When Aliza Dutt entered the race to recapture the top Houston-area elected office for the Republican party, her launch received little fanfare. There was a barely 200-word blurb in The Houston Chronicle, which mostly pulled its information from the one-page press release she posted to Instagram—which has, at the time of writing, about 70 likes. Indeed, without having caught her May 20 interview with a dead-eyed reporter “exclusively” on the local Fox affiliate, one would be forgiven for not knowing who she was.
Her website’s campaign promises are as vague as they are banal: To address crime, she’ll “back the badge, restore order”; for immigration, she’ll “support state-led enforcement, back law enforcement”; with county funds, she’ll “protect taxpayers, cut waste”—all of which signal the type of campaign she wants to represent, without much substance beyond that.
But lurking behind the curtain of her marginal campaign for Harris County Judge (an executive position, presiding over a four-person Commissioners Court) is a national powerhouse. On the same day Dutt announced her campaign, she also appointed her campaign treasurer: Cabell Hobbs, a veteran staffer of major Republican campaigns going as far back as 2008. The Austin, Texas, P.O. Box provided under Hobbs’ name connects back to other PACs registered in Florida, North Dakota, and West Virginia.
His most recent work also may be his best-known: In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Hobbs’ Future Coalition Super PAC, funded to the tune of $5 million by Elon Musk, targeted battleground voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania with digital ads promoting Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff’s Jewish faith in a play to undercut Harris’s appeal with Muslims. The ads, which CNN and The New York Times called antisemitic, were targeted based on zip codes and worked both sides of the street: On the one hand, some ads tried to connect Emhoff’s religious beliefs to Harris’s position on Israel—referring to Emhoff her “top adviser,” spliced with footage of the Israeli flag; on the other hand, Harris was characterized as a “two-faced” supporter of Palestine.
Dutt, an immigrant from Hong Kong, is the mayor of Piney Point Village—a real city, apparently. With a population of around 3,000 and a median income of over $250,000, this wealthy enclave is pointedly separated from the city of Houston, on the sprawling west side of Harris County (population: 5 million). Before that, according to her campaign website, she worked as a reporter covering Capitol Hill and as an energy analyst. Her desire to control the Harris County Judge position isn’t unique among Republicans; although Lina Hidalgo, a Democrat, rode into the office in 2019 and successfully but narrowly defended her seat in 2022, the position has long been the central focus for local conservative pundits and mattress salesmen, even with a 4-1 Democratic majority on the court Hidalgo oversees. Indeed, one locally beloved mattress salesman known as Mattress Mack dropped millions of his own cash to unseat Hidalgo, and later bankrolled the quixotic legal effort questioning the validity of the election.
One county insider, who requested anonymity to speak to The New Republic, says that Hobbs’ involvement in Dutt’s campaign signals that Republicans are “tired of [the] Mattress Mack amateur shit, and they’re coming for the seat.” Republicans also sense weakness in Hidalgo’s camp: Despite the strong Democratic majority, her fights among members of the Commissioner’s Court have become more frequent. Hidalgo’s side lost a recent budget vote 3-2, plunging the county deeper into a major deficit in order to increase pay in the Sheriff’s Department. Annise Parker, a well-connected fellow Democrat and former Houston mayor in the late 2000s, is expected to enter the race soon. In December, Houston’s current blue dog mayor John Whitmire even suggested she wouldn’t pursue a third term, which she flatly denied.
“Right now, county and city leaders are mortgaging our future to pay for raises for cops,” another county insider said, referring to the budget vote and a recent deal between Houston’s mayor and the police, which will increase officer pay by a whopping 36.5 percent. “Despite her many failings, Lina [Hidalgo] is the one local leader who has been willing to call out corruption and cronyism, and that has earned her a lot of enemies on both sides of the aisle…. Lina has been a nightmare, but honestly man, everyone is a nightmare here right now. The failure of leadership is astonishing.”
Hobbs has previously worked with the Ted Cruz Victory Fund and, per The New York Times, took over “nearly every aspect” of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, setting tens of millions of dollars on fire. One might ask why, then, he’s concerning himself with a tiny candidate lacking immediate name recognition even locally. The answer may be in the name of his old Super PAC — Future Coalition. Why could that be? Consider this Houston race a dress rehearsal. The 2024 results showed significant inroads for Republicans among people of color. Harris County is the most ethnically diverse city in Texas, making for the perfect petri dish to test out messaging and, if all goes according to plan, taking it national. Dutt may not prevail in this election, but this may be the proving ground for the next spate of Republican campaign messaging.
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