July 6, 2020

Conspicuous Coronavirus Omission Highlights
Seismic Crisis Shifts in Special Senate Contest

By Mike Hailey
Capitol Inside Editor

Austin Democrat Sarah Eckhardt glided into a special Texas Senate battle this spring with a monumental apparent advantage after flattening the proverbial coronavirus curve during her final two months as the Travis County judge.

But you wouldn't even know there'd been a pandemic anytime lately based on a pair of campaign mailers that Eckhardt fired off to voters late last month.

The Eckhardt postal flyers seized to no surprise on the massive protesting around Texas in the first half of June with a pitch for criminal justice reform including plans to "defederalize and demilitarize" local police. Eckhardt touted accomplishments on environmental regulation and alternative energy, public transportation and the expansion of medical care online.

While Eckhardt claimed credit in the literature for a reduction in crime through an expanded focus on mental health, she insinuated in one mailer that Rodriguez had been perpetuating police brutality by trying to stay on the good side of law enforcements groups that had been donors. Eckhardt's campaign makes the veteran legislator look more like a bad guy in a Robert Rodriguez movie than a successful attorney who'd been the executive director for the county party before a stint in the Legislature's lower chamber that begain in 2003.

She attacks the lawmaker for missing a vote last year on a bill that stemmed from the death of Sandra Bland after she'd been arrested near Houston during a traffic stop. Rodriguez had been one of more than two dozen representatives on both sides of the aisle who were recorded as absent for the vote in the regular session's final month.

Rodriguez has endorsements from fellow Austin-area Democratic State Reps. Gina Hinojosa, Donna Howard and Celia Israel while freshman State Rep. Sheryl Cole is backing Eckhardt.

But the ex-county judge who became one of the most powerful leaders in Texas almost overnight for a couple of months in the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis doesn't say a word in the mailers about the plague that's no longer a selling point with the Austin area as one of the hottest spots in the second outbreak that Rodriguez has the ability now to blame on her.

The special fight to replace Democrat Kirk Watson in the heavily Democratic Senate district is the Texas first political race to unfold almost exclusively in a pandemic since 1918 when Democrats William P. Hobby and Morris Sheppard were re-elected as governor and U.S. senator respectively during the second wave of the Spanish Flu.

Rodriguez and Eckhardt are the only two Democrats in the field that includes a pair of Republicans in former Austin City Council member Don Zimmerman and Waller Thomas Burns II along with Libertarian Pat Dixon. Zimmerman could have an outside shot at overtime if the turnout for the primary runoffs that are being conducted simultaneously is low across the aisle.

While Eckhardt has been perceived as the favorite on the strength of a grassroots coalition with a strong female presence that she's been cultivating for years, Rodriguez is scrambling to secure a spot in a runoff with an attempt to turn his main foe's greatest early asset into a fatal liability in the final week of the first round in SD 14.

The novel virus that's been highly elusive and unpredictable has switched sides for the time being in the special contest for the seat in the east wing that Watson held for 13 years before leaving the Legislature for a job as the dean of the Hobby School of Public Affairs at the University of Houston.

While Rodriguez has the establishment in his corner with Eckhardt strong among the liberal city's influential neighborhood groups, the Democratic candidates share the same basic progressive orientation that they've always had. But the only issue that really matters now in a historically extraordinary 2020 is the disease that's been reshaping the world since it surfaced here in February and March.

Eckhardt could see that scenario poised to play out when she'd been planning in March to head for the exit at the county courthouse in March after being forced to resign from the local position when she became a candidate for state office. But the coronavirus started racking up infections in the county where state government is based before Eckhardt had actually passed the gavel to Sam Biscoe as a former county judge who'd been appointed as a temporary replacement.

Eckhardt had the ability to stay at the wheel until Biscoe had been sworn in - a move that the commissioners delayed all the way to early May in a collaborative maneuver that would afford the departing leader the best of both worlds as a pandemic manager and candidate.

But Eckhardt made the same basic mistake that had knocked Governor Greg Abbott off track as the sole Texas director of the COVID-19 reponse when he thought the state had contained the virus when it had only been warming up for the current wave that's fueled a 212 percent increase in new cases in Travis County in the past month alone.

A dramatic headline at the top of an Eckhardt mail piece appears to be a teaser for an elaboration on the actions that she took as one of the local response's two original local pandemic leaders along with Austin Mayor Steve Adler. "THE EARTH'S FUTURE IS ON FIRE.'

But the campaign mail warning turns out to be a pitch for climate change proposals without any mention of the virus.