PREVIOUSLY:
Mayor’s race
Controller’s race
Harris Health bond referendum
At Large #1
At Large #2
At Large #3
At Large #4
Returning to this as promised for the November elections. I will be doing the same for the runoffs shortly, as the data is now available.
Dist Alcorn Batteau Hernandez
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A 8,788 2,126 4,230
B 7,634 3,685 2,747
C 25,524 3,829 5,914
D 11,193 5,194 3,578
E 11,141 3,461 6,100
F 3,957 1,487 2,280
G 18,781 3,077 4,559
H 8,277 1,845 5,637
I 5,592 1,969 4,963
J 3,367 1,111 1,920
K 9,636 2,831 3,291
Dist Alcorn Batteau Hernandez
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A 58.03% 14.04% 27.93%
B 54.27% 26.20% 19.53%
C 72.37% 10.86% 16.77%
D 56.06% 26.02% 17.92%
E 53.82% 16.72% 29.47%
F 51.23% 19.25% 29.52%
G 71.09% 11.65% 17.26%
H 52.52% 11.71% 35.77%
I 44.65% 15.72% 39.63%
J 52.63% 17.36% 30.01%
K 61.15% 17.97% 20.88%
This is what you call a dominating performance. Sallie Alcorn won a majority in every district except I, and still won a plurality there. She stomped her two opponents (a perennial and a guy whose name I never bothered to learn) in Districts C and G. Some credit here has to go to Alcorn’s performance as a Council member – she is, by all accounts, one of the best; well-informed, hard working, responsive, you name it. Some credit goes to her incumbency, which gives her a leg up in name recognition; she also had the good luck to draw two non-entities as her opponents, unlike her colleague Letitia Plummer, who drew a much more prominent perennial candidate as her main challenger. Some credit goes to the fact that she raised enough money to advertise, which goes again to name recognition. This is as good a combination as you could want.
One thing that I think was consistent in these At Large races, which has been a theme for some time now, is that especially in a large field the candidates are not at all well known to the voters. With that noted, I want to bring up a comment left on an earlier post asking why the city doesn’t move to holding its elections in even-numbered years, which would once and for all take care of the anemic turnout we get. As I noted in my reply, this was a question recently raised by Houston Landing writer Maggie Gordon. To quote myself:
My main concern is that having city elections at the same time as the Presidential elections is it would totally drown out the local races. Nobody knows who’s running for the At Large seats now, it would be a total crapshoot in an even year. It would also mean that HISD and HCC elections are completely orphaned in the odd years, or we’d have to move them as well and make them even more obscure. Oh, and it would make our already super-long ballots that much longer.
I’m not opposed to this idea. I’d most likely vote for it right now. I’m just saying there would be downstream effects that we ought to think about before we make such a move.
Having them in the non-Presidential years would slightly address the drowning-out issue, but remember that the off years have even longer ballots, as there are more judicial races on them. My point in bringing this up here is that the lawsuit to end At Large Council seats is still out there. I think that suit is an underdog, but if the plaintiffs somehow prevail, then I at least would be more amenable to moving our city elections to even-numbered years. For one thing, we’d only be casting three votes in those elections instead of eight, and for another I feel like we’d be less likely to know little to nothing about the candidates in any of those races. Be that as it may, I’m glad we were still able to elect Sallie Alcorn to an At Large position. She remains one of the best arguments in favor of keeping things as they are now.
I will do an analysis of the two city propositions next, and then move on to the runoffs. Let me know what you think.
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