Despart noted that attorney Audia Jones has filed a Notice of Treasurer in the 2020 race for District Attorney. Jones, who recently left the Harris County District Attorney's Office, has been very vocal on her Facebook page about her vision for the Criminal Justice System. Her posts have also been critical of the D.A.'s Office's current administration.
Jones is married to 180th District Court Judge DaSean Jones, who just took office on January 1st of this year. In the event that Jones were to win the race for District Attorney, there would probably be some question as to whether or not her husband could preside over cases prosecuted by the District Attorney's Office. In all honesty, I'm not sure what the answer to that question would be.
While Audia Jones is the first one to definitely throw her hat in the ring to run for District Attorney (I'm not sure that Kim Ogg has even formally announced that she is running again), there have been rumors that former prosecutor Rachel Palmer Hooper is mulling over a run as the Republican candidate. That's largely based on this Tweet from last month:
Rachel is sounding like somebody who is getting ready to make a run. She's been in the Civil World for some time now, but who knows? Maybe she misses the excitement of the Criminal Justice System.
Quite frankly, I think that any candidate running for Harris County D.A. as a Republican in 2020 is just throwing his or her money in the toilet. After the bashing that Republicans took in 2018, that's going to be a fool's errand if Trump is still at the top of the ballot in 2020. Although straight-ticket voting is (fortunately) now a thing of the past in Texas, I don't know if the change will be enough to make up those margins. I expect that the "protest turnout" of voters who show up just to vote against Trump will remain extremely high and that doesn't bode well for any candidate running as an R in 2020.
On the plus side, I think that most smart candidates know this. I'm expecting a pretty quiet Republican Primary. Hopefully, it will be so quiet that no one will feel all that compelled to "buy ads" from sleazy Slate producers like Terry Lowry and Steven Hotze.
I think that if anyone has a chance to win as a Republican candidate for District Attorney in 2020, it would need to be someone that would appeal to Latino and Latina voters. The Republican Party has been rather alienating to those voters in the Trump Era and if the Republicans were smart, they would start trying to build some bridges to that community instead of burning them. A charismatic, qualified, and experienced Latina candidate would be ideal in that situation, and if I were leading the Harris County Republican Party, I would be working overtime to recruit someone that matched that description.
But where could they ever find a candidate like that?
Stay tuned, folks. 2020 is already getting interesting.
