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
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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?