I’m not sure what was going through Trish DeBerry’s mind when she decided to give up her very safe $146,000 county commissioner’s job only 11 months into her first four-year term, to attempt to make the leap from representing the only solidly Republican quadrant of the county to a countywide office: Bexar County judge.
Perhaps she, like many Democrats, believed the hype that President Joe Biden’s low approval rating, high inflation and high crime rates nationally and locally would provide a Republican tsunami that she could surf to victory.
To any Republican who is nurturing ambitions similar to DeBerry’s, I suggest you clip this column and store it in the file you are building for a future campaign. The reason: Bexar County is a solidly Democratic county and is likely to stay like this until a climate change-fueled actual tsunami washes a few million Floridians to inland Texas.
If you want to see just how Democratic Bexar County is, you just need to look at the judges’ races. When we vote for judges, most of what we know about them is the party they claim, their gender and ethnicity. If you read the San Antonio Report’s voter guide you also knew where they went to law school and how long they had been on the bench. Their qualities as judges? How do we judge that? We don’t recognize many of their names. Even if the names are familiar, we know little about their track records. We could call our lawyer friends, but to get much useful information we’d have to have a lot of them, because few have practiced in all of the courtrooms.
So some us don’t vote for judges, roughly 21,000 on average in this election out of 540,465 votes cast. The rest of us vote based on the little bit we know. I’ve always said that an Irish name on the ballot tugs at my heart if I know nothing else, but if I know the bastard there’s no way I’ll vote for him.
Gender and ethnicity seem to have an impact in at least the Democratic primary. These days it’s good to be an Hispanic woman. Of the 23 District Court and county Court-at-Law judges elected Tuesday in Bexar County, 15 have a Spanish surname, or at least a hyphenated name that is half Spanish. Three are non-Hispanic women, and four are Hispanic men.
But in the November election, all that matters is party. Why do I say that? Because they all get almost the same number of votes. Other distinguishing characteristics beside party clearly have little impact.
In Tuesday’s election, the champion judicial candidate was Court at Law Judge Melissa Vara with 58.27% of the vote. Way back at 55.59% was District Court Judge-elect Joel Perez. So among the 23 judges on the countywide ballot the spread was 2.7 percentage points. All the differences between the winning candidates — their height, their weight, their judicial temperaments, their legal experience, their ethnicities and sexes, their level of kindness to their mothers, their church attendance, everything — suggests that the major variable in their performance was how many of their personal friends and relatives went to the polls.
Clearly in the general election what counted was whether they had an R or a D behind their names. So that gives us the baseline for the party orientation of Bexar County. Democrats have a rock-solid advantage of 12 to 15 points, a margin that would take a very popular Republican running a great and well-funded campaign to overcome.
Here’s just how solid the county’s party orientation is: Both county judge candidate Peter Sakai, at 57.27% of the vote, and District Attorney Joe Gonzales at 56.08%, fell inside the range of the judges’ percentages. This despite the fact that more than $1 million was spent in the DA’s race and at more than half that in the county judge’s race.
This is not new nor is it just a Bexar County phenomenon. By the same measurement Houston’s Harris County is much more closely divided, but still Democratic. Among its 37 state district judge races, Republicans won only two benches. The spread among the Democratic candidates ran from a high of 52.28% to a low of 49.83%. That’s a spread of 2.3%, close to Bexar’s 2.7%.
What’s more, Harris County featured a very high-profile race for county judge. Incumbent Lina Hidalgo appeared crippled by a scandal involving some of her top aides, who were indicted in an alleged bid-rigging scheme. Republicans raised about $10 million for challenger Alexandra del Moral Mealer, a candidate with a very attractive background whom they saw as a potential statewide star. She is a West Point graduate and Afghanistan war veteran with a Harvard MBA and law degree. Yet Hidalgo, who spent about $4 million, won with 50.78% of the vote. That, as you probably noticed, is also within the judicial vote range.
So Harris County leans Democrat, but Bexar County is overwhelmingly Democrat. DeBerry was delusional in making her bid. What’s more, the successful public relations woman, though she ran a solid campaign, did serious damage to what PR professionals would call her brand.
She attacked Sakai in an ad for a ruling he made as a District Court judge 18 years ago. It regarded whether a toddler should be returned to her mother, who had lost custody two years earlier due to drug abuse. Based on unanimous recommendations from Child Protective Services staff and the lawyer for the child, Sakai sent the child home with her mother, who six weeks later killed her.
Sakai was devastated. He took time off from the bench and considered quitting. Instead he came back. Voters understood that judges have to make tough decisions and sometimes they are wrong. He was repeatedly reelected to the bench and has earned one of the best reputations in the courthouse. But DeBerry’s sensationalistic ad concluded: “Peter Sakai: bad judge, bad judgment, bad for Bexar County.”
It reminded me of the 2005 mayoral race between Councilman Julián Castro and Phil Hardberger, former chief justice of the 4th Court of Appeals. In an ad Castro accused Hardberger of “freeing” a number of sex offenders and murderers.
Castro attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School. He knew very well that Hardberger didn’t send all those convicts back to the streets. He simply ruled on alleged errors or misconduct by prosecutors and judges and sent the cases back to be done correctly.
Castro, who was only 30 and would have been San Antonio’s youngest mayor ever, wanted the job too much. In my opinion, both he and the city benefited from his loss in that election. Hardberger was an excellent mayor, and Castro, who succeeded him in 2009, was a much better mayor then than he would have been in 2005.
I don’t know if Trish DeBerry has a political future. But if she does, she needs to exercise better judgment both in choosing her race and in running it.
