Updating the Houston Mayor’s Race with Five Weeks to Go

With the city general election just five weeks away, let me share my perspective on how the race is unfolding.  One thing we now know is that Council Member Peter Brown used his financial advantage to dominate the air waves in September.  After a small TV buy a few weeks ago, Mr. Brown has had a robust media program the last couple of weeks.  City Controller Annise Parker has just debuted her first television ad, and former City Attorney Gene Locke has yet to hit the big screen so Peter Brown has had the screen to himself.  Television advertising is much more effective when your opponents are not on the air, so this development should help tighten the race up, since as readers of this blog know, I thought Ms. Parker and Mr. Locke had the easier track to a December runoff than Council Member Brown.   We have not had any recent public polls, so just how much Peter Brown’s ads have moved the needle is largely conjecture, but I still think Parker and Locke have the advantage in the fight for one of the top two spots.

Public interest may finally be picking up a bit, but I still think turnout will lag well behind 2003, when 304,907 ballots were cast in the city.  Two reasons I continue to think turnout will be low is that the major candidates do not disagree much on the major issues facing the city, nor have they gone after each other personally, in sharp contrast to the looming Texas governor race between Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and incumbent Rick Perry.  This makes sense in a non-partisan multi-candidate field where a runoff is extremely likely, because no one wins the job on November 3^rd, so the survivors will need endorsements and new supporters to prevail in the December finale.

Shifting gears, I was a panelist on a three-hour radio show Saturday morning that former Council Member Ada Edwards organized.   I thought all three serious candidates performed well (Harris County Board of Education Trustee Roy Morales skipped the event).  They stated their respective cases effectively, and with a good deal more passion than I observed at a forum three months ago.   They are clearly knowledgeable about city government, bullish on Houston’s future, and promised to move the city forward without dwelling much on the details of just how this will be done.  They avoided talking about the likely hard choices the next mayor is going to face in a deteriorating fiscal environment.  Nothing new here.  Candidates promise.  Office-holders have to choose. And their choices are often between unattractive options, the discussion of which before an election would lose not win votes. 

Early voting starts in three weeks, on Monday October 19^th.  Two things to watch is how many people turn out in the 12 day period, and where the vote is heavy or light compared to 2003 when we had the Sylvester Turner-Bill White-Orlando Sanchez contest.  Six years ago, 84,994 early and absentee ballots were counted, or 28 percent of the total vote.  My guess is that early voting will start very slowly this year, because many Houstonians have not been following the contest, know little about the candidates, and will wait to cats their ballots the last couple of days of early voting, or on November 3^rd.

For the statistically inclined, here are some numbers from representative precincts across the city in 2003 to use for comparisons this year:

Pct   Nature of      Registered         Early         Election        Total        %

No.   Precinct       Voters in 2003    Voters      Day Voters    Vote     Turnout

 

003   Heights         1878                143             609              752        40.0

 

060   Montrose       2434               167             674               841         34.5

 

234   Westside Anglo   3330         508              1133           1641          49.3

 

306   Clear Lake     1859              349               442             791          42.6

 

469   Kingwood      3613              503                879           1382          38.3

 

046   Hispanic/       2814             106                495             601          21.4              

  Northside

 

031   Black/          2456                242              455             697          28.4

        Sunnyside

 

156   Black/         3463                 535              745           1284          37.1

        MLK Area

Note the 2003 vote pattern – highest in white Republican areas (Westside/Clear Lake/Kingwood) and the Heights, followed by Montrose and the African American precincts, with heavily Hispanic precinct 46 having the lowest turnout.  This raises the questions of whether the Republican areas will vote so heavily in a mayoral election without a credible candidate from their party, and if these areas do turn out, for whom will they cast their ballots?

Dr. Richard Murray