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In September, Sheila Jackson Lee started running her first attack ad against her lead opponent in the Houston mayor’s race.

John Whitmire, the ad said, was backed by “Trump Republicans who want to make abortion a crime.”

It was the kind of attack that Whitmire’s campaign expected. With her own approval rating deep underwater, Jackson Lee needed to sink his credibility with voters to have a chance of winning. Within 30 minutes of seeing the video ad, state Sen. Carol Alvarado called one of Whitmire’s campaign consultants with an idea.

Alvarado offered to cut an ad for Whitmire, a man she counts as one of her mentors, with fellow Latina Democrat U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia. Within days, Whitmire used a share of his $10 million campaign pot to blanket the airwaves with video of them defending his Democratic bona fides.

It was a demonstration of Whitmire’s overwhelming fundraising advantage, the allies he made over 50 years in the Texas Legislature and the political instincts that propelled him to a decisive victory in Saturday’s mayoral runoff.

Whitmire staffers and consultants said the ad helped neutralize Jackson Lee’s attempt to drive up his disapproval ratings with Democrats and Latinos, without alienating the Republicans and independents who rounded out his coalition.

By Election Day, that coalition handed him a lopsided, 64-36 percent win in the mayor’s race that exceeded his own team’s expectations. In an interview Saturday night, Alvarado credited the instincts that Whitmire honed over a half-century in politics for the wide margin of victory.

“I think he was one of the few people who could bring the diverse communities of Houston together,” she said. “He did what he's been doing in the Texas Senate, and I think the coalition is probably one of the most diverse we've seen in a very long time. That's why you see the results tonight.”

Running scared

Since election night, some pundits have argued that Whitmire’s victory was a foregone conclusion from the moment Jackson Lee announced.

Jackson Lee’s negative numbers were too high, Whitmire’s too low and the nature of a race between two Democrats vying for Republican votes meant the outspoken progressive never had a shot, the argument goes.

In interviews this week, Whitmire campaign insiders agreed they always thought they had the better of Jackson Lee. Still, they kept running as if they had a competitive race on their hands, according to Robert Jara, a veteran Houston political consultant who has advised Whitmire for decades.

All told, the campaign says that it knocked on 182,673 doors and made 3.2 million attempts to call voters. It also spent millions of dollars on ads, according to campaign finance reports.

“We ran scared throughout,” Jara said. Even after Whitmire took the lead in the Nov. 7 general election, “I wouldn't say that we thought, ‘OK, it’s over with, we can all rest.’ But we saw that it was going to be hard for her to catch up.”

Jara began working for Whitmire’s campaign shortly after his November 2021 announcement that he was running for mayor.

Almost from the start, Whitmire was the presumptive frontrunner. During 50 years in the state House and Senate, he had never lost a race. He built up a massive network of Houstonians he had touched personally with his work at the legislature. He had a phone book full of friends in politics who were happy to endorse him, and a two-year head start meant he could lock them down first. Moreover, his $10 million campaign account would help him while scaring away potential rivals.

By March of this year, Whitmire’s most serious competitors appeared to be Amanda Edwards, a former city councilmember, and Chris Hollins, another rising young Democrat who had built up a national profile as the interim Harris County clerk during the 2020 election.

Edwards or Hollins might have run a “youth versus age” campaign, according to Robert Miller, a partner at the Locke Lord firm where Whitmire works who acted as an unpaid campaign advisor. Instead, Jackson Lee hopped into the race.

“One of the inflection points of this campaign was when she got in the race, because that got Hollins and Amanda out of the race, and while she had universal name identification, she also had tremendously high negatives. It also took age off the table,” Miller said. “It became a very set-piece campaign.”

Around the same time, there were persistent rumors that 2019 mayoral candidate Tony Buzbee might enter to offer a more conservative alternative to Whitmire.

“A Buzbee-type candidate, basically, would have created one more angle for us,” said Kevin Shuvalov, a Republican consultant who oversaw mail advertising for the Whitmire campaign.

The threat never materialized, however. Instead, Whitmire’s critics from the right were M.J. Khan and Jack Christie, two lower-profile former city council members who never raised much money.

Whitmire’s consultants insist his strategy would have remained the same no matter the competition: To build up his personal profile and then run an issue-driven campaign aiming to build a broad coalition.

The strategy was hatched over lunch on March 1, 2022, the day of the primary election where he defeated a challenger trying to take his state Senate seat.

As Whitmire told his campaign staffers about the support he received from neighbors when his family’s house burned down when he was a child, consultant Jaime Mercado realized he was hearing “campaign gold.”

“People think of you as this fire-breathing Dean of the Senate,” Mercado recalls thinking. “And here I’m hearing you, and it’s like, sir, you have these incredibly humble beginnings and you’ve been through so much.”

Big team, big money

Inside his campaign, Whitmire assembled a team of veterans, including Jara and Sue Davis, his communications director, along with younger voices such as Mercado and lead consultant Diana Patiño, who drew widespread praise from colleagues for her coolheadedness and focus.

Even setting aside the $10 million state campaign account that he controversially transferred to the local race, Whitmire’s fundraising operation was formidable.

“We knew we would need more money than that,” said Jennifer Naedler, who served as the campaign finance director. “If you are not getting investment from the people who are going to vote for you, you shouldn't be running.”

Her job was made easier by the thousands of people Whitmire had helped over his long career, she said.

“Everybody has a story about how they were affected by his leadership or something he did, a call he made. I swear, he’s like George Bailey,” Naedler said, referring to Jimmy Stewart’s character in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Business owners, animal rights advocates concerned about the state of the city’s animal shelter and builders upset with delays at the permitting office were all big donors, Naedler said.

“Would you just fix the permitting department?” many donors asked the campaign, according to Naedler. “It was just mind-boggling, the volume. Everybody has got a horror story. It’s a completely fixable situation.”

To critics on the left, too much of Whitmire’s haul came from the same Republican donors who oppose abortion rights and other progressive causes at the state and national level. By contrast, Jackson Lee’s fundraising lagged despite her long career and connections in Washington.

“When you start late, it makes a difference,” said Glenn Rushing, the Jackson Lee campaign’s general manager. “He was in the pockets of the big mega-donors of the Republican party, and when you have that, it makes it a lot more difficult.”

In early October, Jackson Lee’s campaign sent a letter to Houston City Attorney Arturo Michel arguing Whitmire was violating the law by transferring uncapped state-level donations to his city campaign. However, the campaign never followed through with a lawsuit seeking enforcement of the law.

“We seriously considered it, but the timing was not on our side,” Rushing said. “Had we filed a suit, by the time it takes to run through the court system, the election would have been over.”

Of crime and MAGA

By the time Jackson Lee ran her attack ad tying Whitmire to “Trump Republicans” in September, the contours of the race were well-established.

The senator was talking as much as he could about issues such as crime, a top concern for voters across the political spectrum.

“It was in every poll that you saw. Crime was the No. 1 issue,” Jara said. Over time, Jackson Lee’s messaging on the issue increasingly matched Whitmire’s.

“It was interesting to see how it morphed over the course of the campaign. By the end she was kind of talking a lot about what the senator was saying – tough and smart on crime,” Jara said.

Meanwhile, Jackson Lee and other candidates were taking shots at Whitmire from the left and right.

“Our strategy was to convince Democrats that she was the Democratic choice, and that our opponent was funded by the Republicans, and that we stand for Democratic values, versus him being all over the board,” Rushing said.

Jackson Lee’s September ad seemed to gain some notice with Democratic voters, according to field reports from Whitmire canvassers. The ad from Alvarado and Garcia drowned it out, however.

“We ran it so much. We had the resources to run it,” said Marc Campos, the Whitmire consultant who fielded Alvarado’s phone call.

Whitmire’s supporters say Jackson Lee’s strategy was flawed from the start. While he has a strong relationship with Republicans in Austin, he toes the Democratic Party line on many issues, including abortion and transgender rights.

“Her strategy was to try to label the senator as a Republican in hopes that it would just turn into a partisan election,” Jara said. “It was a bad strategy, given his record. He had a solid, Democratic record, and the facts were the facts.”

Moreover, Patiño said, Jackson Lee failed to tell a positive story of her own, in contrast to Whitmire’s ads about his humble roots.

“Yes, her negative numbers were high, but I think her starting with a negative campaign was what really did it for her. I don't think voters appreciate that,” Patiño said.

In the waning days of the first round, Jackson Lee was hit with what is known in politics as an October surprise. An audio recording of Jackson Lee berating a staffer surfaced on social media. Rushing, the Jackson Lee campaign staffer, said he did not think it moved many votes.

The first round

At 4 a.m. on Nov. 7, the day of the general election, 35 of Whitmire’s paid canvassers fanned out across Lazybrook, Timbergrove and the Greater Heights to leave his campaign literature at voters’ doors.

“That was a hell of an operation,” said Robert Orta, the deputy campaign manager who ran Whitmire’s field outreach program. “We got 8,000 doors done that morning.”

Observers had assumed Jackson Lee would command an advantage in the ground game, given her lengthy experience rallying voters in her district. Yet, according to Orta, her field campaign appears never to have materialized.

Whitmire’s canvassers essentially ceded council Districts D and B to Jackson Lee. As they covered the rest of the city, however, they saw few signs her troops had gotten there first.

“Off the top of my head, I cannot think of more than one or two instances where we actually saw people walking in Sheila Jackson Lee T-shirts or passing out her cards,” Orta said. “They were not there.”

Mercado said he was proud that the campaign knocked on doors in communities like Alief, where he grew up, that often are overlooked in local politics.

Orta said Jackson Lee may have lacked the money to hire canvassers. Instead, she appears to largely have outsourced her field operation to an independent, labor-affiliated group called Houstonians for Working Families.

That group knocked on more than 160,000 doors and made close to 2 million phone calls, according to Trey Daniels, one of its consultants.

For months, Whitmire’s consultants thought he might end the first election neck-and-neck with Jackson Lee atop the crowded, 18-candidate field. Instead, he ended six percentage points ahead of her at 43 percent.

“I think everybody was kind of surprised,” Campos said. “Then we looked precinct-by-precinct, and pretty much we were just killing it in Republican areas, killing it in areas like the Heights, doing two-to-one in Latino boxes.”

Whitmire’s success with Latino voters while relying on an inner circle populated with young Latino political professionals is a point of pride for veterans like Alvarado and Campos.

“This is who is advising him, and it’s not surprising that we built this coalition,” Mercado said. “I like to tell people Latinos are the ultimate swing vote … they’re up for grabs every cycle.”

Round two

Jackson Lee’s first-round drubbing appears to have done little to change her strategy in the second. At campaign forums, she upped the volume on her attacks on Whitmire.

Mayor Sylvester Turner, one of her most prominent endorsers, accused him of ethical violations for his work on behalf of Locke Lord and other clients.

“I don’t think that registered,” Rushing said. “These things are not lies, they are real, but when you don’t have the time and you don’t have the money to fight it back, it’s hard to get it to sink into the public domain.”

At the same debates, Whitmire repeatedly proclaimed that he would not stoop to negative attacks himself. He kept buying millions of dollars worth of ads, according to campaign finance reports, and his canvassers kept knocking on doors, according to Orta.

The campaign never seriously considered going negative itself, his consultants said, and the candidate avoided any major gaffes despite attending countless forums and debates in both rounds.

“Campaigns, many times, are defined by their mistakes,” Miller said. “Sitting here, I can’t point to one mistake that he made.”

Jackson Lee was getting attacked – but not by Whitmire. Instead, a pro-Whitmire political action committee sent out mailers accusing her of wanting to defund the police. Jackson Lee was so frustrated by the tactic that she called a press conference the day before the election to rebut it.

By Election Day, Jackson Lee’s support seems to have slipped where it matters most. Her best precincts in the first round lost 9 percent of their Jackson Lee votes, while Whitmire grew his best precincts by 25 percent.

Daniels, the consultant for the pro-Jackson Lee group, credited some of the enthusiasm gap to the high-profile City Council race between two conservatives on Houston’s west side.

“The District G race with Tony Buzbee and Mary Nan Huffman, he had over 30,000 people that came out and voted in District G, and they weren’t going to do Sheila Jackson Lee a favor,” Daniels said.

Whitmire supporters, meanwhile, say the wide final margin is a testament to his strategy of building a citywide coalition, and proof that he has a mandate to govern one of the nation’s most diverse cities.

“If there's anything I’m most proud of, we campaigned in every community,” Whitmire said late Saturday. “I can't wait to see the breakdown of where the votes came from, but they came from across Houston. This is Houston here tonight.”

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