Challenger Sean Teare Defeats Incumbent Kim Ogg in DA Race

Former Harris County Prosecutor Sean Teare has won the Democratic primary against incumbent Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg with 74.99 percent of the votes to Ogg’s 25.01 percent, with all of the Election Day vote centers reporting returns.

Teare will face Dan Simons, the lone Republican candidate in the Harris County DA race in the November general election. A prosecutor and defense attorney, Simons has also worked in the Harris County DA’s office, starting in early 2013, but left the office in 2017 during Ogg’s first term as district attorney.

Simons previously ran for a judicial seat in the Harris County Criminal Court in November 2022 but was unsuccessful in his race. After losing, Simons was a part of the group of more than 20 Harris County GOP candidates who filed lawsuits challenging the results of their respective contests. His case was dismissed, alongside over a dozen others.

Ogg faced a tougher race this time compared to 2020, when she won reelection after defeating multiple opponents by more than 30 percentage points, including progressive frontrunner and personal injury lawyer Audia Jones.

This time, the incumbent consistently performed poorly in polls conducted by the University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs. The last of three surveys found that 68 percent of likely Democratic primary voters who knew enough about Ogg viewed her unfavorably. She was also the only candidate evaluated in the study with a negative net favorability rating of minus 32 percent.

Mark Jones, Rice University political science fellow, said within recent years, Ogg has seen support against partisan Democrats fall. He added that the district attorney is popular across the general electorate of voters who supported Houston Mayor John Whitmire in November. However, he said these are not the voters that participated in March’s primary election.

“Kim Ogg’s Democratic credentials have been challenged,” said Nancy Sims, a political science lecturer at the University of Houston.

Ogg has come under fire by those in her party, with some referring to her as a Democrat in name only and pointing out that she ran as a Republican in the 1990s before switching parties when Harris County was undergoing a blue wave.

This led the Harris County Democratic Party precinct chairs to formally admonish Ogg last year in December, saying that she no longer represented their party’s values.

Those criticizing the district attorney have taken issue with her more conservative approach, particularly her stance on bail reform for misdemeanor offenses. Ogg often draws connections between bail reform and violent crimes or felony cases.

Teare, a former employee of Ogg’s office who ran its vehicular crimes division, criticized his opponent’s work on the county’s intake system. He argued on the campaign trail that the district attorney was ruining the system by reducing the number of attorneys working full-time during the week and bringing on more to fill in voluntarily throughout the weekends.

He added that the office was hiring prosecutors with no experience trying cases in court, which they needed to handle these roles. Teare said he would work immediately to reverse the changes Ogg made if he was elected.

Sims said Ogg’s disagreements with the Harris County Commissioners Court didn’t help her favorability among Democratic voters, too. The district attorney would fight with the commissioners regarding the number of prosecutors her office needed, the methods of processing or prosecuting crimes and bail reform.

“It seemed like in her [Ogg’s] second term, she moderated a little bit more, but her bigger challenge was her conflicts with other Democratic officials,” Sims said.

Sims added that many Democratic voters didn’t like Ogg’s issues with Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo and Hidalgo’s staff. The district attorney’s office launched an investigation that led to several of Hidalgo’s former aides facing indictments regarding a COVID-19 vaccine outreach contract.

“It’s probably a death sentence for her [Ogg’s] career as a district attorney,” Jones said of the conflict between Ogg and Hidalgo over the ongoing criminal case.

Ogg said she has “suffered” many internal attacks from the Democratic party as she has done her job as Harris County’s top law enforcement official. She added that carrying out her duties and prosecuting Democrats and Republicans seems to be part of the concerns of those against her despite being in the same party.

“Since I began prosecuting public officials in 2017, or their employees, we’ve just had a chilled relationship with members of my [Democratic] party,” Ogg said. “So, while we don’t investigate, we bring in an agency to investigate. It’s just really chilled internal relationships inside the [Democratic] party with the mayor’s office with Commissioner Ellis’s Office with the county judge Hidalgo’s office, all of whom have endorsed and vocally supported my opponent.”

“I want them [voters] to know that I’ve served them honestly and unflinchingly when it came to doing my job. And then if prosecution of public officials and their staff costs me my job, I have a clean conscience, she added. “Because I will not participate in any kind of cover-up by anyone who’s a member of either party when the public trust is at stake.

During Ogg’s first term, she was not at odds with members of her party and many supported her candidacy for district attorney. She worked on aspects of bail reform and implemented a program to divert those charged with low-level marijuana possession into educational programming.

Teare out-raised Ogg significantly, according to campaign finance reports. The district attorney went on the offense regarding Teare’s funds, and donations her challenger received from billionaire philanthropist George Soros, despite Ogg having received contributions from him during her first campaign before the 2016 November general election.

Ogg also questioned Teare’s endorsement from Hidalgo and whether or not he cut a deal with the county judge related to the ongoing criminal charges against Hidalgo’s former aides.

“It feels as though they’re trying to they — that the public officials who endorsed him — are trying to take some of the public corruption cases and try them at the ballot box,” she said.

In response to Ogg’s criticism of the endorsement, Teare said he would move the case involving criminal charges against the county judge’s former aides out of Harris County to another nearby county where another district attorney could handle it.

According to Sims, voters should remember that Ogg’s term is not up until the end of the year, and the Democratic nominee for district attorney must win in November against Republican nominee Dan Simons.

“Anyone in this position is going to take some pretty serious challenges, no matter who they are, because COVID-19 affected prosecution of cases and crimes and the backlog is huge,” Sims said. “They tend to blame other people, but the bottom line is we went two years without court, which has affected everything. They are going to need more money, more prosecutors, more courts, more everything.”

“You may like how someone governs better than the other, but at the same time, the office is plagued,” she added. “So, it may be that different management styles will make that run more smoothly, but it’s not going to be a magic cure-all.”