299th

When the Travis County returns showed 55% of the vote counted and their candidate for the county's 299th District Court, Karen Sage, had sealed her win, the candidate's supporters erupted into cheers at the run-off election night party at her campaign headquarters on West 10th Street. It was a modest affair – delivery pizza and wine in paper cups – in the small office just blocks from the courthouse, where Sage's team of campaign workers has toiled for nearly a year to bring Assistant District Attorney Sage onto the bench being vacated by retiring District Judge Charlie Baird. Indeed, Baird was among those who packed into the people-warmed office space – adorned with voting precinct maps and other paraphernalia from the campaign – to congratulate the newest felony judge to the local bench. (Baird also attended Montford's party and said he'd called both candidates Tuesday morning to commend them on their hard-fought campaigns and to wish them good luck on election night.)

Sage moved to Austin less than four years ago but has been campaigning since last summer, when she first announced that she would run for district judge, and her campaign was a study in block-walking and door-knocking. At that point she was running for the 147th court against Austin Police Monitor Cliff Brown; after Baird announced his retirement in December, she switched to this race. (Brown, meanwhile, took the 147th primary in a landslide and faces no GOP opponent in the fall.) At filing deadline, Sage drew three opponents, including former prosecutor-turned-defense attorney Mindy Montford (who ran for D.A. in 2008) – a formidable candidate with high name recognition. Never­the­less, Sage's campaign stuck with the formula it had devised early on: Meet the voters and tell them why you're their candidate.

On Tuesday night, Sage's intense ground game paid off. In the March primary, she came in second – drawing 37% of the vote to Montford's 45% among the four contenders. Yet she easily won the run-off, with an impregnable 57% lead in early voting and ending the night with nearly 59% of the nearly 12,000 people (a little more than half on election day) casting their votes in the only Democratic race on the Travis County ballot. (Turnout, unsurprisingly, was a minuscule 2.1% – only the hardest-core Dems found their ways to the polls.)

At day's end, Sage was tired and excited. "The field – it's all about [working] the field," she said. In fact, she'd worked to get out the vote until 6:40pm, just 20 minutes before the polls closed. "That's the kind of dedication [from] voters that you get when you meet them in the field."

Meanwhile, over at Montford's election night event at the Tavern (just blocks from Sage's festivities – both took place just off the unofficial Lawyer's Mile, the regular stomping grounds of the courthouse crowd), the defeated candidate was surrounded by supporters disappointed to see her March lead evaporate. Montford, who has lived in Austin for three decades and has been practicing law here for well over a decade, was gracious in defeat, her spirits visibly bolstered by the large crowd. (Indeed, the party boasted a number of influential courthouse denizens and officials who lingered despite the race's outcome.) At 9:14pm, Montford called Sage to concede and to wish the victor well. "I'm extremely proud of the volunteers and the grassroots efforts that we put into this; run-offs are very difficult and unpredictable," Montford said. "I commend Karen Sage on her get-out-the-vote effort."