratic nominee.
texasnorml.org, texasnorml.org
See the whole US House, District 38 race, including every opponent →
Who is paying for this campaign
Campaign finance — Federal Election Commission
Commission candidate H4TX38011, filed as
“MCDONOUGH, MELISSA A”, principal committee C00836940
(MELISSA MCDONOUGH FOR CONGRESS).
fec.gov
Everything below covers the reporting period that ended
2026-06-30, as filed with the Commission. These figures lag the
filing deadlines: money raised after that date does not appear until the next report is due,
so a recent contribution is not missing, it is not yet reportable.
What we could and could not put a label on
-
unclassified
$39,189
not matched by any of our patterns · figures cover through 2026-06-30
Fraction classified: 0%. We examined
$39,189 — the 15 largest employer groupings
($9,647) and 3 committee contributions
($29,542) the Commission shows for this committee — and
matched $0 of it to one of our own patterns.
$39,189 is listed above as unclassified.
What that figure is not. $39,189 is what we examined,
not everything this campaign raised: the Commission returns the largest employer groupings
rather than every contribution, and contributions too small to be itemised carry no
employer at all. Read the classified fraction as a share of what we looked at.
Any grouping of contributors into an industry is weedvoter’s own classification, applied to employer and committee names exactly as filed. The Commission publishes employers and committees; it never publishes industries. OpenSecrets discontinued its public interface in April 2025, so nothing here is an OpenSecrets classification.
Money received is not a position. Everything on this card is money that changed
hands. It is not evidence that any contribution influenced any decision, nothing on it is
placed beside a roll call, and we make no claim about anyone’s motive.
For what Melissa McDonough has actually done about cannabis, read the record above on this
page — the roll calls, the bills that carry their name, and the date of each one,
every entry linked to the document it came from. That is the part of this page built to be
judged, and it is the part the score is calculated from. No contribution on this card moves
that score by a cent.