How a Latina judge mockingly called ‘Dora’ by conservative critics could change the outcome of the election

Harris County has tripled early voting sites and kept polling stations open 24 hours a day

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo  (EPA-EFE)

Monday may well be the real day the election is won or lost. 

It’s the day a federal judge will hear arguments from wealthy GOP activists and politicians to throw out the ballots of 127,000 Harris County residents, leaving them just hours to scramble back to the polls and recast their votes.

The move is the latest tactic from Republicans to quash voter turnout in the third largest county in the US and most populous county in Texas in a year that has seen record numbers head to the polls, threatening to turn America’s largest red state blue.

Last week, Texas cemented its position as a key battleground state when the number of early votes soared past the total number of votes cast in the entire 2016 election.

More than nine million residents had voted by Thursday with still one day of early voting to go as well as election day voting.

Included in this tally was the roughly 1.4 million voters who turned up in Harris County, home to Houston, thanks to the mission of a 29-year-old female Colombian immigrant to energize Latino and young voters.

Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo has tripled early voting sites, kept polling stations open 24- hours a day and launched drive-thru voting so residents can cast their votes safely from their vehicles as the pandemic rumbles on.

It’s a plan that has appeared to have worked with the largely Democrat county beating its own record for turnout, something that is expected to work to Joe Biden’s advantage.

Such is the threat to the state’s GOP stronghold that Republicans - including donor Steven Hotze who pushed for the unsuccessful ‘bathroom bill’ to take away the rights of transgender Texans to use public restrooms – have asked state and federal courts to throw out all drive- thru votes.

That the Republicans are trying to throw cold water on Ms Hidalgo’s efforts should perhaps come as little surprise.

Ever since she took on – and beat – 11-year Republican judge Ed Emmett to take the county’s top elective position as a then-27-year-old in 2018, Ms Hidalgo has had to endure racially inflammatory comments about her Latino roots.

In 2019, Republican Chambers County Commissioner Mark Tice told her to “speak English” saying “this is not Mexico” as she delivered updates on the Deer Park chemical fire in both English and Spanish.

Other critics have cruelly labelled her Dora, after the Latina character in kid’s TV show Dora the Explorer.

Ms Hidalgo’s Latina roots and progressive politics certainly set her apart from the white middle-aged Republican politicians synonymous with the state for decades (Republicans have won the majority of every presidential election since 1976).

Born in Colombia in 1991, Ms Hidalgo witnessed firsthand the violence and corruption in the country growing up.

“You couldn’t go to the grocery store without worrying about a bomb,” she later recalled in 201. 

“Everyone knew somebody who had been kidnapped.”

Her family then moved to Peru when she was five before moving again - this time to Houston – when she was 14 and

In 2013, Ms Hidalgo became a US citizen. The talented student also earned a place at Stanford University where she studied political science before she moved to Myanmar to work for a nonprofit.

On her return to Texas in 2015 she started volunteering for the Texas Civil Rights Project working on civil rights cases including identifying the remains of migrants who died after crossing the US-Mexico border and seeking justice for the family of a young Latino man who committed suicide in prison.

She then started a joint master’s program studying public policy at Harvard University and law at New York University before she put it on hold to set her sights on the county judge seat.

Ms Hidalgo has often said she has Donald Trump to thank for her move into politics.

When Mr Trump was elected she was just 26 and had never considered politics as a career option, she said at the time.

But this all changed after she heard Mr Trump speaking disparagingly about women and minorities and grew concerned about the divisiveness is he was sowing across America.

But no one expected the underdog to win the race for the county judge seat against the Republican incumbent with a large war chest.

Of course everyone was wrong and Ms Hidalgo took 49.7 percent of the vote, making her both the first woman and the first Latina to take the county’s top job.

During her tenure, the 29-year-old Democrat has made something of a habit of going up against Texas Republicans including taking on and eventually winning against governor Greg Abbott over the state’s coronavirus response.

 While governor Mr Abbott refused to tell Texans to wear masks for months and rushed to reopen the state as cases and deaths soared, many have seen Ms Hidalgo – armed with the facts – as the state’s real leader in how best to handle the health crisis.

On 16 March, after being in office just 15 months, she led the way in shuttering bars and restaurants in the county, with Mr Abbott following suit for the state three days later.

In April, Ms Hidalgo then issued a mask mandate in Harris County, warning people would be slapped with fines of up to $1,000 (£773).

“If we get cocky, if we get sloppy, we get right back to where we started and all of the sacrifices people have been making have been in vain,” she said at the time.

She faced the scorn of several senior Republicans, with US representative Dan Crenshaw calling the order ‘draconian’ and Mr Abbott saying just hours later that local officials could not enforce mask mandates across the state.

But Ms Hidalgo refused to be pushed around and while the governor lifted the state’s stay-at-home orders and claimed the pandemic was all but over, the judge extended the county’s.

Mr Abbott was left with metaphorical egg on his face after a Covid-19 surge in the state left hospitals on the brink of collapse, and he was forced to backpedal reopening plans and finally tell Texans to wear masks.

Now Ms Hidalgo is taking on the Republicans once again.

Under her watch, the county has spent $31m (£23.9m) on the elections – dwarfing the $4m (£3.09m) spent in 2016 – focusing on making voting accessible to all residents to encourage historical abstainers to make their votes count.

This includes the now-contested drive-thru voting sites that make up 10 of the 120 early voting sites and almost 9 per cent of all votes cast in the county.

“What we’re seeing is, when you build it, they come,” Ms Hidalgo told NBC News.

The official line being argued by GOP activists and politicians opposing the ballots in court this week: it violates the US constitution.

Ms Hidalgo’s line: “Voters’ fundamental right to vote is being put at risk for the sake of political gains by the incumbent party”. 

Once again, Ms Hidalgo is ready to take on the GOP. And if she wins, she may well swing the entire presidential election.