Nicole Perdue
The result of a hotly contested race to replace a retiring Harris County judge has flipped from a narrow Republican win to a Democratic victory after the final set of ballots was reported.
Official results published by the Harris County Clerk’s Office Friday show Democrat Nicole Perdue prevailing over Republican Michael Landrum by just 774 votes out of about 1.46 million ballots cast in the race. The Clerk’s unofficial and incomplete results from the Nov. 5 election had shown Landrum narrowly leading for a week after election day before the final ballots were reported.
Harris County Commissioners Court canvassed the vote Friday morning, making the results official.
The race is one of 15 district judge races targeted by Harris County Republicans in an effort to reverse several years of Democratic gains in local judicial races. Last week, the local Republicans celebrated Landrum as one of 10 Republican candidates for local judgeships that won their races, despite the outstanding ballots that still needed to be counted and reported.
The other nine races still show Republican candidates holding on to their leads.
[…]
County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth said in a statement Friday that the counting and reporting process went as it should.
“The November 5 elections were successfully administered through the dedication and commitment of Harris County voters, election workers, and stakeholders,” Hudspeth said. “Everyone played a vital role in ensuring the integrity and accessibility of the voting process, and I’m proud of how smoothly Election Day went.”
My judicial Q&A with Nicole Perdue is here. The difference between the unofficial November 6 report, which is the last one we had received, and the official November 15 report is one part more mail ballots – the 2021 omnibus voter suppression law that added more requirements to mail ballots also allows for some time after the election to fix some of the inevitable errors and omissions in the information that voters must provide – and one part provisional ballots. Here are the two results, with the earlier unofficial one listed first:
Candidate Mail Early E-Day Prov Total Pct
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Landrum 18,065 570,568 138,056 0 726,689 50.04%
Perdue 31,835 543,309 150,294 0 725,438 49.96%
Candidate Mail Early E-Day Prov Total Pct
============================================================
Landrum 19,749 570,568 138,056 811 729,184 49.97%
Perdue 34,851 543,309 150,294 1,504 729,958 50.03%
There was a similar flip in 2022, so this shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. (That result remains up in the air because of the sore loser election lawsuit; unless that gets overturned by an appellate court, there will be a rematch in May.) What isn’t mentioned in this story is that the Dems came pretty damn close to flipping two more races:
Nov 6 unofficial totals, 80th District Court
Sonya Aston (R) = 729,336 – 50.10%
Jeralynn Manor (D) = 726,499 – 49.90%
Nov 6 unofficial totals, 215th District Court
Nathan Milliron (R) = 723,801 – 50.08%
Elaine Palmer (D) = 721,459 – 49.92%
Nov 15 official totals, 80th District Court
Sonya Aston (R) = 731,731 – 50.02%
Jeralynn Manor (D) = 731,084 – 49.98%
Nov 6 unofficial totals, 215th District Court
Nathan Milliron (R) = 726,251 – 50.01%
Elaine Palmer (D) = 725,947 – 49.99%
That’s a 647-vote loss for Jeralynn Manor, and a 304-vote loss for Elaine Palmer, both of which are closer than Nicole Perdue’s 774-vote win. Needless to say, it would not have taken much more Democratic participation to flip these. Every vote matters, y’all. The Chron has more.
Flip?
Elaine Palmer was the Dem incumbent (125thDC)
Ditto for Jeralyn Manor (80thDC)
Oops, my bad!
215th not 125th for Judge Palmer 215th is Kyle Carter, one of the rare surviving male Dem civil bench holders.
The interesting phenom here is that the males are getting eliminated in the Democratic primary. Sexist voting?
Sometimes undervotes are deliberate. Lots of people in the LGBT community never forgave Palmer for her unfair attacks on Judge Steven Kirkland. I’m not aware of any attempt on her part to even attempt to repair the damage.
Tom, if I recall correctly, the attacks were based on fact. Kirkland had a drinking problem at one time. I voted for Steve in the primary, though I usually voted in Republican primaries. Steve told me that a law firm with deep pockets wanted him out for a ruling he made against them.
Im looking for your analysis on the 507th District Court Race in Harris County. This is the last judicial race on the ballot and Lillian Henny Alexander was successful by a margin of 40,000+ votes. There is no designation of the court type . Why do you believe this margin exist for a democrat who ran for the first time in Harris county. The races below this race Democrats barely squeeze by or suffer a loss.
No, the attacks on Judge Kirkland were not based on fact. They implied he was a current alcoholic, which was blatantly false and unfair.
On another note, the Democrat in one of the California congressional contests has taken a narrow lead as absentee ballots continue to be counted, which if it holds would narrow the GOP margin of control to 221 to 214. 220 if you factor in the Gaetz resignation.
Markham, did they imply, or did you infer? I guess we use different glasses to see the world.
How many DWI arrests? Two.
Should Brett Kavanaugh have been relevant to his appointment to the Supreme Court? After all, it was over thirty years after he was recommended.
It would not have surprised me if his choice of lifestyle was a reason some people voted against him.
Politics is dirty.
Judge Kirkland is an alcoholic but has been sober for many years, long before he was first elected. He was a smart judge who did a good job, ruled fairly, and was very diligent. On the merits, he deserved reelection
He was primaried because a prominent trial lawyer lost an important case in Kirkland’s court. The lawyer’s firm campaigned against Kirkland and allegedly recruited Palmer to run against him. I’m certain that homophobia was an issue in his primary, even if it wasn’t publicly discussed.
It has been a free country and anyone can run against an incumbent. Hope we will continue to be a free country but the D’s are more likely than the R’s to challenge well-qualified incumbents.
FROM THE UNMENTIONABLES DEPARTMENT
Allround mensch Mike Engelhart, Robert Schaffer, Ravi Sandill, all to ge gone by the end of the year. All booted in the Dems primary.
Michael Gomez survived the primary, but he wasn’t challenged so Harris County Dem primary votes had no chance to eliminate him as well.
Additionally, Jerry Zimmerer, an incumbent Democrat on the 14th Court of Appeals was ousted in the primary runoff, loosing with 43.% in Harris County to his female challenger who touted her sex: “For 46 years, no woman has ever been appointed or elected to serve as a Justice in Place 3, since the creation of this Seat!”. Let me suggest that it’s a phony campaign pitch because the place designation doesn’t matter. (It matters only for election purposes).
Plus: Not only do the Houston courts of appeals have plenty of female members (historically, of both parties), they have already both had female chief justices (the chief justices have special administrative resposibilities, but also only 1 vote on panels and en banc reconsiderations). Zimmerer may have lost anyhow in the general election (the appellate districts include 9 additional counties besides Harris), but he didn’t even get a chance to contest it as he was ejected in the first instance thanks to his own party.
I haven’t yet looked at the primary data for the prior election clycle, but I had a case in the 189th DC, so I am aware that Judge Dollinger is gone too, and why.
QUESTION TO PONDER: Does the Harris County Democratic Party (leaders and party-in-the-electorate) have a MISANDRY problem?
I am poised to offer what I would like to think is a more sophisticated hypothesis, but I’ll let you all weigh in first. And if I happen to got any facts wrong (no one is infallible) thanks for germane corrections and amplifications.
Wolfgang his is nothing new. When I worked in Harris County politics in the 90s, no man had defeated a woman in a country-wide Democratic judicial primary in over a decade. I moved out if the county after that so I don’t know what happened but I suspect the general trend continued.
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