Triana has been a judge at every level Texas has — city court, justice of the peace, county court, 14 years running a district court, and now the appeals bench — and when Texas lawyers were polled on this race, they picked her over the sitting Republican justice. A mother of five, she started out prosecuting domestic-violence cases.
The Texas-born daughter of Cuban refugees, she went to UT San Antonio and UT Law, co-founded a small criminal-and-family-law firm, and then spent 23 years on trial benches in Travis County, where she was known for clearing a backlog nobody else could. She trains other judges across the state on protective orders. Her opponent, Brett Busby, was put on the court by Abbott in 2019 before he'd ever won a statewide vote.
Judges aren't allowed to take sides on these values — it's against judicial ethics rules. The best clue to how a judge thinks is the party they run with.