Lina Hidalgo, once a rising Democratic star in Texas, will not seek re-election next year as county judge in Harris County, which includes Houston, or for any other office in 2026, she told The New York Times.
Her decision ends — for the moment, at least — a meteoric political career that had fueled the hopes of many Texas Democrats and had drawn sustained and withering Republican attacks.
Ms. Hidalgo said Democratic voters who feel defeated by the aggressive actions of Republicans in Texas and in the Trump administration should not take her decision as another reason to feel deflated.
“I’m afraid people are going to say, ‘Well, you know, she’s giving up. Why shouldn’t I?’” she said. “That’s the last thing I want people to take from it.”
But with the political tide turning, pressure had been building on Ms. Hidalgo. Republican opponents have talked openly about trying to remove her from office, and a new state law requires that removal petitions against county officials be handled by a prosecutor and judge from another county, rather than in the county where the official presides.
In Ms. Hidalgo’s case, that would mean a prosecutor and a judge from a more conservative county could have decided her fate.
“I changed the law this session to make it easier to remove incompetent county judges from office!” State Senator Mayes Middleton, a Republican who sponsored the new law, wrote on social media last month, posting a video of Ms. Hidalgo during a contentious commissioners court meeting in August.
And Ms. Hidalgo could have faced a potentially tough Democratic primary that includes the former mayor of Houston, Annise Parker, who has already declared her candidacy.
Ms. Hidalgo said her reason for retirement was that she did not want to hold onto the office for its own sake, rejecting what she said was the “empire mentality” of some politicians. She planned to announce her decision officially in a video on Tuesday.
“A lot of the problems in our politics these days come from this obsession with staying in power,” she said in the interview with The Times.
She said she would stay focused on unfinished business for the remainder of her term, which ends at the end of 2026, including a push on early childhood education and safeguards to human trafficking, before she decides on her next steps. She did not rule out a run for office after 2026.
Ms. Hidalgo rocketed to national attention in 2018 when, as a 27-year-old progressive Democrat and first-time candidate, she defeated a two-term Republican incumbent and took over as the top official in the nation’s third most populous county.
Her victory, her youth and her biography as an immigrant from Colombia gained her immediate prominence among Democrats and talk of an eventual statewide run in Texas, perhaps for governor or the Senate. Her profile appeared to be exactly what the Democratic Party was seeking, a young progressive Latina capable of winning over the state’s increasingly Hispanic voters.
As county judge, she navigated several crises, including hurricanes, a major chemical plant explosion and a devastating winter freeze that knocked out power in 2021 and killed dozens of people in the county. During the Covid pandemic, she sparred publicly with Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, over mask mandates and business reopenings.
She said she was proud of her role handling emergencies, as well as taking on changes to ethics rules and the pay-to-play culture in county contracting. She called her efforts on county contracting “the most fiscally responsible, efficiency-focused, impactful thing that I could do.”
Mike Doyle, the chairman of the Harris County Democratic Party, said that many Democratic Party members and voters see Ms. Hidalgo as someone who “fights hard for issues they care about.”
But almost from the start, he added, Ms. Hidalgo was a “lightning rod” for Republicans across Texas. Some accused her of inexperience and suggested her office had been plagued by corruption. As she was preparing to run for re-election in 2022, a handful of her aides were indicted in connection with a pandemic-related contract, but those cases were later dismissed.
In a bruising re-election fight that year, she barely defeated her well-funded Republican opponent, Alexandra del Moral Mealer, who made crime in Houston and accusations of wrongdoing in Ms. Hidalgo’s administration central to her campaign.
“If somebody wants to politically prosecute me again, I’m like, ‘yeah, come at me,’” Ms. Hidalgo said in the interview. “They brought it on, and I’m still here.”
Beyond that bravado, the job took a toll. Last year, Ms. Hidalgo talked openly about her mental health struggles, seeking to provide a public example to others who might similarly benefit from seeking treatment.
Her political fortunes have taken a turn, too. In recent months, she has clashed with colleagues on the commissioners court, which she leads and where Democrats hold four of the five seats. The lone Republican commissioner proposed to censure her over her decorum at a notably raw meeting last month, where Ms. Hidalgo was pushing for early childhood education funds. Two Democratic commissioners joined him to approve the censure.
“I don’t think there’s any denying that there’s been tension,” Mr. Doyle said. “And that’s probably got in the way of some of our more ambitious efforts.”
Ms. Hidalgo’s aides had been discussing a possible run for the House for her, including in a district to the east of Houston, the Ninth Congressional District. That district is currently held by a Democrat, but it was recently redrawn by Republicans to flip control.
For now, Ms. Hidalgo said she would instead step back. Then, she added, “It doesn’t mean that I won’t later run for something else.”
J. David Goodman is the Houston bureau chief for The Times, reporting on Texas and Oklahoma.
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