Dems aim for third sweep of courts

Erin Lunceford had barely settled into her judge’s chambers at the Harris County courthouse before she had to fire up her 2016 reelection campaign.

Appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott in July 2015 to preside over the vacant 61st District Court, one of the county’s 24 elected civil courts, Lunceford promptly was swept out of office along with the 10 other Republican incumbents on the ballot. She is running four years later to reclaim her seat from Democrat Fredericka Phillips, while Harris County Republicans look to avoid a third-straight election of unanimous courthouse defeats.

“It’s definitely an uphill climb,” Lunceford said, noting that a Republican did not bother to run in half of this year’s 24 state district judicial contests. “It’s a huge, tough road. I mean, I’m not giving up my day job.”

Harris County judicial candidates traditionally have had little control over their electoral fates, with outcomes at the top of the ballot largely dictating results at the bottom in recent years. A single party has won every countylevel judicial race in four of the last six election cycles, and from 2008 to 2016, more than half the judges from the party that carried Harris County finished within one percentage point of their fellow candidates that year, according to an analysis from Rice University political science professor Mark Jones.

After Democrats Hillary Clinton and Beto O’Rourke won Harris County by 12 and 17 percentage points in 2016 and 2018, respectively, Republicans acknowledge they face long odds of winning the countywide vote this year. Party officials and judicial candidates

are encouraged, though, because Texas no longer allows voters to cast their ballots for every candidate from one party by pressing a single button, a process called straight-ticket voting the Texas Legislature eliminated.

“A lot of people do not know the judicial races,” said Kevin Fulton, vice chair of the Harris County Republican Party and head of the party’s coordinated campaign for judicial candidates. “Harris County has one of the longest ballots in the country. Most people do not know the difference between their county court and district court judges, and so they were just going in and checking the top of the ballot for ‘straight Democrat’ and not knowing the impact they were having on the bottom of the ballot.”

The absence of straightticket voting, Fulton said, gives Republican judicial candidates more influence over the outcome and leads to more people voting for “a judge that they actually know or a philosophy they actually believe in.”

‘No … hope whatsoever’

Jones offered a different outlook.

“Barring one of the two dozen Democratic candidates committing a felony between now and Nov. 3, no Republican has any hope whatsoever of winning one of those races,” he said. “Even if they committed a felony, I’d be skeptical that they would lose.”

Lillie Schechter, chair of the Harris County Democratic Party, said Democrats recognize that the COVID-19 pandemic and lack of straight-ticket voting make this year’s election unpredictable. The party is focused, she said, on telling voters to “vote for all the Democrats, start to finish.”

“We are absolutely running a full coordinated campaign, because we don’t take any elections for granted,” Schechter said. “It does look like we are in the best position we’ve been in decades in Harris County, but we do have some changes this election cycle.”

Though far less prominent than elections for Congress and the Legislature, judicial contests are just as important, candidates and court observers argue, due to the direct daily influence of the various courts. Harris County’s 60 state district courts — divided between civil, criminal, family and juvenile matters — have original jurisdiction over cases including felony criminal charges, civil matters involving money, divorce, disputes of title to land and election contests, among others.

Growing diversity

“It affects their lives more than some of the races on top of the ticket,” said state District Judge Julia Maldonado, a Democrat who is in a rematch against Republican Alyssa Lemkuil after unseating her from the 507th Family District Court in 2016. “At family court, lots of people have issues with divorces, custody, child support. Those are your day-to-day issues.”

This year, Harris County voters will decide elections for 24 district courts, three county courts at law and justice of the peace courts. They also will weigh in on four races across the two Houston-based appeals courts, which cover 10 counties, along with three elections for the statewide Court of Criminal Appeals and four for the Texas Supreme Court.

Harris County Democrats’ sweeps in 2016 and 2018 ushered in a wave of judges supportive of criminal justice reforms, such as last year’s overhaul of the system of handling bail for poor people arrested on misdemeanor charges. The bench also has become far more diverse, illustrated by the 17 Black women newly elected last cycle under the “Harris County Black Girl Magic” slogan.

Those trends would continue this year if voters select the handful of Black and Latina Democratic women who unseated white male incumbents during the primaries. Democrat Natalia Cornelio, director of legal affairs for Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis and an architect of the county’s bail settlement, noted that Latinos make up 44 percent of Harris County’s population, but none of the 38 criminal court judges are Latina.

“Our county and country are becoming more diverse,” said Cornelio, who faces Republican nominee Arlene Hecht for the 351st Criminal District Court. “It makes sense that folks who run are more diverse and representative of our population than ever before, that our images of our leaders are evolving and shifting to become more inclusive.”

Jessica Colon, a Houston Republican strategist, said the recent Democratic wins have led to an influx of “activist judges,” while Republicans would focus on “adhering to the laws that are on the books and not making up laws as you go along” if they reclaimed seats. This year, Colon argued, the Democratic judicial nominees are more liberal than before.

“If you look at who won a lot of those primaries, it is an even more progressive, leftist candidate than the Democrat incumbent that sat there,” Colon said.

Democrat Amparo Guerra, a former Houston municipal judge who is challenging Republican Judge Terry Adams on the First Court of Appeals, said every case “turns on its own facts and the law,” but each judge still brings “their professional background and their personal background and their education to the table.”

Lunceford, who testified in favor of eliminating straight-ticket voting at the Legislature in 2017, noted that she received nearly 49 percent of the vote in 2016, ahead of Trump’s 41 percent vote share and the 45 percent of straight ticket voters who voted Republican.

“I’d rather have a bunch of under-votes than have people push one button because they don’t like the president,” said Lunceford, a trial lawyer at Norton Rose Fulbright. “I don’t think that has anything to do with the judges and their qualifications.”