San Antonio residents are set to choose the city’s new mayor in a runoff election this Saturday.
There were 27 candidates in the original race in May to replace Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who reached his term limit in the office. None of the candidates on that very long ballot received the majority of votes, so the two candidates with the highest percentages moved forward to this runoff.
Former Under Secretary of the U.S. Air Force and two-time Democratic Congressional candidate Gina Ortiz Jones received the highest vote count with more than 27% of the total. She’ll face former Republican Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos, who earned more than 16% of the vote.
Josh Peck, who covers city hall for Texas Public Radio in San Antonio, said Ortiz Jones has been emphasizing her liberal credentials on the campaign trail.
“She’s really put herself out there as someone who can be a more progressive option for mayor. She has endorsements from a large array of Democratic officials,” Peck said.
“She said that she’s going to take San Antonio into a compassionate direction and has been really using her opponent, Rolando Pablos, as an example of what she won’t do. She says that he is tied to Gov. Greg Abbott and using that as a cudgel against him as something that San Antonio won’t want in their city.”
Pablos, on the other hand, has focused on being a conservative rather than a Republican Party member, Peck said.
“(This race) is officially a nonpartisan race, but he was the Republican Texas Secretary of State under Gov. Greg Abbott, and his campaign slogan,on all of his signs and his website have been ‘Fiscal Conservative,’” Peck said.
“He’s been pitching himself as someone who has connections to the state government and to the business community that can be a benefit to San Antonio. He has said that more liberal progressive policies like the abortion travel fund that San Antonio passed, these things draw the ire of state government, which puts San Antonio in the crosshairs that it doesn’t want to be in, and that he offers a path of collaboration and partnership with state and national leaders.”
Despite the fact that the mayor’s race is nonpartisan, meaning party labels do not appear on the ballot next to candidate’s names, Peck said it’s hard to ignore the role national party politics has played in this contest.
“Ortiz Jones and Pablos are both outsiders to local San Antonio politics. We had three city council members run and a former city council member run, and yet none of them even broke the top three in the vote share,” Peck said. “That could be a lot of things – people could be dissatisfied with the city government. People may just not know the city councilpersons, but I think the kind of attention that both Gina Ortiz Jones and Rolando Pablos were able to get as a result of their connections to the party establishments, the Republican and Democratic parties, I think goes a long way to explain their big one and two in May.”
» GET MORE NEWS FROM AROUND THE STATE: Sign up for Texas Standard’s weekly newsletters
These connections have also come with funding, Peck said.
“Pablos has pulled in, through a political action committee that supports conservatives in Texas and Republicans in Texas, over a million dollars that this political action committee has raised on his behalf. They’ve spent $600,000 just in this runoff, which is more than Gina Ortiz Jones has raised in total,” Peck said.
“That comes from being connected to Republican politics. You can say the same for Ortiz Jones, who has donations from the likes of the Nancy Pelosi campaign, Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Joaquin Castro’s campaign.”
Polls will be open on Saturday from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m.
“If you’re there after 7 p.m. passes, you’re in line, you can stay in line to vote. This is gonna be a low-turnout election, which means that every vote counts that much more,” Peck said. “So hopefully everyone can get out there and vote to make sure that their voice is heard.”
