DA primary runoff results

If there was ever a reason to never bet on politics, the April 8 Republican primary runoff for Harris County district attorney provided one as Pat Lykos crushed Kelly Siegler in a race to replace DA Chuck Rosenthal. Lykos, a former state district court judge, came in second in the March 4 Republican primary behind Siegler, a longtime Harris County DA, forcing a runoff because neither received more than 50 percent of the vote in the four-candidate race. Siegler looked strong because  an army of assistant district attorneys volunteered to work on her campaign throughout the runoff, walking neighborhood blocks and talking to voters. But yesterday, the tables turned as Lykos defeated Siegler by winning 53 percent of the runoff vote, according to unofficial Harris County Election Department results. “I attribute it to all of the volunteers who worked for me. I’ve had people working five days a week full time,’’ says Lykos. “And the hunger for change and reform” put her over the top, she says. Lykos cast herself as the outsider who could provide new leadership at the Harris County DA's office, which has been plagued by scandal involving Rosenthal, who resigned from his post earlier this year. Siegler did not return a telephone call seeking comment. Lykos will face Democrat C.O. “Brad” Bradford in the November general election. “I feel very humbled,” Lykos says. "I’ve had complete strangers come up to me and say they have been praying for me.” In Travis County, Rosemary Lehmberg, a 31-year veteran prosecutor, handily defeated Mindy Montford in the April 8 Democratic primary runoff for district attorney.  The unofficial vote totals published on Travis County’s Web site show Lehmberg claimed about 65 percent of the total, to Montford’s 35 percent.  No Republican filed for the job that Ronnie Earle will give up Dec. 31 after three decades as DA. Unless someone mounts a successful write-in campaign, Lehmberg, Earle’s first assistant for the past decade, will become Travis County’s first female DA in January 2009.  Lehmberg’s effort to succeed Earle, her longtime mentor, seemed less than a sure thing after the March 4 Democratic primary in which four candidates competed. Lehmberg won about 35 percent of the more than 186,000 votes cast in the primary, while Montford claimed about 31 percent of the vote.  The lopsided vote for Lehmberg in the runoff election came despite the well-financed media campaign run by Montford, a prosecutor in the trial division of Earle’s office and the daughter of former state Sen. John Montford.  Mindy Montford maintains that Lehmberg ran a negative campaign.  In her campaign advertising and at candidate debates, Lehmberg frequently questioned whether Montford is independent enough to oversee the public integrity unit in the Travis County DA’s office after accepting hefty campaign contributions from Capitol lobbyists. “At the end of the day, it worked,” Montford says of Lehmberg’s campaign tactic. Lehmberg says her frequent comments about Montford’s contributions from lobbyists were not meant as an attack on Montford but as “public education.” It was an issue people were interested in, Lehmberg says. Lehmberg says she will spend the next few months talking with Earle and the staff in the DA’s office to determine what needs to be done in that office.  One of the things she will look at, Lehmberg says, is more alternatives for young drug offenders. That could include expanding the county’s drug court program, which moves eligible nonviolent drug offenders out of the criminal justice system and provides them treatment, rather than jail time, to help them stop using drugs. However, Lehmberg doesn’t have any immediate plans to change the way the DA’s office has run under Earle’s administration. “There are so many things we’re doing well,” she says.  “There’s no need to fix what’s not broken.”

-- John Council and Mary Alice Robbins