San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Thierry, Dutton facing a fight for reelection
State lawmakers backed unpopular conservative bills
Democrat Lauren Ashley Simmons was about to launch into her campaign pitch on a recent Saturday of block walking in southwest Houston when the woman who answered the door interrupted.
“We’re definitely getting Thierry out of here, so you don’t even have to give your spiel — we’re down for it,” resident Nicole Rodriguez, 31, said of Democratic state Rep. Shawn Thierry.
She added that Thierry last year “really showed her true colors. And they’re not blue.”
Thierry is one of two Texas Democrats facing competitive primaries after she and longtime state Rep. Harold Dutton voted with Republicans last year to ban gender-transition care for transgender minors and prevent transgender college athletes from competing on the teams that match their gender identity.
Both of the Houston Democrats also backed a GOP bill aimed at prohibiting books in public school libraries that include sexually explicit material, which critics charged would end up banning LGBTQ literature because it was too vaguely worded. And Dutton has received flak for helping usher in a state takeover of Houston Independent School District, a move many fellow Democrats opposed because they worried it would give Republican state leaders too much sway as they work to crack down on race and LGBTQ content in classrooms.
Thierry’s and Dutton’s campaigns have each drawn financial support from the Family Empowerment Coalition PAC, a group that advocates for private school vouchers and has raised money largely from GOP donors, and that contributes mostly to Republican candidates.
A University of Houston poll released Thursday found that both incumbents had healthy leads over their primary challengers, though both surveys had large margins of error due to small sample sizes, and about 40% of voters were undecided in each.
Thierry, 54, said she hopes voters “keep an open mind” and judge her by the rest of her voting record beyond the LGBTQ votes.
“Unfortunately, there are going to be those folks that are going to be single-issue voters,” Thierry said in an interview. “And you just can’t always agree with every single issue and every single person, and so I’ve accepted that.”
Thierry was not the only Democrat to break from her party on those votes, but she was by far the most vocal, defending the moves as being in line with the will of her majority-minority district.
Her outspoken support of the GOP bills — including a teary speech on the Texas House floor — has led to her first truly competitive primary since she was first elected in 2016. She faces two opponents, Simmons and activist Ashton Woods. Simmons has emerged as the leading challenger, matching Thierry’s fundraising and drawing endorsements from a host of political groups that typically favor incumbents — along with five of Thierry’s House colleagues.
Her votes came as even more of a shock to some in House District 146, located in south and southwest Houston, because of its strong liberal lean: President Joe Biden carried the district by nearly 80 percentage points.
With her Democratic bona fides under attack, Thierry has noted that she votes with her party on most issues and joined fellow Democrats in 2021 when they fled the state to deny Republicans the quorum necessary to pass a voting restrictions bill. She also has pointed to endorsements from Democratic state Reps. Barbara GervinHawkins of San Antonio and Nicole Collier of Fort Worth, and to her role spearheading a bipartisan push to renew the state’s maternal mortality task force.
‘Race factor’
Thierry says she believes there is a “race factor” on the transgender medicine issue, arguing that her stance is largely opposed by white Democrats, while her Black and brown constituents support her. Thierry and Dutton are Black.
“I took the stance that I believe more than 80% of people in my district agree with,” she said. “Across the board, people think kids should wait.”
Puberty blockers and hormone therapy are common treatments for transgender youths, whereas surgeries are rare. Every major U.S. medical association has supported the medical care for transgender youth. LGBTQ advocates say many families with trans children have had to leave the state since the ban took effect.
Woods, 39, said Thierry is ignoring the existence of Black LGBTQ people, like himself, and is only taking into account the voices of older, more religious constituents.
“She’s been visiting too many churches, and she’s been only talking to people over the age of 50,” said Woods, who unsuccessfully challenged Thierry in 2020. “How many millennials and Gen Zers do you see in her pictures?”
Simmons, 36, who identifies as a Black queer woman and uses she/they pronouns, said Thierry’s decision to not only buck her party but to make a 12minute speech about it on the floor really upset her. With that vote and the one on the bookrating bill, Simmons said she felt as if Thierry was going along with the Republican “national playbook.”
For Simmons, whose daughter has sickle-cell anemia, the idea of a government intervening in a health care decision is “despicable.” She said her family has had to make hard choices when deciding to allow her daughter to receive experimental medication and opioids.
“I don’t need (Gov.) Greg Abbott in that room with me making that decision,” she said.
Simmons said she hadn’t planned on running for office, but after a video of her lambasting the Houston ISD superintendent over the takeover went viral on social media, several people independently asked her if she’d consider running for office. Eventually, she agreed.
In a sign of a competitive race, the attacks are flowing from Simmons and Thierry.
Thierry’s campaign in a recent mailer attacked Simmons over her criminal history, pointing to charges including one for shoplifting filed against her in her early 20s.
“Vote for a proven lawmaker, not a repeated lawbreaker,” the ad read. “District 146 deserves safe communities free from crime.”
Simmons said the ad did not bother her, as she is upfront about her past with voters. She regularly talks about how when she was 19 and a student at the University of Texas at Austin, she became pregnant, and her parents stopped supporting her. She temporarily fell into poverty and shoplifted food and clothing for her baby out of desperation, she said.
Simmons, meanwhile, has highlighted campaign donations that Thierry has received from Republicans who, her ads note, also support former President Donald Trump.
Nearly a third of Thierry’s campaign cash since the start of last year has come from prominent GOP donors Darwin and Doug Deason and the Family Empowerment Coalition PAC, the group co-founded by Doug Deason to advocate for private school vouchers.
Adam Loewy, a personal injury lawyer who mostly donates to Democrats, has said he also donated $25,000.
Simmons has raised about $57,000 since she launched her campaign in October, initially matching Thierry until her fundraising declined in January.
But since the Houston Chronicle published an editorial earlier this month in which Thierry described Simmons’ Texas House supporters as “the gay ones,” Simmons has raised nearly $36,000 on an online donation platform alone, according to her campaign consultant Grant Martin.
In a since-deleted post on social media site X, Thierry said the quote was “taken completely out of context from a larger discussion.” She did not respond to a request for comment seeking further explanation.
Spotlight on HISD
Competitive primaries are not new for Dutton, who was first elected to his northeast Houston district in 1984. He has scraped by in a pair of tightly decided races in 2020 and 2022, most recently winning by 219 votes out of more than 8,000 cast.
In both primaries, Dutton overcame backlash stemming from his effort to oust Houston ISD’s elected school board. That issue is again at the center of his reelection after HISD’s board was replaced last year under legislation authored by the Houston Democrat.
Dutton’s main Democratic challenger, former Harris County Department of Education trustee Danny Norris, believes the takeover has made Dutton more vulnerable than ever, in light of what Norris called the “brazen, tyrannical actions” of state-appointed HISD Superintendent Mike Miles.
Dutton said he pushed for the state takeover because HISD leaders were not doing enough to change the status quo at two high schools in his district: Kashmere, which failed to meet state academic standards for 11 years, and Wheatley, Dutton’s alma mater. Wheatley’s failing grades put HISD on the path to a state takeover.
“As I’ve told people, I don’t like state takeovers either,” Dutton said. “But I hate failing campuses and failing futures for students more than that. So, I just couldn’t sit there as a state representative and watch so many children’s future become bleak or nonexistent simply because we didn’t fix their schools.”
Critics contend that the takeover strips voting power from minority voters and has come with changes that are overly rigid and destabilizing, and that place too much emphasis on test scores. The takeover is being overseen by the Texas Education Agency, which a Republican appointee leads.
Dutton said “there are probably some things I would have done differently” regarding Miles’ actions leading HISD, but he argued that it’s too early to judge whether the district is on the right track.
While the HISD takeover has dominated the race, Norris said he also believes Dutton prioritized GOP “scare tactics” over more important “socioeconomic issues” when he voted for Republicans’ LGBTQ legislation.
“Clearly, he has not made any friends with the trans community,” said Norris, an attorney. “My point of view is, I don’t want anybody to be discriminated against. And I think it’s unfortunate that with the limited time that the Texas Legislature has in session, that we were spending time to talk about things like trans athletes.”
Like Thierry, Dutton has responded to the criticism by saying he voted in line with what he “heard most often from the people in my district.”
Also challenging Dutton in the Democratic primary are retired educator Joyce Chatman and pastor Clint Horn, though neither has raised significant money or landed endorsements from prominent Democratic groups, a number of which have lined up behind Norris.
Dutton, who is looking to extend a four-decade tenure in the state House, said he had considered retiring so that his chief of staff, Tamoria Jones, could run to replace him.
But after Jones’ unexpected death last summer, Dutton said he “was in a fog as to what I was going to do.”
Dutton decided to go for another term, he said, because “I looked around at the people who had filed for office, and I had never seen them at any kind of community meeting.”
Still, he added, “this job belongs to the people. And if they decide that it’s time for me to take on another challenge, I’ll do that.”
“I think it’s unfortunate that with the limited time that the Texas Legislature has in session, that we were spending time to talk about things like
trans athletes.” Danny Norris, Dutton’s main
primary challenger