Morning Digest: The mayor's race in Texas' second-biggest city heads to a runoff
Republicans haven't won the post since 1995, but a PAC with links to Greg Abbott is spending heavily
Leading Off
San Antonio, TX Mayor
The race to serve as the next mayor of San Antonio, Texas, will head to a runoff between Democrat Gina Ortiz Jones and Republican Rolando Pablos after no contender in the 27-candidate field came close to the 50% needed on Saturday to avert a second round of voting.
Ortiz Jones, who lost a pair of close races for Congress in 2018 and 2020, led the pack with 27% of the vote, while Pablos, a former Texas secretary of state, landed in second with 16%. Businessman Beto Altamirano, another Democrat, finished third with 12%, while a quartet of Democrats on the city council took the next four slots in Saturday's officially nonpartisan race.
The two frontrunners both benefited from sizable outside spending on paid media, the San Antonio Express-News reported before the election. One Democratic super PAC put $100,000 toward Ortiz Jones' bid, while a conservative group with ties to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott—who appointed Pablos as secretary of state in 2017—helped out the GOP's leading candidate with more than $200,000.
All told, candidates aligned with the Democratic Party took 69% of the vote while those "vetted" by the Bexar County Republican Party combined for just 28% (the remaining 3% went to minor candidates without a discernible affiliation).
The aggregate Democratic performance far outstripped the results of last year's presidential race, which saw Donald Trump take about 41% of the vote in San Antonio, which hasn't elected a Republican as mayor since 1995. That should make Ortiz Jones the favorite when she and Pablos meet again on June 7.
However, turnout was very low, with only around 10% of registered voters participating, and Republicans are likely to keep the spigots open for Pablos—who has sought to downplay his partisan ties and links to Abbott. Still, he has just five weeks to make up considerable ground.
Ortiz Jones and Pablos are vying to succeed term-out Mayor Ron Nirenberg, an independent-turned-Democrat who first won office in 2017. Nirenberg hasn't addressed any future political plans yet, but a report last month in NOTUS identified him as a potential Senate candidate.
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Senate
LA-Sen
An internal poll for Sen. Bill Cassidy finds him with a 45-18 lead on state Treasurer John Fleming in next year's Republican primary, with 3% going to Some Dude Randy Arrington and 34% of voters saying they're undecided.
However, the same survey, conducted by Ragnar Research, also shows Cassidy's favorability rating at just 44-34. While Ragnar's memo plays that as a positive, saying the senator's "image is favorable overall," that's a very weak showing with members of Cassidy's own party.
The only other poll we've seen testing a similar matchup was a Fleming internal from late February that had him up 40-27 in a two-way race. MAGA loyalists have had their sights on Cassidy because of his vote to convict Donald Trump following his second impeachment trial, but they have yet to rally around Fleming as their standard-bearer, with several other Republicans still weighing the race.
Governors
FL-Gov
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez tells Axios that he's thinking about running for governor—kinda?
"I'm not saying I'm completely not considering it," the Republican offered. "I certainly have considered it."
Tortured double-negatives aside, Suarez's biggest difficulty is that Donald Trump has already anointed Rep. Byron Donalds as his preferred successor to term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis, and there's little reason to think GOP primary voters have any complaints.
House
FL-27
Former Key Biscayne Mayor Mike Davey, who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nod to take on Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar last year, tells the Key Biscayne Independent he's considering another bid for Florida's 27th District.
Davey lost the 2024 primary to Lucia Baez-Geller by a 54-46 margin, but Baez-Geller went down to a 60-40 defeat at Salazar's hands in November. While the Miami-based 27th District was competitive turf not that long ago, Democrats have suffered badly there in recent years as their support among Latino voters has cratered.
According to new calculations from The Downballot, Donald Trump carried the district by a 57-42 margin last year, a huge jump from 2020, when he won the 27th by less than one point.
Judges
WI Supreme Court
Clark County Judge Lyndsey Boon Brunette, who'd reportedly been considering a bid for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, said on Friday that she won't seek to challenge conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley.
According to an unnamed "source close to Boon Brunette" who spoke with WisPolitics, the would-be candidate demurred because she was worried that a contested primary could undermine liberals in their quest to unseat Bradley in April. The same source said, however, that Boon Brunette was likely to run in 2027, when another conservative justice, Annette Ziegler, will be up for election.
The only liberal candidate still considering the race against Bradley is Court of Appeals Judge Chris Taylor. Should Bradley lose, liberals would expand their majority on the court to 5-2.
The Downballot is a reader-supported publication. If you value our commitment to clear, honest coverage of elections, we’d be incredibly grateful if you’d become a paid subscriber today.
Obituaries
George Ryan
Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, who served four years in office and six years in prison, died on Friday at the age of 91.
Ryan began his political career in the state House in the early 1970s, eventually rising to speaker. In 1982, he was elected lieutenant governor on a ticket with incumbent Jim Thompson and won reelection four years later. Ryan did not seek to succeed Thompson when the governor finally retired in 1990 after four terms but instead ran for secretary of state, winning twice.
It was only in 1998 that Ryan sought the governorship, defeating his Democratic opponent by a 51-47 margin in what proved to be his last race. Ryan made national headlines when he declared a moratorium on executions in 2000 and later commuted many death sentences, but a spiraling corruption scandal that began during his tenure as secretary of state prompted him not to seek reelection.
Ryan was ultimately convicted by a federal jury in 2006 and sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison. He was released in 2013.
Since Florida turning red was being discussed, I feel that the reason why it happened in the first place has simply been gotten wrong by the MSM.
A lot of ink has been spilled over it and the mainstream explanations such as Cuban conservatism (which was always present and rivaled by growth of other liberal voting groups) or other demographic shifts, have always felt somewhat shallow, and even the popular "voter migration" narrative (retirees move there but Florida's median age is still lower than most).
The possibly disproportionate conservative migration was during the entire course of pandemic while the election was in November 2020 and is still built on very limited data (only the voting registration of a small numbers of movers - 300k in the NYT Upshot analysis - are known and and their previous home state registration might not even reflect their votes since decades). Rather than focusing on local narratives, I've based it on broad national trends.
During the oft cited 2000 election, the Democrats' erstwhile Solid South hadn't completely vanished even after 1994 (some areas where the party is completely toxic today still voted for them, college educated voters preferred the GOP and New Deal-era voters were still alive). Democrats were also centre-right compared to the centre-left Democrats of today though that's a different story.
We all know Obama won Florida twice - in 2008 and 2012 - thanks to his unique strength among working-class and rural white voters, as well as some residual loyalty in New Deal-era socially conservative rural counties. These strongholds began to collapse in 2016, shifting states like Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, and Indiana into the Republican column more permanently. Yet Florida was actually closer in 2016 than in 2020: Hillary Clinton only lost by a single percentage point, while Biden - despite increasing investment in the state and improving on Clinton's performance in places like Texas, Iowa, and Ohio – lost by 3.4 points.
Interestingly, Biden improved across almost all demographics nationally but performed worse among Latinos and rural whites. In fact, no Democrat has ever matched Hillary's 2016 performance with Latino voters. Her relative strength is likely attributable to Trump's not yet normalized anti-Latino inflammatory rhetoric at the time and Hillary's solid promise of immigration reform. Hillary even won an estimated 46% of the Cuban vote — a rare high-water mark for Democrats with a group that barely voted for Gore or Kerry. Hillary also won Latino populated Nevada while losing the remaining swing states.
So here's the core of my theory: Florida was only competitive in 2016 because of a once-in-a-generation showing among Latino voters, including Cubans. That anomaly masked the broader realignment already underway and clearly seen in Ohio or Iowa. Without Obama-era levels of support from rural and working-class whites, Democrats simply could not win the state. If you dig into the precinct-level data, the trend becomes clear: small cities, towns, exurbs, and rural counties have trended increasingly red, while urban centers and suburbs have gone bluer - but not by enough to overcome the former (in 2020). Florida's demographics are also not typically Southern except in North Florida.
https://www.google.com/search?q=2016+presidential+election+county+shift+map&udm=2
https://www.google.com/search?q=2020+presidential+election+county+shift+map&udm=2
This structural Republican dominance isn’t new either. Consider 2010: Democrat Alex Sink lost to Rick Scott , a literal Medicaid fraudster and human ghoul, by just 1 percentage point, yet Republicans won the statewide House vote in Florida by an astonishing 18 points during the Tea Party wave. In 2014, Scott narrowly beat Charlie Crist by just 1 point again, but Republicans carried the House vote by about 12 points. In both cycles, you can see the same story: even when Democrats come close in top-of-ticket races against unpopular nominees, the GOP holds firm control down-ballot.
Now look at 2018, a "blue wave" year nationally. Democrats narrowly lost the governorship when Ron DeSantis beat Andrew Gillum by just 0.4 points. Yet even that close gubernatorial result masked a deeper trend: Florida Republicans still won the U.S. House vote by 6 percentage points statewide. This was a midterm where Democrats were flipping seats across the country - yet Florida stood out as an outlier. Democrats ran a charismatic candidate (atleast at that point) with strong urban turnout and improved among all demographics except Latinos, but it wasn’t enough to counter the entrenched Republican strength in less urban areas, with non college educated white voters. DeSantis was not yet popular and was an average candidate who had seemingly lost the primary until Trump's sudden endorsement.
Maybe, Florida Democrats can get their shit together in 2026-28, the results may be close as 2020 (or 2018 due to midterm electorate differences) with another Latino swing resembling the Biden-Trump spread or maybe a lot of conservatives actually moved there and it will be never reach those margins again. Maybe, they might eke out a victory with a moderate common sense candidate... Also, a lot of COVID era movers have been going back to New England and California since the end of remote work and due to Florida's affordability crisis contributing to the current housing price crash in Florida.
I hope this makes some sense and look forward to hearing what you guys think about this theory.
Edit: Florida is a quarter Latino (in total population not voting population) and is not a majority-minority state like many assume.
Politico: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp will not run for Senate in 2026, according to three people familiar with his decision.
We've won Georgia!