Mayor John Whitmire
A much-hyped effort to recall Houston Mayor John Whitmire from office — the subject of multiple news stories and social media posts over the past year — fell significantly short of its goal as the 30-day window closed this week.
According to organizer Ethan Hale, canvassers collecting signatures returned “just over 2,000 or so — something like that.”
In order to place the recall question before voters, the campaign needed to collect more than 63,000 signatures in 30 days.
The campaign raised less than $5,000 of a $100,000 goal and relied heavily on volunteers.
“I think we knew the odds were not exactly in our favor, and I think we were more so hoping more of our volunteers would turn out, but didn’t really happen that way,” Hale told Houston Public Media.
Hale and his fellow organizers used harsh language in their attacks on Whitmire, branding him a “fascist” and lambasting a range of his policy positions. In particular, they criticized the administration’s increased budget for the police department as most other departments saw cuts, and they opposed his more car-centric approach to transportation infrastructure compared to his predecessor, the late Sylvester Turner.
Whitmire previously called the effort “silly,” and his spokesperson did not comment on the shortfall this week.
Brandon Rottinghaus, professor of political science at the University of Houston, led research with his students on recall efforts across the country. A major takeaway: organizers were rarely successful, with the researchers finding only 56 recalls from 2007 to 2022.
“The organization for recall elections tends to be pretty robust — you’ve got a lot of people out canvassing, you’ve got door-to-door walkers, you’ve got money behind it, and you’ve got a real message,” Rottinghaus said. “It’s not clear that those things happened in this case, and so as a result, that’s the recipe for how recall election efforts fail.”
See here for the previous update. I’m not going to relitigate why the recall was doomed to fail – I think I’ve been pretty clear from the beginning why this was not a serious effort – but as someone who is not a fan of this Mayor, all this pratfall does is make the rest of us look bad, too. And I resent that. Get your act together before you go forth with something like this or don’t go forth at all. This wasn’t a noble failure, the kind you can learn from and build on. It was just a mess.
That said, I will take issue with this:
The flaccid effort to recall Whitmire from office and Hale’s failed run for office weren’t the only disappointments for opponents of the mayor this week. Former city council chief of staff Jordan Thomas — a progressive urbanist who framed his bid for the at-large city council seat as a potential challenge to Whitmire — came in third with 16% of the vote.
“I think it’s a bit disappointing how things ended with Jordan Thomas,” Hale said. “I think for a lot of us fighting the mayor, it’s very disappointing.”
Rottinghaus, however, said Thomas’ campaign “didn’t lose, it just ran out of time.”
“If there was momentum, it tended to be late, and that often doesn’t get the job done,” he said. “In a relatively short primary with low turnout, it’s a hard thing to get attention to a relatively unknown candidate. … Thomas was fighting an uphill battle against two fairly well established opponents.”
I agree with Prof. Rottinghaus here. Jordan Thomas, a young first-time candidate with little money, exceeded my expectations. I’ve seen candidates like him fail to break five percent in the past. There were multiple candidates that have run for office before, some multiple times, that he surpassed. He’s in a pretty good position to have an influence on the runoff, if he wants to. This right here, that’s something you can build on. Make of that what you will.