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Harris county judge GOP runoff candidates Vidal Martinez and Alexandra del Moral Mealer.

Alexandra del Moral Mealer holds up her sign with supporters outside Trini Mendenhall Community Center during early voting on Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2022 in Houston. Del Moral Mealer is running in the Republican primary for Harris County Judge.

GOP runoff candidate Vidal Martinez.

Republicans are preparing an all-out push this fall to unseat Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, in the hopes of regaining control of Texas’ biggest county and derailing the first-term Democrat’s early political ascent.

First, though, GOP voters must decide on Hidalgo’s November opponent. The initial nine-candidate Republican primary field was narrowed in March to a two-person runoff on May 24 between Alexandra del Moral Mealer, an investment banker in the oil and gas industry and former Army captain, and Vidal Martinez, an attorney and former federal prosecutor with deep ties among Houston’s business, legal and political communities. Early voting begins Monday.

The primary is a subject of intense interest in Republican circles, and not just in Harris County. State leaders, having feuded with Hidalgo over COVID restrictions and other high-stakes issues for the last couple of years, badly want to deny her a second term and are said to be keeping a close eye on the GOP runoff.

Hidalgo, a 31-year-old Colombian immigrant, also is widely speculated as a future statewide candidate.

At the local level, Harris County Republicans see a confluence of events — the felony indictment of three Hidalgo aides, a rise in homicides, Democrats bracing for a Republican wave year nationally — that they believe makes Hidalgo vulnerable.

The matchup between Martinez, 67, and Mealer, 37, has turned on the question of who is best equipped to beat Hidalgo in a county that last elected a Republican to countywide office in 2014. Amid the GOP dry spell, Hidalgo in 2018 unexpectedly beat the moderate Republican incumbent, Ed Emmett, helping bring Commissioners Court under Democratic control for the first time since 1990.

In the aftermath, even some shellshocked Republicans would admit Hidalgo seemed well-positioned to win re-election — a testament to their party’s recent struggles in countywide races, and the relatively uncontroversial start of Hidalgo’s tenure. However, a rise in homicides rippling across Harris County and other parts of the country, paired with a favorable national landscape for Republicans, has breathed new life into the GOP’s uphill campaign to unseat Hidalgo.

“You can argue whatever stats, but there’s not very many people that will raise their hand and say, you know what, Harris County is a safer place than it was a few years back,” Mealer said. “Because of that, that people know life has changed, there’s an energy base there. ... I mean, drive around the city and tell me the last time you’ve seen as many conservative (yard) signs inside the Loop.”

With several factors working in favor of Republicans this time, the 2022 midterm may be the party’s last, best chance to win an election for Harris County judge amid a diversifying electorate that is putting countywide seats increasingly out of reach, said Richard Murray, a former political science professor at the University of Houston who has studied the area’s demographics for decades.

“You could call it Custer’s last stand,” Murray said. “I mean, we have fewer whites (in Harris County) now than we did 20 years ago. If your base is white voters, your only shot is an off-year election with low turnout, where your side is motivated, and maybe you get a few breaks — which it looks like that may be the case.”

During the initial round of voting, Mealer finished first with 30 percent of the vote, despite being outspent 3-1 by Martinez, who placed second with 26 percent.

Both runoff contenders bring decorated résumés to the race. Martinez has been on the Houston Methodist board of directors since 1992 and previously served on the Port of Houston Authority commission, Greater Houston Partnership board of directors, University of Houston board of regents and as chairman of the State Bar of Texas board of directors. He runs a private practice that handles “regulatory and transactional” business legal issues.

Mealer graduated from West Point in 2007 and rose to the rank of Army captain, specializing in defusing bombs as an explosive ordnance disposal officer. After her military service, which included stints in Kandahar and Bagram, Afghanistan, she received business and law degrees from Harvard University. Originally from Sacramento, she and her husband moved to Houston full time in 2016; she since has worked in investment banking, most recently for Wells Fargo, handling oil and gas transactions.

The two Republicans have similar visions for the job, centered on a return to the county’s traditional focus on public safety and infrastructure, instead of the more expansive role Hidalgo has established through climate change, early childhood development and immigration initiatives. They say the county should renew its focus on those core functions to free up funds for more law enforcement spending.

“I’m going to fund law enforcement. I’m going to give the sheriff and the constables their raises that they deserve,” Martinez said, arguing county law enforcement pay is not competitive enough to adequately recruit and retain officers.

He also criticized the Democratic majority on Commissioners Court for repeatedly rejecting District Attorney Kim Ogg’s requests for more prosecutors, who she said would help unclog the county’s huge backlog of criminal cases.

The court last month approved $7 million for Ogg to hire new prosecutors and increase pay in her office, after Democrats earlier in the year passed new county budgets that provided modest funding increases for county law enforcement — including 5 percent pay raises for sheriff and constable deputies — but failed to match the spending levels requested by the sheriff’s office, constables and Ogg, a Democrat.

Hidalgo acknowledged Harris County has seen a rise in crime, but said the same can be said for the country as a whole. She pointed to several steps the county has taken in response, including ramping up law enforcement presence in violent crime “hot spots,” reducing blight in distressed neighborhoods, funding programs for at-risk youth and requiring bail bond companies to take an upfront fee of at least 10 percent from defendants charged with violent crimes.

She also argued Republican proposals to fully fund the budget requests of county law enforcement were “infeasible,” as they would have reduced funding for the health department by 47 percent, prompting cuts to “vital public health services.” The library system and engineering department were among the handful of others in line for significant cuts.

“It’s sort of a dog whistle that they’re trying to use that is not tethered in truth,” Hidalgo said of the GOP criticism of her record on violent crime. “And I think that characterizes who they are, and that is a Trojan horse for Trumpism. I mean, that’s what Trumpism is, is dog whistles and pandering, as opposed to actually working to solve the problem.”

Houston police logged a 17 percent rise in homicides last year, after seeing a 45 percent uptick in 2020. Overall violent crime rose slightly in 2020, then saw a modest decrease last year.

Murray, the UH professor, said the surge in homicides has handed Republicans a winning issue on which Hidalgo’s best hope is to “limit the damage.”

Still, regaining control of the county judge’s seat would not guarantee the GOP a majority on Commissioners Court. Republican Precinct 4 Commissioner Jack Cagle also is up for re-election this year, his first time on the ballot after his precinct was redrawn to favor Democrats.

The new makeup of Cagle’s precinct means he and Hidalgo both could lose re-election, maintaining the current 3-2 edge for Democrats, said Bob Stein, a Rice University political science professor who served as a consultant for the court when it redrew its precinct map in 2001.

“For Cagle to win, he has to reach out to people who haven’t voted for him before and persuade what is probably a small number of independent voters,” Stein said.

While Martinez and Mealer have trained most of their fire on Hidalgo, there have been moments of acrimony between the two. Martinez criticizes Mealer for moving to Houston full time about six years ago, contrasting that with his longer ties to the city. And he argues he would be more effective at winning Latino support during the general election, noting that Mealer does not speak fluent Spanish.

Martinez expanded on that line of attack in the closing moments of a forum last month, when he displayed a photo of Fidel Castro, signed by the former Cuban dictator and inscribed to Mealer’s late grandfather, former Spanish language film journalist Armando del Moral. Martinez said Democrats would find and use the photo against Mealer in the general election, weakening her support among Latino voters.

“There’s not going to be a single way that a communist Castro grandfather that gave her all her inspiration is going to be elected from the Latino community,” Martinez said. “You have to look at electability. And if you don’t, we’re going to lose this race.”

The comments were met with jeers and audible groans from the crowd, and they stirred backlash from Republicans who previously had been on the sidelines of the race — including influential conservative talk radio host Michael Berry, who took to the airwaves to accuse Martinez of playing “identity politics” and running a “losing, desperate campaign.”

Mealer called Martinez’s attack “pathetic.”

“This man chooses to spit on my grandfather’s grave. He took in people from the Bay of Pigs. He fought Fidel,” Mealer said. “To say that my grandfather is a communist is the most insulting thing.”

On the electability front, Mealer argues she can court Latino support without speaking fluent Spanish. And she says her status as a newcomer to Houston political circles may appeal to voters who feel oversaturated with politics — not unlike the argument Hidalgo made when she unseated Emmett in 2018.

“And I do think it’s an advantage that I’ve not gone up the ranks in the political system,” she said. “You know, my background is military, and it’s working oil and gas here in Houston. There’s a lot of good lessons learned from both of those.”

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Jasper covers Texas politics for the Houston Chronicle's Austin Bureau. He previously reported on City Hall and local politics at the Chronicle and covered local government for the San Antonio Express-News. He graduated from Northwestern University in 2017 with degrees in journalism and political science, and has interned for the Tampa Bay Times, Washington Post and Fortune magazine.