Early voting numbers released Tuesday night showed Fort Bend County Commissioner Dexter McCoy with a commanding lead over interim County Judge Daniel Wong in the race to permanently fill the county's top elected post. The unofficial totals put Democrat McCoy at 111,278 votes to Republican Wong's 73,444, a gap of nearly 38,000 ballots.
Those figures, reported by Community Impact, are not final. All results remain unofficial until the county canvasses them, the outlet noted. FOX 26 Houston tracked the race Tuesday night as part of its coverage of the 2026 election, with reporter Rashi Vats stopping by Wong's watch party before heading over to McCoy's gathering to report on the numbers as they came in.
Wong, who has served as Fort Bend County's interim judge, ran to hold the position on a permanent basis, while McCoy, a sitting Precinct 4 commissioner, challenged him for the seat. The winner will serve a four-year term, according to the county election website cited by Community Impact.
Two Different Paths to the Same Office
The matchup pitted two Fort Bend County officials with very different résumés against each other. Wong previously sat on Sugar Land City Council and now runs an engineering firm as its CEO, according to Houston Public Media's candidate profile. Community Impact describes him as a civil engineer and business owner, citing a candidate questionnaire.
McCoy, meanwhile, has held his county commissioner seat since winning election in 2023, per that Houston Public Media report. He ran as the Democratic challenger seeking to unseat an incumbent who'd only held the judge's office in an interim capacity.
Polling Had Signaled a McCoy Advantage
The early-vote gap tracked with pre-election polling. A Texas Southern University survey conducted in October showed McCoy with a nine-point lead over Wong, with 11% of voters still undecided at the time, Houston Public Media reported. That undecided bloc left some uncertainty heading into Election Day even as McCoy held the edge in the poll.
The trend continued once ballots started being counted. The Houston Chronicle's live election tracker likewise showed McCoy holding what it called a solid lead over Wong in early returns from the county. FOX 26's own live-results page for the Nov. 3 election noted that the first Texas returns were expected around 7 p.m. that evening, setting up a night of closely watched numbers in Fort Bend County and across the Houston suburbs.
With the margin between the two candidates sitting near 38,000 votes in the unofficial count, attention now turns to the formal canvass that will certify the outcome of a race that will decide who leads one of the fastest-growing counties in the Houston area for the next four years.
