We’re still more than a year out from the 2023 election, but we are now up to three serious conteners for Mayor, plus two others in the wild, so the finance reports are beginning to generate some real interest. The January 2022 reports are here, the July 2021 reports are here.
Candidate Raised Spent Loan On Hand
====================================================
Turner 209,950 129,870 0 802,194
Peck 19,100 19,457 5,000 24,057
Jackson 17,400 11,330 0 33,436
Kamin 86,461 14,691 0 193,807
E-Shabazz 8,000 5,591 0 17,691
Martin 2,500 18,138 0 151,767
Thomas 5,750 2,887 0 51,761
Huffman 45,350 45,284 0 30,697
Cisneros 13,500 1,164 0 38,094
Gallegos 27,050 14,126 0 127,933
Pollard 286,341 11,800 40,000 716,441
C-Tatum 51,950 16,089 0 154,697
Knox 18,425 10,266 0 37,185
Robinson 67,675 17,595 0 247,700
Kubosh 14,000 31,141 196,000 59,273
Plummer 6,417 8,175 33,010
Alcorn 38,305 17,321 0 178,429
Brown 500 4,849 75,000 34,861
Hollins 1,123,316 138,079 0 941,155
Edwards 789,227 96,378 0 712,066
As a reminder, no links to individual reports here because the city’s system generates PDF downloads, and I don’t have the time to rename and upload and share them. Next year, when there are candidates, I’ll do that. Not this time.
All of the current officeholders submitted reports in a timely fashion this period. The only oddity was with the report for CM Letitia Plummer, which did not list an amount raised on either the summary or section totals pages. She clearly did raise some money, as a perusal of the rest of the report shows, but didn’t include a total for it anywhere. I didn’t feel like tallying it up myself, so I left the mystery in place. The only non-officeholders of interest to file reports are the two 2023 Mayoral candidates listed at the bottom, who made a decent splash with their unprecedented totals for this point in the cycle. While he did not file a city of Houston report yet, and while there is some uncertainty about how much he can move from his state account, Sen. John Whitmire had $9.7 million on hand as of July 15. Even if he can only transfer, say, 25% of that, it’s a lot of cash to start out with.
We must once again talk about the finance report for Ed Pollard, who I will say again must be planning something for his future because there is absolutely no need for this level of fundraising for his re-election campaign in District J. I had speculated that maybe he was aiming for a Mayoral campaign, but at this point that seems less likely – I can’t rule it out, but there’s already a big field of well-financed players, and Pollard would be the least known and tied for least-funded among them. Maybe next time, or maybe something in 2024? Or maybe he just really likes fundraising? Who knows.
Other than that, honestly kind of a boring set of reports. Things should start to get more interesting with the January 2023 reports – if nothing else, I’d expect to see a few new names. I’ll skip the HISD and HCC reports this cycle so look for those next January as well. I’ll round up a few state reports of interest for next time. Let me know what you think.
