For Harris County Judge: Letitia Plummer

While Democrat Letitia Plummer has done her homework, Republican candidate Orlando Sanchez struggles to break from MAGA extremes.

Sharon Steinmann, Houston Chronicle

Voters of Harris County, cast your ballots with a smile and know that no matter who you pick for county judge, you’re making a better choice than you did four years ago. 

Both candidates are more thoughtful and balanced than the last two candidates to seek this seat.

County Judge: Letitia Plummer

Letitia Plummer ★★★1/2 — This former city council member has demonstrated skills and vision beyond her Democratic primary campaign’s progressive advocacy.

Orlando Sanchez ★★★ — A three-time county treasurer and former city council member, he struggles to live up to the full promise of being an experienced, moderate Republican. 

On the Democratic side is Letitia Plummer, 56, who is running to continue Judge Lina Hidalgo’s vision of a county government that goes beyond the statutory responsibilities of infrastructure and public safety. The former City Council member wants the county to provide robust services to address mental health, improve financial literacy and support small businesses. Most of the 5 million-plus residents in the county don’t live in an incorporated city that provides basic civic amenities. She insists the county can do that without losing focus on core responsibilities. Plummer is particularly passionate about disaster response and improving our criminal justice system.

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On the Republican side is Orlando Sanchez, 68, who has been campaigning as a moderate in the age of MAGA. The former City Council member and three-time county treasurer has talked about how he can work across the aisle and tackle the basics of county governance. He even told voters to “ignore that R” next to his name on the ballot. The county judge doesn’t have much direct authority, but the position does have a powerful bully pulpit. Residents would benefit from a leader who truly has the ability to serve as a convener and consensus builder — a politician who can transcend partisan divides.

In fact, that’s the sort of county judge Harris County once had in Ed Emmett. There was no question he really was a moderate Republican. You could see it in his personal disposition, his openness to the LGBTQ community, and how he broke from his party on policy issues such as Medicaid expansion and local control. 

In 2018, Emmett even publicly said that he was voting for Mike Collier, the moderate Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, over a firebrand conservative, Republican incumbent Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. That took courage — and it took someone willing to put the county ahead of partisanship.

But Sanchez, who was born in Cuba, hasn’t held elected office since 2018, and his bipartisan bona fides haven’t been put to a real test in a long time. Voters need a way to determine whether that bipartisan rhetoric is mere campaign bluster. 

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So we decided to see if he could pass the Emmett test. Would Sanchez be willing to put the county ahead of his party?

When the editorial board met with the county judge candidates, we asked Sanchez if he would vote for Bo French, the Republican candidate for railroad commissioner — a candidate so bigoted that Dan Patrick himself once disowned him.

Turns out Sanchez’s talk of moderation was just empty words: He told us he was voting for French.  

“I am playing for the red team,” he said.

Our meeting was before French made national news for racist social media posts about University of Texas students. Sanchez issued a statement that said he was “deeply troubled” by French’s comments, but he didn’t say whether he still believed French should be elected. 

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We followed up and gave him another chance at the question. We asked him whether now, like Republican Sen. John Cornyn and longtime Texas GOP strategist Karl Rove, he would publicly oppose French’s election. 

“Let me preserve my right to a secret ballot,” he said.

That’s not moderation. That’s not leadership. It should be easy for any moderate Republican to say they’re not voting for French, who openly judges people by the color of their skin, called for the lynching of former President Barack Obama, and generally talks like he’s quoting from a synagogue shooter’s manifesto. But for Sanchez, loyalty to MAGA apparently comes first.

Harris County Judge candidate Orlando Sanchez talks with the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board in Houston, TX on September 4, 2026.

Sharon Steinmann/Houston Chronicle

Harris County’s residents deserve better than someone who views the world through a lens of red team and blue team. We deserve someone who is firmly and publicly on Team Harris County.

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That’s why we believe Dr. Letitia Plummer is the better choice in this race. 

A dentist by profession, her personal history feels thoroughly Houstonian. Her grandfather, Matthew Wesley Plummer Sr., was a prominent attorney and civil district judge who fought to integrate the Harris County courthouse cafeteria. Her mother was born in East Africa to a Yemeni-Indian family. Her parents met while her dad was in the Peace Corps.

Plummer served for five years on City Council before she stepped down to run for county judge. During her time at City Hall, she regularly took the lead in pushing much-needed reforms, such as holding slumlords accountable for dilapidated and dangerous apartments. She also pushed for better ways to hold accountable bad actors in the Houston Police Department. She wasn’t always successful in her advocacy, but she brought a much-needed outsider perspective to City Hall.

Still, would Plummer merely be a die-hard progressive partisan at Commissioners Court? We take some comfort in knowing that she has already broken with commissioners from her party while on the campaign trail. Plummer said she opposed this year’s property tax increase and criticized the county for spending temporary COVID-era federal funds on permanent programs. 

In fact, she has a record of standing up for what’s right even when it’s tough, and with distinctly more self-control and success than the incumbent county judge.

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Plummer pushed back against a well-intentioned plan proposed by then-Mayor Sylvester Turner to buy out homeowners who lived near a cancer cluster in Fifth Ward and Kashmere Gardens. Plenty of homeowners didn’t want to abandon their neighborhood and Plummer urged the city to wait for test results from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency before moving forward. The tests eventually showed no ongoing risk of dioxin exposure. So instead, Plummer helped assemble a partnership to provide free cancer screenings for residents potentially at risk.

It’s that ability to bridge on-the-ground concerns with actionable policy that makes her a compelling candidate for county judge.

Harris County Judge candidate Letitia Plummer talks with the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board in Houston, TX on September 4, 2026.

Sharon Steinmann/Houston Chronicle

Meeting with the editorial board, she told us that she wanted to focus on improving our criminal justice system and building the flood infrastructure.

She emphasized the need to build a new jail and ensure it is fully staffed with the detention officers necessary to keep it operating safely. 

“The jail is disgusting,” she said. “It’s a humanitarian challenge. It’s not designed properly. It’s unsafe. People are dying there. The detention officers are miserable.”

Her vision is bold — and expensive, which means that she can’t get it done alone. The reality is that the county judge has little direct power outside of emergencies, but we’d all be well served by a leader who uses her podium and convening power to solve this persistent challenge.

Plummer aptly recognizes that our dilapidated jail and broken criminal justice system mean we have to spend millions shipping defendants to other facilities. 

She is not proposing a bigger jail, just a more humane one. Rather than expand the incarcerated population, she’d look for ways to both shrink the jail population and speed up processing, and rededicate taxpayer resources to workforce development programs for people leaving the criminal justice system. It’s an approach reminiscent of the bipartisan criminal justice reform movement that thrived in Texas before the COVID-era spike in violence. We’d encourage her to make sure conservative reformers like Marc Levin have a seat at the table if she gets the opportunity to move that idea forward.

Similarly, we’d also encourage Plummer to build a team that can compensate for her weaknesses. She has repeatedly filed faulty campaign-finance reports, and she’s been sanctioned twice by the Texas Board of Dental Examiners, most recently in 2022, for problems that included shoddy dental work and overcharging the patient. Maybe those problems merely indicate that she’s not a details person and doesn’t have the right people backing her up. But running Harris County is far more complex than running a dentist’s office or even a campaign. We hope that experienced staffers could help her avoid the pitfalls that ensnared our current county judge’s office.

On flooding and other disasters, Plummer pointed to the need to pair regional infrastructure investments with local resilience hubs known as “Lily Pads” that could be dispatched when needed and operate off the grid, providing a neighborhood with power generation, food and other resources, such as health care and guidance on next steps for recovery. The plan builds on work by the city and county to ensure that community centers and other facilities have power backup generators. 

Harris County Judge candidate Letitia Plummer talks with the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board in Houston, TX on September 4, 2026.

Sharon Steinmann/Houston Chronicle

Overall, it is clear that Plummer has done her homework to prepare for the general election. She says she even got emergency management credentials from FEMA’s National Incident Management System.

Sanchez, on the other hand, shied away from the big ideas he discussed during the Republican primary, such as tackling our area’s expensive system of overlapping law enforcement agencies. He even fumbled some basic policy questions, inaccurately conflating the ODonnell settlement’s changes to the county’s misdemeanor bail system with discretionary decisions made by judges and magistrates in the felony courts. 

He did agree with Plummer on the need for a new jail, and we were intrigued by his proposal to sell the county’s court facilities downtown, reap a profit and rebuild a comprehensive criminal justice facility elsewhere.

Both candidates seemed nervous during their screening with the editorial board. Neither was overwhelmingly impressive. But Sanchez failed to live up to the full promise of being an informed, experienced moderate Republican — the kind we used to have in Harris County — while Plummer demonstrated skills and vision beyond her primary campaign’s progressive advocacy. 

“I just want to take care of human beings,” she told us.

There’s more than 5 million of ’em in Harris County. We think Plummer deserves their support.