This is the first of four profiles the Tribune is writing about the Republican candidates for attorney general. For more information on the primaries and the voting process, check out our guides and news coverage here.

BELTON — On stage at a community center an hour outside Austin, Joan Huffman cuts a sharp contrast with her opponents in the Republican primary for attorney general.

It’s not just that she’s the only woman in the race, or that she’s been in public service longer than some of the other candidates have been alive. It’s her message.

“I’m going to be a law follower and a rule follower,” Huffman told the Central Texas Republican Women’s luncheon in January. “Always have been, and I always will be.”

Huffman’s understated pitch based on her decades of experience as a prosecutor, judge and state senator is novel only when compared to the incendiary, boundary-pushing current occupant of the office — and the other candidates vying to outdo him.

At the forum, Huffman’s fellow senator, Mayes Middleton declared this race a “spiritual battle” between the left and the right, “the light against the dark.” Aaron Reitz, a former top aide to Attorney General Ken Paxton, cast himself as a warrior fighting against forces that “want to ruin your life, take away your money, destroy your family, brainwash your kids, ruin the economy [and] ruin our way of life.”

After nearly a dozen of these forums, Huffman gets a little tired of the bombast. The other candidates vow to destroy left-leaning district attorneys, who they believe are too soft on crime and don’t do enough to enforce right-wing priorities like voter fraud. Huffman actually wrote the law making it easier to remove local prosecutors, which is how she knows it will be harder to accomplish than they like to claim.

“There’s a certain number of people who love the, ‘We’re going after everyone,’ and they’re not stopping to think, ‘Oh, how’s that really gonna happen?’” she told The Texas Tribune after the forum. “But I hope and I pray and I believe that people do … want someone who’s steady and firm and has knowledge of working government and is telling us the truth about the limitations of the role.”

An old-school, law-and-order Republican from Houston, Huffman has climbed the ranks of the increasingly conservative Senate to become one of the body’s most influential lawmakers. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has put her in charge of the budget and redistricting, and she’s led the chamber on criminal justice issues, including recently toughening Texas’ bail laws.

Huffman is running on her record of public service and respect for the rule of law, once prerequisites to be Texas’ top lawyer. But she’s lagging in the polls, as well as fundraising and key endorsements, raising the question: In 2026, is even-keeled experience what Republican voters want for the largest red-state attorney general’s office in the country?

Even Huffman herself isn’t sure.

“It’s hard to read at this point,” she said after the forum. “But I am who I am, and I have the experience I have. So I’ll just keep showing up and making the case.”

Tough on crime

Huffman’s road to this race began in 1981, when she moved to Texas to work as a secretary at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. In the basement of the courthouse, processing criminal cases, she fell in love with the law.

She put herself through law school and returned to work in the same office where she got her start, rising to chief felony prosecutor for a county larger than many states. She handled over 100 jury trials, including death penalty cases, and embedded with the police department on gang and narcotics task forces.

In 1998, she ran for district judge as a Republican, leaning into her background as a prosecutor at a time when both parties were aggressively pushing lock-em-up messaging. The GOP swept the countywide judicial elections that year, putting Huffman on the criminal court bench for the first of two terms, during which she made good on campaign promises to be tough on crime.

When she ran for the state Senate in a special election in 2008, she emphasized her law-and-order background and good relationships with law enforcement, despite her lack of political experience.

“It was a nasty fight and they weren’t so sure about me,” she said recently in an interview with Texas Scorecard.“I was new and just hadn’t been part of legislative circles or the establishment circles.”

Huffman won in a low-turnout runoff. In her five terms since, she pursued tough-on-crime policies, putting her at odds with Democrats and even some criminal justice reform Republicans. She tried to kill a proposal to review wrongful convictions, pushed back against a bill to seal the records of teenagers who commit petty crimes, worked to shield the manufacturers of lethal injection drugs, successfully barred cities from cutting funding to law enforcement and increased penalties for a range of violent crimes and drug trafficking offenses.

Cracking down on crime has traditionally played well with GOP voters. But for a hyper-partisan, nationally influential role like Texas attorney general, it’s not as attention-grabbing as the cultural issues her opponents are serving up about using the office to target undocumented immigrants, Muslims and trans people.

“Nobody is campaigning on being soft on criminals,” said University of Houston political scientist Richard Murray. “So how do you distinguish yourself? That’s where we get candidates running on ‘I’m going to be tougher on Sharia law.’”

The other candidates in this race have tried to paint Huffman as part of the establishment, a RINO — Republican In Name Only, despite her reliable party line vote in the ultraconservative Senate. When she entered the race, Reitz sniped that the “liberals now have their candidate,” a charge he has continued to assail her with throughout the campaign.

On certain issues, Huffman has run to the middle, at least compared to the far-right campaigns of her opponents. While they rail against disregarding “judicial activism,” she stresses that the state must follow court rulings, even if leaders disagree with how they were decided. Like the others, she’s down to sue big business — but judiciously, she caveats, and in a way that doesn’t imperil the state’s pro-business landscape.

She’s also the only candidate to say Texas cannot enforce its laws, like abortion bans, outside of state lines, noting that Paxton’s “passion” for pursuing these cases has yielded little but judicial smackdowns and retaliatory lawsuits from other states.

This criticism, however gentle, of Paxton is similarly a marked departure from the rest of the field. While the other candidates vow to follow in Paxton’s highly politicized footsteps, Huffman has been circumspect about his oversight of the office.

“It is time to shake things up. Look at how everything’s being handled. Look at who is in charge,” she said at the Belton forum. “And again, ask the question, how can we make it better? How can we better serve Texans?”

Reitz has homed in on this insufficient allegiance to Paxton, claiming she was instrumental in the effort to impeach him in 2023. As the Tribune and others reported at the time, Huffman was one of five Republican senators, including Middleton, considering voting to convict Paxton; in the end, she and Middleton both voted to acquit. Huffman has denied that her vote changed during deliberations, but Reitz, who is endorsed by his former boss, has continued to depict her as a Paxton obstructionist.

U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin, is currently leading the pack by a wide margin, with Huffman, Middleton and Reitz vying to force a runoff. But with low name recognition and a sedate campaign focused on the efficacy of the office, Huffman faces an uphill battle with the small subset of particularly politically active Republicans who turn out for the primary.

“The campaign Huffman is running looks a lot like a good general election campaign, where you’ve got voters that are much less partisan and want somebody running the AG’s office based on their competence,” Murray said. “But, perhaps sadly, there’s not a hell of a lot of those voters likely to be participating in the primary.”

A prosecutor’s attorney general

As a former criminal prosecutor and judge, Huffman is proposing significantly beefing up the criminal investigation and prosecution arms of the attorney general’s office. It’s an atypical proposition for an agency mostly limited to handling civil cases.

The Texas Constitution gives district attorneys complete authority over criminal proceedings, and courts have repeatedly upheld that the attorney general must get their permission before wading into local cases. Historically, the agency has helped local officials handle complex or politically fraught cases that could otherwise overwhelm a smaller office.

But lately, even that limited role has diminished, some prosecutors say.

“We don’t have any type of collaborative or cooperative working relationship, not of great substance,” said Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot.

In recent years, Republican elected officials have been increasingly at odds with prosecutors in the state’s largest, left-leaning counties. In 2022, a handful of district attorneys said they would not enforce the state’s abortion laws, and similar tensions have arisen over unproven allegations of voter fraud and prosecuting low-level drug offenses.

Paxton has railed against “rogue DAs” and demanded access to their case files, a proposal the all-Republican 15th Court of Appeals rejected. Huffman’s opponents have similarly vowed to “rein in” and “destroy” local prosecutors, rallying around the idea of using an untested legal tool to remove them from office.

Huffman has done her share of flaming uncooperative district attorneys. In 2023, she passed a bill that allowed Texans to file removal petitions against prosecutors who refused to take on whole categories of cases, like abortion-related crimes. In 2024, a judge dismissed one of these removal petitions filed against Travis County District Attorney Jose Garza, a perennial target of the right.

But on the campaign trail, Huffman focuses on rebuilding trust and making the attorney general’s office a resource local officials want to reach out to. She’d like to better equip the office to help local agencies handle more complex crimes, like financial fraud or transnational gangs, and create regional task forces to enhance communication between the state and local governments.

“I’m not trying to usurp the powers from the locals at all,” she said. “I want to be a compliment to them and for them to be willing to ask for help.”

Huffman’s conciliatory approach is playing well with law enforcement, as well as some prosecutors and sheriffs. Creuzot, who is backing state Sen. Nathan Johnson in the Democratic attorney general primary, said he has great respect for Huffman and appreciates her collaborative nature.

Waller County District Attorney Sean Whittmore, who previously worked at the attorney general’s office, has endorsed Huffman. As district attorney in a booming county west of Houston, he has worked with the attorney general’s office on complicated cases, including a major abortion arrest. But he doesn’t want the state to be able to charge into his backyard without checking first.

“There’s a reason the Texas Constitution is structured that way,” he said. “I always think it’s ironic when it’s Republicans trying to take prosecution away from local prosecutors. One of the tenants of Republicanism has always been local control, and so when they want to centralize prosecutions in Austin, I don’t think that’s necessarily in the best interest of everyone involved.”

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