The importance of contesting elections

How many of you knew that there are at least 486 elected government offices with jurisdiction over some or all of Harris County (not counting statewide offices)? How many of you knew that there are an additional 876 elected offices within the Harris County Republican Party? Not only is the local Republican Party not finding candidates to contest many of the races for government offices, we currently have a 45% vacancy rate for our elected party offices. This status quo is unacceptable.

What are these elected offices? The government offices include: 12 county commissioners and countywide offices; 8 constables; 16 justices of the peace; 100 judicial offices; 7 members of the Harris County Board of Education and 9 members of the Houston Community College Board of Trustees; at least 161 school board trustees sitting on 23 school boards; 39 congressional and state legislative seats; 34 mayors; and at least 100 city council members spread among 34 cities. Although many of the school board and city council offices are officially non-partisan, Democrats have supported candidates for these offices for years in order to pursue their policy agenda and develop a “farm team” of candidates. It is time we do the same.

As for our party offices, there are 875 precincts in the county. We have the ability to directly elect a precinct chair in each precinct, as well as our County Chairman. Not only do we not find candidates to contest every race for a governmental office in this county, we have only filled 454 of our precinct chairs, and many of those positions have had to be filled by appointment rather than election.

If we are going to rebuild a competitive party in this county, we need to implement a process to find, train and support candidates for all of these offices. This process will include outreach programs into neighborhoods and precincts we have ignored in the past, as well as establishing a specific candidate support program. It also will require coordination with our counterparts in adjacent counties, because many of the school districts, cities, and congressional and legislative districts cover more than one county.

These needs illustrate that each of the ten objectives in the plan we have proposed overlaps with other objectives in the plan: outreach impacts candidate recruitment (Objectives 4 and 5); recruiting precinct chairs impacts our get-out-the-vote, outreach, and candidate recruitment efforts (Objectives 4, 5, and 6); and coordination with other county party chairs impacts candidate recruitment and our get-out-the-vote effort in Harris County (Objectives 5, 6, and 8). For this reason, just adopting some of the objectives of the plan we have proposed is not enough. We need to be bold and comprehensive in our strategy to take back this county.