Is Harris County still blue? Tuesday’s election results see GOP gains up and down ballot
The Harris County Republican Party considers the 2024 election a success, and its leaders say they will be back for more in 2026.
Republicans did not secure any countywide seat or secure a majority of Harris County's vote for President-Elect Donald Trump or U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, but Tuesday's results did show significant gains up and down the ballot for GOP candidates.
Vice President Kamala Harris won the county by only a 5.5 percent margin, far below the 13-point lead President Joe Biden secured in 2020. The swing saw Democrats lose 10 judicial seats to Republican opponents and countywide Democratic candidates eke out wins.
"We're back, and we're coming back in 2026," said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, during a Harris County Republican Party news conference Wednesday afternoon to celebrate the election results.
Bettencourt was joined by Harris County GOP Chair Cindy Siegel and several of the Republican judge-elects, who touted the party's messaging and get-out-the-vote effort, arguing they had outmaneuvered their Democratic counterparts.
Siegel said conservative donors are likely "kicking themselves" for not throwing money behind district attorney candidate Dan Simons and county attorney candidate Jacqueline Lucci Smith, who both lost their races by narrow margins.
The local GOP now plans to build on Tuesday's gains, and County Judge Lina Hidalgo is square in their crosshairs.
"Lina Hidalgo, we're coming for your spot," Siegel declared during the news conference. "We're not stopping until we take Harris County back."
Turnout takes workThe narrow margins up and down the ballot are likely the result of low turnout in many Democratic areas of the county and high turnout in Republican areas. That indicates a failure of messaging and get-out-the-vote efforts by local Democrats, rather than a sign that Harris County's status as a Democratic bulwark is threatened, said Nancy Sims, a political analyst at the University of Houston.
"Harris County is Democratic if voters turn out, but voters have to be worked to turn out," Sims said. "Television ads alone don't do it."
The Harris County Democratic Party entered 2024 with lofty goals for the November elections. The party repeatedly touted its "innovative, data-driven canvassing campaign" that launched in the springtime with the goal of turning out 1.1 million Democratic voters in the county.
If that happened, Chairman Mike Doyle argued, Harris County's turnout could flip the entire state blue.
It fell far short of that goal, however. Harris received just under 800,000 votes, more than 200,000 fewer than Biden did in 2020.
Asked what went wrong, Doyle replied, "Who knows?"
"At the end of the day, there were lots of folks who were really enthusiastic to pull the lever for Trump," Doyle said. "The campaign of 'our country is a cesspool and you need to be afraid' obviously had an impact nationwide and here in Harris County."
Like Doyle, Democrats across the country were soul searching on Wednesday, attempting to make sense of Tuesday's Republican victories.
Locally, Doyle was quick to blame the millions in spending across two campaign cycles by the Stop Houston Murders Political Action Committee. The committee has raised millions from several conservative Texas billionaires that were used to pump out attack ads on Democratic judges, arguing their policies were making crime worse.
"The reality is, if you keep saying a lie long enough, it's going to have an effect," Doyle said. "As a result, I think we've lost some great public servants in the judiciary from that."
Lack of supportDoyle said he believes the countywide canvassing effort could have been successful, but it lacked support from statewide Democrats. Doyle noted the grass-roots enthusiasm and mobilization that came with former U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke's 2018 challenge of Cruz and said that was missing from U.S. Rep. Colin Allred's bid this year.
"On the ground, we didn't have a lot of impact," Doyle said. "When Beto ran his campaign, there was a lot of on-the-ground impact and resources in Harris County. That was not the same this cycle. We had a lot of television ads, but we didn't have a lot of the grass roots, touching doors, touching voters, that kind of thing.
"We had a lot of ads from the Allred campaign," Doyle continued. "We didn't have support that would be helpful for on-the-ground door knocking and calling that was part of the campaign in '18, certainly. That helps a lot because we have someone at the top of the ticket in Texas, at least, who was working hard, or at least putting resources into Harris County. I think that was the difference."
The Allred campaign did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
Republican gains were not limited to Harris County.
Statewide, Trump saw his margin of victory swing nearly 1 million votes in his favor. In all of the state's blue counties, including Harris, the vice president's margins decreased from Biden's four years ago.
"Republicans clearly launched an effective effort to mobilize voters statewide and that included the urban areas," said Jim Henson, director of the University of Texas at Austin's Texas Politics Project.
Henson said it could take a while before the swing in Republicans' favor is totally understood as politicos across the state begin their own autopsies. Party infighting in the wake of a major defeat is not new in politics, Henson said, and it will take further analysis to determine if Allred's campaign shorted its ground game in Harris County.
Local political parties casting blame on the state party after a major defeat is nothing new in the realm of politics, Henson added.
"When there's a 1-million-vote swing in favor of Republicans, you're going to feel that everywhere," Henson said. "Whoever's fault that is, there's going to be a lot of blame to go around."
Policies matterFor Democrats to ever realize their dream of turning Texas blue, they need money, Sims said. Allred's campaign was able to spend big in the Senate race, but there was a lack of national financial support from the Democratic Party that left Texas Democrats with an uphill battle across the state, Sims added.
Those who spoke at the county Republican Party's Wednesday news conference said the answer to the question of what went wrong for local Democrats is simple.
"They were on the wrong side of the issues with the public," Bettencourt said. "I don't know how to run a campaign that is 'raise taxes, keep violent criminals on the street,' etc."
Riding high from Tuesday's gains, Bettencourt said local Republicans are satisfied there were not irregularities in this year's election.
After paper ballot shortages and long lines plagued a handful of polling locations in the county during the November 2022 election, 21 separate lawsuits were filed by Republican candidates challenging the results.
Local Democrats have argued the effort was a baseless attempt to undermine voter confidence in the county that built off Trump's false claims of voter fraud from 2020.
The lawsuits did not find evidence that voters systematically were disenfranchised, but a judge earlier this year did order a redo of the 180th District Court election saying the 449-vote margin meant the true outcome could not be determined.
The Texas Legislature last year abolished the county's elections administrator's office. That decision moved the administration of this year's election back to the Harris County Clerk's office, which previously administered elections before the creation of the elections administrator's office in 2020.
"It shows what happens when you run an election fairly," Bettencourt said. "I don't think there's going to be any election lawsuits because the election was run fairly."
Doyle smarted at Bettencourt's suggestion and promised that Harris County Democrats would embark on their own effort to counter Republican campaigning.
"It calls it out what they did in '22 as bad behavior and fraud on our electoral system, quite honestly," Doyle said. "All of a sudden, we have another successful election and it turns out better for them, so they're not going to claim fraud. That doesn't make them look great, from my view."
