Happy Mid-Year Campaign Finance Reporting Day to all who celebrate. Today we’ll be looking at the races of interest in Harris County, which thankfully for me has a lot fewer candidates to review than the last time we did this in January, before the primaries. I also did this roundup in July 2021 if you want to go that far back. You know the drill here, so let’s get to it.
Lina Hidalgo, County Judge
Alexandra Mealer, County Judge
Rodney Ellis, County Commissioner, Precinct 1
Adrian Garcia, County Commissioner, Precinct 2
Jack Morman, County Commissioner, Precinct 2
Tom Ramsey, County Commissioner, Precinct 3
Jack Cagle (SPAC), County Commissioner, Precinct 4
Lesley Briones, County Commissioner, Precinct 4
Teneshia Hudspeth, County Clerk
Stan Stanart, County Clerk
Marilyn Burgess, District Clerk
Chris Daniel (SPAC), District Clerk
Carla Wyatt, County Treasurer
Eric Dick, County Treasurer
Kyle Scott, County Treasurer
Name Raised Spent Loans On Hand
======================================================
Hidalgo 1,150,804 569,065 1,400 1,983,697
Mealer 764,544 404,802 6,000 455,927
Ellis 543,900 241,714 0 3,805,232
Garcia, A 787,949 675,976 0 1,897,179
Morman 63,144 19,585 0 69,638
Ramsey 34,869 69,290 0 549,707
Cagle 388,332 209,368 0 1,231,540
Briones 126,038 98,547 0 90,720
Hudspeth 18,265 18,145 0 13,952
Stanart 3,407 5,583 0 6,729
Burgess 16,070 15,864 5,207 15,049
Daniel 20,600 9,619 25,000 12,144
Wyatt 2,085 6,082 0 1,092
Scott 2,309 5,340 23,000 719
With the much-smaller field of candidates now that we are fully past the primaries, everyone who is on the November ballot in these races has a current finance report online. Note that for some candidates, the report covers the period from February 20 through June 30 – these are the candidates who won their March primaries outright – and for some it covers the period from May 15 through June 30. These are the candidates who had to win in their runoff, a list that includes Alexandra Mealer, Jack Morman, and Lesley Briones. Mealer’s amount raised total is a lot more competitive with Judge Lina Hidalgo’s given the smaller amount of time that her report covers, but as John Coby points out, she got more than half of that total from four donors who each gave her $100K.
It’s interesting to me that Morman, who was a County Commissioner for eight years before Commissioner Garcia nipped him in 2018, has had such anemic fundraising. I’m not sure what that says, other than maybe not enough people think he can win. Lesley Briones still has a significant cash deficit against Commissioner Jack Cagle, but she’s been considerably more proficient at fundraising. She is unlikely to catch up to him in that department, but she’ll be more competitive.
Not much else to say, as the other offices tend to have little fundraising capacity, and these reports present no surprises. Eric Dick also filed a report for his current office of HCDE Trustee, in which he again reported zeroes across the board. Given Dick’s past propensities, I wouldn’t take any of that as gospel, but it is what he reported.
UPDATE: My bad, I had the wrong Republican candidate for Treasurer.
Kyle.Scott is the Republican running for Treasure not Eric Dick.
Chris Daniel needs to spend some of that money on LEGAL signs. He currently has signs up with “Re-Elect” on them. The thing is, he is not a current office holder. You cannot have “re-Elect” on a sign if you are not the elected incumbent in office.
Bill – Oops! My bad. It’s fixed now. Thanks for the catch.