Harris County District Court Races
Harris County Republicans hoped the elimination of straight-ticket voting in Texas would help them recapture some of the District Court seats won overwhelmingly by Democrats in recent elections.
It didn’t.
With all Harris County voting centers reporting, Democrats won all 14 civil District Court races on Tuesday’s ballot. In five of those 14 contests, the Democratic candidate ran unopposed; four of those five unopposed Democrats were incumbents.
The Texas Legislature abolished straight-ticket voting — the ability of an individual to vote for all candidates of a party with a single mark on the ballot — in 2017, but the change didn’t take effect until this year. The move to end straight-ticket voting was led by Republicans in the Texas House and Senate and furiously opposed by the Democratic minorities in both chambers.
In recent Texas elections, Democratic voters, and in particular Democratic minority voters, far more often voted a straight ticket than did their Republican counterparts. In those Texas counties where Democrats at the top of the ticket do best, including Harris and Dallas counties, straight-ticket voting was thought to confer a big advantage on down-ballot Democratic candidates, including candidates for the district court bench. Thus, the abolition of the straight-ticket vote was seen by many Republicans as giving hope to GOP candidates in down-ballot races.
That hope was not realized Tuesday.
The blue sweep in Harris County continues a trend that Republican leaders, including Nathan Hecht, chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, find troubling.
In 2016, Democrats won 23 of 23 state district court races in Harris County. In 2018, it was 24 of 24.
Hecht, in his 2017 State of the Judiciary message, decried that among the GOP’s district court candidates who lost in 2016 were 11 sitting judges.
“Such partisan sweeps are demoralizing to judges and disruptive to the legal system,” he wrote.
Dallas County District Court Races
The big blue wall held Tuesday in Dallas County’s civil District Courts, with Democrats coasting to victory in all three contested races.
With all of the county’s 463 voting centers reporting, atop a record number of early votes, incumbent Eric V. Moyé, judge of the 14th District Court, easily turned back a challenge from Republican Jessica Voyce Lewis, a bankruptcy lawyer running for office for the first time. Moyé won by a 62-38 margin.
In the 162nd District Court, incumbent Maricela Moore fared similarly well against Jessica Lewis’s husband, Republican Jordan Montgomery Lewis, another political novice. Moore won by a 64-36 margin.
And Democrat Monica Purdy poured out Republican incumbent Judge Mike Lee in the 95th District Court, winning by a 64-36 margin. Lee had held the seat briefly and tenuously; he was appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott in late July to succeed Republican David Evans, whom Abbott had appointed to a vacancy on the 5th Court of Appeals in Dallas. Purdy is the associate judge for seven of Dallas County’s 13 civil district courts, handling many day-to-day judicial tasks for those courts.
For years, Democrats have had an all but unbreakable hold on the Dallas County District Court bench, a function of the Democratic Party’s overwhelming electoral advantage in the county. In 2018, in 22 of the 24 District Court races on the general election ballot, the Democratic candidate had no opponent; in the other two, the Democrat won in a landslide.