Last year, woke Democrats in Harris County effectively pushed Mayor Whitmire out of the Harris County Democratic Party, barring him from ever receiving their endorsement again. This could turn out to be a major mistake for them.
While Houston’s left-wing progressives have been doing a victory lap since pushing Whitmire out, they likely haven’t hurt his reelection chances.
Former City Councilman Greg Travis pointed to Whitmire’s moral victory over former Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee as an example of this, saying: “Whitmire won the election with 65 percent of the vote to 35 percent of the vote. So where is that support coming from? They think they’re gonna get a ‘Mamdani’? Their Mamdani was Sheila.”
He went on to call out the Democrats who seem to believe Houston is one election away from putting a radical leftist socialist into power. “Nobody cares what these people think,” Travis said. “The people who become precinct chairs in the Democratic Party are the most extreme of the extreme. It’s not who the everyday American is.”
Travis says many of these local progressives are too locked in their own bubbles and don’t understand that the political atmosphere of the Montrose area is not reflective of the rest of the city.