The 8-day reports — the final look at candidate campaign finance totals before Election Day — are in. We have compiled data for all statewide, State Board of Education, Texas Senate and Texas House candidates who filed electronically with the Texas Ethics Commission. Explore the numbers by contest or by candidate. You can see the top-line totals for contributions, expenditures, loans and cash on hand for each campaign.

Questions continue to be raised about a giant water pipeline project that would pump roughly 16 billion gallons of groundwater annually from Burleson County to San Antonio.

The Tribune today launches its 15-part The Shale Life series, which tells in a variety of visual styles the stories of those who are living through the effects, both good and bad, of the shale boom in Texas.

Monday night was a big one for a pair of Texas politicos who were both given a national stage from which to galvanize support among their respective voter bases.

Democrat Wendy Davis, trying to energize young voters on the University of Texas campus in Austin Monday, said she’s seeing hopeful turnout trends despite a torrent of polls that show she’s losing the governor’s race to Attorney General Greg Abbott by double digits.

Border security and immigration top the list of concerns in Texas, according to the most recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll.

Republican Greg Abbott holds a double-digit lead over Democrat Wendy Davis in the race for governor of Texas, according to the latest University of Texas/Texas Tribune Poll. In other statewide races on the ballot, most Republicans hold even larger leads over their Democratic opponents. 

While many Democrats in southern states are running away from Barack Obama as fast as they can, Sen. Wendy Davis leaned into her embrace of the president on Wednesday, saying she valued his support and would welcome him on the campaign trail. 

Here are some dispatches from around the state on the first day of early voting.

Voters can cast ballots today for the Nov. 4 general election as the two-week early voting period commences.

Wednesday amounted to a daylong series of body blows to those who thought that authorities had things under control in the response to the diagnosis of Ebola in Dallas.

Several days into the media firestorm over the release of an ad that features an empty wheelchair, Sen. Wendy Davis isn’t pulling back one inch from the harsh attacks on Attorney General Greg Abbott.

Now that the deadline for filing 30-day campaign finance reports ahead of the Nov. 4 election has passed, we can get a better snapshot of the financial health of Texas candidates. Use this tool to search data for all statewide, State Board of Education and legislative candidates who filed electronically with the Texas Ethics Commission. You can see the top-line totals for contributions, expenditures, loans and cash on hand for each campaign.

Gov. Rick Perry will have to spend part of his Halloween in an Austin courtroom. Perry was excused from a pre-trial hearing on Monday, but he must be at the next one, the presiding judge in the case determined.

Confirmation came Sunday afternoon that a second person has been diagnosed with the Ebola virus in Dallas.

The pollster for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis defended her controversial TV commercial Sunday, saying it’s working as intended despite widespread criticism that using the image of an empty wheelchair in an attack ad on a disabled candidate was mean-spirited and unfair.

A federal district judge in Corpus Christi ruled against the state's voter ID law, injecting a note of drama into the run-up to the general elections.

A sad chapter was marked Wednesday in the story of Ebola in Texas with the death of Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who flew to Dallas to join family only to be diagnosed with the deadly disease after arriving.