Texas Senate, District 5
About this race: Cedar Park and much of Williamson County. The incumbent coauthored SB 3 and recorded Yea on the hemp restrictions at every stage across three sessions, and Yea on the medical expansion — 35 recorded acts in all, including 29 record votes.
Whose record this page shows. The paragraph above is about the
race, and part of it describes a different person. Everything after this line on this page is
Paul Thomasson’s own record and nothing else — including, where it says so, the
finding that no record was located. Every record the paragraph above describes is
set out candidate by candidate on the
Texas Senate, District 5 race page.
Paul ThomassonDemocrat
100/100
support for legal access — top band, 67 to 100
thin — one or two records produced this number · 2 of 2 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.
- 2026-10-13 questionnaire — Wrote "Cannabis should be legalized, decriminalized, regulated for safety and taxed.": support for legal, regulated adult access, counted as +2 at weight 2
- 2026-08-24 questionnaire — Named "restore Texans’ THC choices" as one of his top priorities: a position for restoring adult access to THC products rather than restricting it, counted as +2 at weight 2
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Questionnaire2026-08-24
Listed restoring access to THC products among his top priorities, in a candidate Q&A that Community Impact published on 2026-08-24. Asked "What would your top priorities be if elected?", he named ten, among them "restore Texans’ THC choices", alongside repealing vouchers, raising the minimum wage, healthcare, data centers and water rights. The paper asked no cannabis question; he raised the subject himself. His opponent, Charles Schwertner, answered the same questions in the same article and did not mention THC, hemp or cannabis.
communityimpact.com
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Questionnaire2026-10-13
Answered the 2026 candidate survey of the Marijuana Policy Project, a national cannabis-policy advocacy organisation, and the Texas Cannabis Policy Center, whose 2026 Texas Voter Guide prints the written comments of Senate and statewide candidates who replied. The survey asked four questions: whether to expand the Texas medical cannabis program to allow patients cannabis flower; whether limited possession of THC hemp products and up to one ounce of flower should be a civil fine of up to $100; whether cannabis and THC products should be legal to possess for adults 21 and older; and whether a legal, regulated market should be created for adult-use sales.
The guide prints one written comment from him, beside the civil-fine question: "Cannabis should be legalized, decriminalized, regulated for safety and taxed." The guide prints no response dates; the date given is the Last-Modified date the publisher's own server returns for the guide's PDF edition (2026-10-13), the earliest date the answer is documented as published. The guide also prints the organisation's own support headings for each candidate; those are its characterisations, not the candidate's words, and are not reproduced here.
mpp.org
See the whole Texas Senate, District 5 race, including every opponent →
Who is paying for this campaign
Campaign finance — Texas Ethics Commission
Texas Ethics Commission filer 90033, filed as
“Thomasson, Paul L.”, treasurer appointment for State Senator, District 5, dated 2025-09-10. The name on the filing is not word-for-word the name on the ballot — both are printed above so you can check the pairing yourself before you rely on it.
Why there are no figures and no industry breakdown here.
Texas does not require a candidate to report a contributor’s employer or occupation —
the Commission’s own 2026 guide asks for the amount, the contributor’s name and
address, and the date, and that is all. So there is nothing in these filings to group into
industries, and we have built no such grouping rather than imply one. Separately, the
Commission’s bulk filing archive tells automated readers to stay out of it, and we
honour that, so we have read no individual Texas contribution record. Treat the itemised
question as unchecked by us, not as checked and found empty.
Read this filer’s own reports at
the Texas Ethics Commission (ethics.state.tx.us) → — choose Transaction Type
“Contributions”, then Search By “Filer ID” and enter
90033. The Commission’s search posts its results, so there
is no direct link to one filer’s page; the number above is what makes it one step
instead of a hunt.
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 Paul Thomasson 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.