Democratic state Sen. John Whitmire defeated Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee within the Houston mayoral race in Saturday’s runoff election after a marketing campaign closely targeted on voter issues over security on the streets.
Whitmire, a perennial tough-on-crime voice who for many years heralded Texas rules over public security, was declared the winner by the Related Press with 57 p.c reporting. At that time, Whitmire was main by an virtually 2-to-1 margin.
With backing from the town’s hearth division and police unions and a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign warfare chest, Whitmire was the early favourite within the race and finished first in the 18-candidate general election in November. When no candidate secured 50 p.c of the vote, the race went to a runoff.
Whitmire leaned on a coalition of average Democrats, independents and conservative voters, with a outstanding marketing campaign promise to make the town safer with elevated policing.
Metropolis elections are formally nonpartisan in Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest metropolis with greater than 2.3 million individuals, however Democrats have held the workplace since 1982.
The showdown between Whitmire and Jackson Lee illuminates the fault strains inside the Democratic Occasion over easy methods to cope with crime on an area degree, additionally seen in mayoral races in Los Angeles and New York Metropolis lately. Crime has “actually turn into a significant concern — not solely actuality, however the notion. We can not have Houston perceived as not being a protected metropolis,” Whitmire beforehand informed POLITICO. “I’m representing Houstonians. That’s what they need.”
The race additionally marked a uncommon showdown between two long-tenured lawmakers from a celebration that has flailed politically in deep-red Texas. Whitmire, 74, and Jackson Lee, 73, are Texas establishments in their very own proper, simply recognizable of their arenas of Austin and Washington.
First elected to the state Legislature as a university scholar in 1973, Whitmire ran a marketing campaign that hewed carefully to issues of native voters: crime, infrastructure points and metropolis monetary controls. Compared, the 15-term member of Congress Jackson Lee talked about tackling public security but in addition elevated issues about girls’s entry to abortion and forged her opponent as a Trump-style Republican.
Alongside the way in which, she notched endorsements from huge nationwide names equivalent to Invoice and Hillary Clinton, Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries, in addition to term-limited incumbent mayor Sylvester Turner.
“She has been a champion for so long as I’ve recognized her, so long as she’s represented lots of you in Congress,” Hillary Clinton mentioned at a rally for Jackson Lee on the finish of October. “We want her management, her advocacy, her grit, to get stuff executed for the individuals of Houston.”
However even with big-name Democrats behind her, Jackson Lee in the end couldn’t make up her deficit.
Her marketing campaign grew to become mired in scandal after an expletive-filled rant, allegedly of Jackson Lee berating staffers, leaked on-line in October, for which she expressed remorse in a press release.
If Jackson Lee intends to run for one more Home time period, she doesn’t have lengthy to declare her intentions: The submitting deadline is Monday night.
Whitmire has a protracted historical past with crime-related legislative points — a observe file that began after his household was robbed at gunpoint within the early Nineties. From there, he took the chairship on a state committee regulating prison justice reform, serving to usher in a brand new Texas penal code and extra funding to the state jail system. Whitmire’s marketing campaign pledge to make the most of state troopers to help Houston’s police division drew the ire of progressives, who extra typically concentrate on reforming policing.
He usually shied away from assault messaging all through the marketing campaign, as a substitute touting his capability to work with the Republicans who management the state. However he’ll have his fingers full regulating tensions between his metropolis and the state authorities, which has proven rising curiosity lately in exercising higher management over Texas cities — Houston specifically.
The state lately took control of the city’s school district and increased its authority over the county’s elections, whereas the legislature has additionally passed a Republican-backed law to remove native legal guidelines mandating that development employees have water breaks.
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