The Texas Judge Race That Republicans Are Suddenly Eyeing

But lurking behind the curtain of her marginal campaign for Harris County Judge (an executive position, presiding over a four-person Commissioners Court) is a national powerhouse. On the same day Dutt announced her campaign, she also appointed her campaign treasurer: Cabell Hobbs, a veteran staffer of major Republican campaigns going as far back as 2008. The Austin, Texas, P.O. Box provided under Hobbs’ name connects back to other PACs registered in Florida, North Dakota, and West Virginia.

His most recent work also may be his best-known: In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Hobbs’ Future Coalition Super PAC, funded to the tune of $5 million by Elon Musk, targeted battleground voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania with digital ads promoting Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff’s Jewish faith in a play to undercut Harris’s appeal with Muslims. The ads, which CNN and The New York Times called antisemitic, were targeted based on zip codes and worked both sides of the street: On the one hand, some ads tried to connect Emhoff’s religious beliefs to Harris’s position on Israel—referring to Emhoff her “top adviser,” spliced with footage of the Israeli flag; on the other hand, Harris was characterized as a “two-faced” supporter of Palestine.

Dutt, an immigrant from Hong Kong, is the mayor of Piney Point Village—a real city, apparently. With a population of around 3,000 and a median income of over $250,000, this wealthy enclave is pointedly separated from the city of Houston, on the sprawling west side of Harris County (population: 5 million). Before that, according to her campaign website, she worked as a reporter covering Capitol Hill and as an energy analyst. Her desire to control the Harris County Judge position isn’t unique among Republicans; although Lina Hidalgo, a Democrat, rode into the office in 2019 and successfully but narrowly defended her seat in 2022, the position has long been the central focus for local conservative pundits and mattress salesmen, even with a 4-1 Democratic majority on the court Hidalgo oversees. Indeed, one locally beloved mattress salesman known as Mattress Mack dropped millions of his own cash to unseat Hidalgo, and later bankrolled the quixotic legal effort questioning the validity of the election.