If the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs were handing out senior superlatives for the high school yearbook, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez would be Most Popular, and former three-term Houston Mayor Annise Parker could be Most Likely to Succeed in a race for county judge.
Maybe. Although Parker scored six points higher in overall approval ratings from a sample set of 2,300 registered Harris County voters in UH’s latest survey, incumbent County Judge Lina Hidalgo had overwhelming support from Democrats, who will be the ones voting in a Democratic primary.
But it may be a moot point. Hidalgo has not declared whether she’ll seek a third term. In the same UH poll distributed July 23, Hidalgo had the lowest net approval rating of any county official, 4 percent.
Fifty-five percent of respondents said they approved of the job Gonzalez is doing, and 22 percent disapprove, netting the sheriff a 33 percent approval rating, the highest in the survey. Commissioner Adrian Garcia’s net approval rating was 26 percent; Commissioner Rodney Ellis earned 25 percent; and Commissioners Lesley Briones and Tom Ramsey got 19 percent each.
County Attorney Christian Menefee, who is running for U.S. Congressional District 18, had an 11 percent net approval rating, and District Attorney Sean Teare netted 13 percent.
The survey was analyzed by Renée Cross, senior executive director of the Hobby School, and Mark Jones, a political science fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.
“On one hand, Lina Hidalgo is almost underwater in terms of her job performance and approval rating among Harris County registered voters, but a silver lining for Hidalgo is that two-thirds of Harris County Democrats have a favorable opinion of her,” Jones said.
The filing deadline for the judge’s race is in December. The primary is set for March 3, 2026, with the general election in November of next year. Democrat Letitia Plummer announced her candidacy earlier this month, and Warren Howell and Piney Point Village Mayor Aliza Dutt have filed as Republicans. Erica Lee Carter, the daughter of the late longtime U.S. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, said she’ll run if Hidalgo doesn’t.
Do candidates and potential candidates weigh university-conducted polls when contemplating a bid for office? Jones said probably not, adding that he assumes that if Hidalgo is serious about running, she’s already polled not just Harris County Democrats but those who are likely to turn out in a 2026 Democratic primary.
“Generally when we do polls like this, they’re more than likely revealing what many of the office-holders already know through their private polls but providing a window for the public to have the same information that many politicians keep to themselves,” he said.
Respondents said that crime, high housing costs, rising property taxes, and poor street conditions are their top concerns. About 57 percent of those surveyed said they think the county is headed in the wrong direction. Thirty-eight percent support cutting programs and services to combat Harris County’s $270 million budget shortfall.
The researchers determined that there are substantial partisan and demographic splits on some “key questions facing county officials as they begin annual budget deliberations, with Republican voters often highly dissatisfied with the county’s direction and spending,” according to a press release from the University of Houston.
“Harris County has a well-deserved reputation as a place where people pull together in times of natural disasters, but we also see that the county isn’t immune to the partisan and demographic divide that has come to characterize so much of national politics,” Cross said in the press release.
Judge Hidalgo is a Democrat, as are commissioners Ellis, Garcia, and Briones. Sheriff Gonzalez, who served as a Houston police officer and Houston City Council member prior to the 2016 sheriff’s election, is also a Democrat. So are the county attorney and district attorney.
Once considered a Republican stronghold, a narrow majority of Harris County voters supported Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, according to reports. Jones said he refers to Harris County as a “light blue” jurisdiction.
“If everything goes as normal, the Democrat wins in Harris County,” he said. “If Republicans have a really good year and Democrats have a really bad year, a Republican can win. I think looking ahead to 2026, it’s a midterm election with a Republican, and not an especially popular Republican, in the White House. More than likely, 2026 will be a year that Democrats sweep all or virtually all of the countywide offices.”
According to the survey, 68 percent of Republican voters think the county is headed in the wrong direction, compared to 50 percent of Democrats. Two-thirds, or 67 percent of respondents, believe the 2026 elections will be conducted fairly in Harris County; that figure drops to 59 percent for state elections and 55 percent for national elections.
Black and Latino residents were far more likely than white residents to say issues — ranging from violent crime to the homeless population, illegal dumping, and the lack of sidewalks — have negatively affected their neighborhoods, suggesting potential disparities in the way neighborhood services are deployed, according to the survey.
“The issues that the largest proportion of Harris County residents say have a major negative impact on the quality of life in the neighborhoods are infrastructure things like streets and sidewalks in bad conditions, but also crime issues like home and car break-ins, violent crime, and the homeless population,” Jones said.
Although crime always ranks high as an issue of concern among registered voters — similar results were published in a recent Texas Southern University poll about the City of Houston — residents don’t appear to blame law enforcement for the crime issue, hence Gonzalez’s high approval rating, Jones said.
“The elected officials that voters blame most for the crime problem are not the sheriff or HPD; they blame the judges and the courts, and, to a lesser extent, the DA,” he said.
