Texas Democratic state Sen. John Whitmire and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) on Tuesday advanced to a runoff in the race to be the next mayor of Houston.
Both Whitmire and Jackson Lee failed to reach the 50% threshold necessary to avert a runoff, meaning voters will return to the polls on Dec. 9 for the final showdown. The Lone Star State’s largest city is a Democratic stronghold in the otherwise red state, and the two front-runners are longtime party members.
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While 18 major- and third-party candidates competed for the job, Whitmire and Jackson Lee had dominated polling in the race. This isn’t entirely surprising given Whitmire's and Jackson Lee’s political power in the area, but it did raise questions about whether either front-runner could amass 50% of the vote.
Jackson Lee has represented part of the Houston area, which now has three members in the House due to its population size, since 1995. That’s more than two decades after Whitmire, the longest-serving state senator in Texas’s history, entered the state legislature to represent the nation’s fourth-largest city.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, one longtime Texas lawmaker who has worked with both front-runners predicted to the Washington Examiner late last month that Whitmire would emerge victorious in the all-but-certain runoff.
Asked about the state of the race going into Tuesday night, that same lawmaker stood by their prediction that Whitmire would eventually be the next mayor.
Whitmire had led Jackson Lee in polling that excluded other candidates by double digits.
Jackson Lee boasted the endorsements of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and several progressive groups in hopes of mobilizing multiple voting coalitions on Election Day. Whitmire, who has a long record as a centrist, had a more delicate path to follow, not alienating his moderate base while winning over the city’s growing progressive constituency.
The economy and crime were the two biggest focuses for both candidates, with each highlighting how they’d address the lack of economic investment in the city amid its massive population boom.
Jackson Lee promoted her Hill experience as a necessary asset to ensure Houston could tap into millions in untouched federal funds. But she also had to deal with the emergence of leaked audio in which she could be heard berating staffers.
The audio, given to the Texas outlet Current Revolt, appeared to be recorded by one of her staffers. He promised he would contact another staffer about a paper she had given them. From there, the congresswoman accused the staffer of not "having a f***ing brain" and shouted several expletives at him.
Without apologizing to the staffer directly, Lee said in a statement via the Texas Tribune that she believes "everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect" and that she knows she is not perfect.
"I recognize that in my zeal to do everything possible to deliver for my constituents, I have in the past fallen short of my own standards, and there is no excuse for that," Jackson Lee said.
Concerning her Houston mayoral run, she said, "To anyone who has listened to this recording with concern, I am regretful and hope you will judge me not by something trotted out by a political opponent, that worked to exploit this, and backed by extreme Republican supporters on the very day that polls open, but from what I've delivered to Houstonians over my years of public service."
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Whitmire, meanwhile, touted his work leading the state Senate Committee on Criminal Justice since 1993.
“Certainly, public safety will be my highest priority,” Whitmire said at a mayoral debate last week.