Good.
Gina Ortiz Jones
San Antonio’s next mayor will be Gina Ortiz Jones, a 44-year-old West Side native who rose from John Jay High School to the top ranks of the U.S. military on an ROTC scholarship.
Jones defeated Rolando Pablos, a close ally of Texas GOP leaders, 54.3% to 45.7% Saturday night in a high-profile, bitterly partisan runoff.
Thanks to new longer terms that voters approved in November, this year’s mayor and council winners will be the first to serve four-year terms before they must seek reelection.
The closely watched runoff came after Jones took a commanding 10-percentage-point lead in last month’s 27-candidate mayoral election, but weathered nearly $1 million in attacks from Pablos and his Republican allies.
At the Dakota East Side Ice House, a beaming Jones said she was proud of a campaign that treated people with dignity and respect.
She also said she was excited that San Antonio politics could deliver some positivity in an otherwise tumultuous news cycle.
“With everything happening around us at the federal level and at the state level, some of the most un-American things we have seen in a very, very long time, it’s very heartening to see where we are right now,” she said shortly after the early results came in.
When it became clear the results would hold, Jones returned to remark that “deep in the heart of Texas,” San Antonio voters had reminded the world that it’s a city built on “compassion.”
Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” blared over the speakers to the roughly 250 supporters celebrating with drinks on a hot spring evening.
At Pablos’ watch party, he said Jones’ overwhelming victory surprised him. The conservative Northside votes he was counting on to carry him didn’t wind up materializing.
“The fact is that San Antonio continues to be a blue city,” Pablos told reporters at the Drury Inn & Suites’ Old Spanish Ballroom near La Cantera. “This [race] became highly partisan, and today it showed.”
I was not following this very closely, partly because of the end of the legislative session, but in the last week or so there were concerns being expressed about Ortiz Jones underperforming, Pablos generating a bunch of excitement among Republican voters, and on and on. There was a lot of money being poured into the race, former Mayor Ron Nirenberg and many of the Democratic former Mayoral candidates declined to endorse in the runoff, Pablos is a Greg Abbott minion – the avalanche of takes that would have followed a Pablos victory would have swept us all into the Ship Channel. I found this reaction from one of the race-watchers to be particularly interesting.
Some 17% of San Antonio’s registered voters turned out for Saturday’s runoff, rivaling the turnout for the hotly contested 2021 matchup between Mayor Ron Nirenberg and Greg Brockhouse. The number far exceeded analysts’ expectations.
“Originally, it looked like Pablos did a good job getting people to turn out in early voting, but [Jones] actually won that by a lot — and she also won election-day voting,” UTSA political scientist Jon Taylor told the Current. “I’m truly surprised.”
Despite his close alignment to Abbott, who’s unpopular in San Antonio, Pablos portrayed himself not as a culture warrior but as a fiscal conservative focused on economic development, crime and poverty reduction.
“I will continue to serve this community with pride,” Pablos told supporters at his campaign watch party. “We want the best for this community and for our families.”
While Jones racked up a convincing victory, her campaign was anything but smooth sailing.
The candidate took heat for not speaking to the media following the May 3 general election, and the Pablos campaign raised allegations that she used her cell phone to cheat during a televised debate.
Although outside partisan money flowed into both races, Pablos had a considerable financial advantage and the backing of a deep-pocketed Abbott-tied PAC. The candidate and his allies used that funding for $1 million in ad buys, including a spate of negative spots about Jones.
However, in the end, the Jones campaign brought together a diverse, citywide coalition that erased the spending difference, UTSA’s Taylor said. During her watch party, Jones thanked a litany of progressive organizations ranging from the Texas Organizing Project to Vote Vets to San Antonio LGBTQ+ groups for getting out the vote.
“They had a really good mobilization effort, and they brought in a lot of organizations that are really good at getting people to the polls,” Taylor said.
What’s more, anger about the Trump administration’s increasingly extreme immigration policies, combined with concerns about what some speculate is the homophobic killing of San Antonio actor Jonathan Joss, may have boosted Election Day turnout in Jones’ favor, Taylor speculated.
“Those issues came up late [and] I’m not sure they impacted all the voters, but it was definitely in the background,” he said. “I think ultimately, this a blue city, and we defaulted to a blue candidate for mayor.”
I for one would like to get a better understanding of why the early vote seemingly looked (*) much better for Pablos than it turned out to be. I’m willing to bet a reasonable number of the early voters have a primary voting history, so was there something off about the data or was it just misinterpreted? I don’t want to overinterpret anything, I just want to understand what the surprise was.
Be that as it may, congratulations to Mayor-elect Gina Ortiz Jones. I wish you all the best over the next four years. The Current has more.
(*) From that Downballot story:
The lone public poll of the runoff, released on Thursday by the Democratic firm Chism Strategies, simultaneously offered hope and flashed warning signs for Jones. The survey found Jones ahead 50-41, but among those who said they’d already voted, Jones was up just 49-47. Early voters, says the pollster, “were significantly more Republican” in the second round compared to the first, making it harder for Jones to make up ground on Election Day, when the electorate tends to lean to the right.
It’s very hard to poll low-turnout races, because it’s difficult to accurately model what the electorate looks like. This poll was actually quite accurate, as it would predict something like a 55-45 race, which is very close to the final result. It was on the “already voted” sample where it was less accurate; sample size probably had something to do with that. I’m sure that part of the result colored people’s perspectives on the early vote, whereas if it had just been “Ortiz Jones leads by nine in this one poll” it likely would have drawn a shrug. I’d put it down as yet another reason to limit how far one should go with a single poll result, especially on a smaller sample.