The tweet said simply, “Holy guacamole.”
Beneath the social media post was a screenshot of early voting numbers that showed underdog Letitia Plummer, a dentist and two-term at-large city council member, in the lead in the Democratic primary runoff for Harris County judge over former Houston Mayor Annise Parker, an LGBTQ trailblazer with 18 years of elected public service under her belt.
As the evening went on and results trickled in, the text messages, phone conversations and comments became more pronounced: “I think Plummer might actually win this thing.”
And she did, albeit by the skin of her teeth.
So how’d she do it? Parker outraised Plummer 10 to 1, adding more than $1 million to her war chest. Parker has more years of experience and more name ID. A University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs picked Parker to win last week’s runoff by a whopping 18 points. But Plummer had a tribe of progressives who were genuinely fearful that Parker wouldn’t stand up to Republican state leadership.
Plummer supporters took note when Parker almost won the three-candidate March primary outright, missing the 50 percent threshold by just 1 percentage point.
Karthik Soora, co-founder of the Houston Progressive Caucus, says there’s merit to the assertion that Plummer won because Black voters turned out to cast ballots in the heated Congressional District 18 race between Al Green and Christian Menefee. But not all Harris County voters live in CD 18. Plummer says she didn’t even campaign in CD 18 because she already had relationships with those voters.
“I wasn’t surprised [by the win],” Plummer says. “We saw what was happening on the ground. We saw the people that were filling our rooms. They were not coming to learn about me. They already knew me. They were coming to get their marching orders.”
Soora says it came down to aggressive information distribution from bloggers and influencers posting reels about Plummer and Parker. A video interview with Plummer shared by Houston resident Sim Kern outlining Plummer’s voting record and priority issues, while criticizing Parker’s public comments, got more than 91,000 views but was ignored by mainstream media, Soora says.
“I think that video was the only exposure some people had to this race outside of mailers,” Soora says. “People should stop pretending, like the old school, that you can just send out a mailer and ignore the stuff that matters. People are tired of baby boomer politicians.”
Menefee, who won the nomination for Congressional District 18 last week, held a press conference on May 27 with Plummer and Dexter McCoy, the Democratic nominee for Fort Bend County judge. Menefee offered his endorsement to the pair and vowed to “campaign as hard as hell” to elect Democrats across the state in November.
“We are united in ensuring that Democrats win every single countywide race in Harris County and Fort Bend County and do all we can to flip the state of Texas and make sure that flows to Harris and Fort Bend counties,” Menefee said. “Democrats right now are united.”
At the press conference, Plummer said she won her race “because we heard people and met them where they were. We did not do politics as usual. We created hope for them.”
When pressed for how she pulled off what’s being referred to as the biggest Harris County upset in recent history, Plummer said, “I honestly believe people are speaking up and showing up. They’re tired of old leadership and dated ideas. They understand that people who have served, have served their time and our problems are still exactly the same. They want to give someone else an opportunity to come up with new ideas and be able to deliver.”
Soora says that while Plummer was a council member — the first Muslim woman to be elected to the Houston City Council — she worked on an apartment inspection ordinance and an immigration ordinance that involved many diverse constituent groups. She developed relationships with those voters that turned out to be more valuable than endorsements or yard signs.
Both measures passed after Plummer left office last year but those who watch city politics closely credit her for initiating the conversations and doing the legal research to get the ordinances drafted.
“It is hard to find left-leaning progressive or activist groups or nonprofits to say, Plummer never showed up for us,” Soora says. “People like Letitia Plummer and they’re passionate about her. It’s easy to say that Plummer wasn’t able to pass all these things but she was one of the few people standing up to powerful special interests in a corporate-dominated city.”
The Caucus, whose entire slate of endorsed local candidates won runoffs last week, targeted voters in the 18-45 age range with mass text messages and reminded them that Parker once spoke out in support of the Houston ISD state takeover. She later walked it back, but Soora says the purpose of the messaging was to let Democratic primary voters know there was actual evidence to support that Parker has a history of unpopular opinions or “centrist ideology at best.”
Parker, who led the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund following six years as a council member, six years as city controller and six years as mayor, didn’t denounce HPD’s cooperation with federal immigration authorities and she endorsed Mayor John Whitmire, who was admonished by the Harris County Democratic Party last year.
Plummer’s Muslim Faith
Plummer’s mother is Yemeni-Persian and her father is Black. The pair met in Africa while her father was serving in the Peace Corps. Dr. Matthew Plummer Jr., a Harvard-educated dentist, converted to Islam, and Plummer and her siblings were raised in Houston, worshipping in a mosque but also visiting a Baptist church in Edna a couple of times a month with their paternal grandparents.
“Growing up, I saw people speaking Arabic and Swahili in my home,” she says, noting that she’s not in any way trying to distance herself from her Muslim faith while campaigning for judge. “I learned to pray in Arabic. This is who I am. I own that.”
Plummer is a divorced single mom and does not wear a hijab to cover her hair. She was raised to have no alcohol or pork in the home. She admits she doesn’t know a whole lot about Sharia law, the religious principles derived from the Quran, or why it’s become so controversial.
“I was never really super religious. I would say I am spiritual,” she says. “I don’t pray five times a day. I probably get three prayers in. I am very clear who I am from a spiritual perspective.”
Cameron “Coach Cam” Campbell, a Harris County Democratic Party precinct chair who led the Whitmire admonishment effort, says it’s up to the men in the party to step in and protect Plummer when she is attacked for her faith or for any other reason.
“What we know about the anti-Black-woman playbook is that they’re going to insult her intelligence,” Campbell says. They’re going to say she’s incompetent. They’re going to bring up Sharia law. Every fear tactic they can play, they’re going to play. It’s not her job to be on defense. It’s our job to call BS when we see BS and step up to challenge these narratives. Part of building a winning culture is not only doing your job but advocating for your teammates.”
The attacks on Plummer’s Muslim faith began soon after she won the nomination, as critics recycled a six-year-old congratulatory tweet from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group Gov. Greg Abbott has deemed a terrorist organization.
Plummer says she’s aware there have been rumblings about her faith, but as a female Black Muslim, she’s faced prejudice her entire life. “In middle school I was teased because people said I didn’t have a mom, that I was motherless. They thought my mom was my nanny. They said this woman who picked me up from school wore costumes.”
She adds that Muslims, Christians and Jews are all children of the same Abraham. “Islam accepts the Bible and the Torah,” she says. “We share the same foundational covenant of just being a good human being. My grounding and my culture and my religion are going to allow me to govern Harris County and recognize every faith, every background and every family from a very personal perspective.”
Plummer says she anticipated that the attacks on her faith would become an issue on the campaign trail but acknowledges that she’s “really protected” by people who support her and see the culture wars and Islamophobia for the fear-mongering that it is. “I’ve gone through this already,” she says, referencing her first run for city council that began in 2018.
“If all they’re going to attack me with is my religion, then we’ve got this,” she says.
Low Turnout?
In last week’s election, Parker dominated the older, white, 65-and-up voters and did “decently well with Latinos” but failed to reach Black voters of all ages, Soora says. “No one was excited about Annise Parker,” he says.
Campbell says people also grew weary of the back-and-forth between current County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who didn’t seek a third term, and Parker. Hidalgo criticized Parker for being too close to Whitmire and former Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, speculating that Parker would “govern like a Republican.” Parker referred to the current Harris County government as dysfunctional.
The age gap between Plummer and Parker has also been referenced as a possible reason why Plummer emerged with the nomination. Plummer is 55; Parker is 70. Some have suggested voter fatigue. Parker chalked it up to low turnout. “While I didn’t think my opponent could beat me, low turnout absolutely could,” Parker told reporters at a watch party on the night of the election.
In the March primary, 333,926 Democrats cast ballots for Harris County judge. On May 26, with only runoffs on the ballot, 112.968 people voted in the Parker-Plummer race.
Plummer acknowledges that while the turnout wasn’t great, it was clear that those who went to the polls chose her because of the relationships she built as a city council member.
Parker conceded the election to Plummer late on election night and sent an email the next morning thanking voters and volunteers for their support. “This campaign is over and our job now is to defeat the Republicans in November,” she said.
Plummer will face the GOP nominee, former Harris County Treasurer Orlando Sanchez on November 3. If elected, Soora says Plummer will be the most powerful Black woman in Texas in terms of the budget she’ll oversee and the authority she’ll have. But both Soora and Campbell say Plummer and her supporters shouldn’t count out Sanchez.
“I think it’s going to be a hell of a fight,” Campbell said. “I’m interested to see how Sanchez can bandage what Trump has damaged with the Hispanic men in the Republican Party.”
