Election wrapup: Houston City Council

As we know, Melissa Noriega came close to getting a clear majority of the vote in yesterday's City Council special election, but fell just short. She will be in a runoff with Roy Morales.

Noriega, a Houston Independent School District special projects manager with strong campaign funding and key support, was widely viewed as the frontrunner in the 11-candidate field. Morales, a member of the Harris County Board of Education, likely benefited from strong name identification because of a previous council run.

The winner of the June 16 runoff will complete the term of Sekula-Gibbs, who vacated the seat in the fall to serve a short term in the U.S. Congress. The seat will be on November's regular ballot for a full two-year term.

"We're very excited. We're very positive. We think it's great," Noriega said in an interview during her post-election party at a west Houston restaurant. "I'm real proud."

Noriega said she had hoped to win the race outright but wasn't surprised by the results, given the number of candidates.

"We've been prepared for the runoff all along," she said. She plans to take Mother's Day off today, then get back to campaigning.

[...]

Morales, who ran unsuccessfully for the council two years ago, had support from prominent Republicans, and he raised nearly $50,000, even after an initial misunderstanding in which city officials said he didn't qualify for the ballot.

He, too, expected the runoff.

"We had a few people that were conservatives," Morales said of other candidates on the ballot. "Now we all pull together and support one candidate."

He added, "Our support was excellent. What I hope is that we have more voters turn out in June."

I'm not exactly sure how the support Morales got was anything more than mediocre, but whatever.

Here's the thing: Usually in a race like this, support from the candidates who don't make the runoff is key. In this case, I figure most of Tom Nixon's voters will transfer to Morales. That still leaves him well short of Noriega, who garnered 15,729 votes while Morales and Nixon combined for 10,831. My gut instinct is that most of the remaining voters are more likely to sit out the runoff than participate, and those who do vote are more likely to support Noriega. I'd also guess that if any of the other candidates make an endorsement for the runoff, they'll probably go with Noriega. Morales just has a lot of ground to make up, and not a whole lot of room in which to do it.

Now of course he could try to get some folks who didn't vote this time around to come out on June 16. Morales didn't get a whole lot of establishment Republican support in the first go-round, but now that it's a two-person fight and the universe of potential voters is even smaller, that may change. If it does, we may see and hear more about the runoff than we did the general election, and if so it will probably be ugly. I don't know if this will happen or not, but it might.

So we'll see. Obviously, Noriega can't take anything for granted, but if she does any kind of decent job just getting her own voters out on June 16, she'll win. Stay tuned.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on May 13, 2007 to Election 2007