Because there aren’t enough candidates for Mayor already.
Bill King
Bill King is inching toward a run for mayor of Houston as the field in next year’s open-seat election continues to grow.
King, an attorney and the former mayor of Kemah, designated a campaign treasurer earlier this month, the initial step needed to start a campaign structure. While the full field is not expected to materialize until around Feb. 1, when candidates can begin raising money for their bids, more and more candidates are beginning to make clear their intentions.
King, who publicly flirted with a run in 2009, is now telling friends he plans to run next year. A former Houston Chronicle op-ed columnist who just unveiled a book, “Unapologetically Moderate,” King likely will run as a centrist, business-minded candidate.
Four other candidates have publicly committed to running for the post: Rep. Sylvester Turner, 2013 mayoral runner-up Ben Hall and Councilmen Steven Costello and Oliver Pennington.
About a dozen more, though, have explored a possible run.
Actually, King was flirting with a 2009 run as far back as 2006. Whatever else you might say, it’s not a snap decision. King’s longstanding hostility to light rail pretty much guarantees that I won’t vote for him, but I’m sure he’ll persevere. I’ll just make one general observation, which I may have made before here or may have just made in conversation, which is that there’s only so much room for candidates in this or any Mayoral race in Houston. There’s only so much campaign funding, so many endorsing organizations worth pursuing, so much volunteer energy, and ultimately only so many voters. As such, I believe that there’s room for only so many viable candidates. Candidates that are fishing from the same pool of voters and donors and all as other candidates will have a harder time staying above water. Some number of the people who say they’re running or thinking about running will ultimately not run, is what I’m saying. They can’t all run. It’s just a matter of who survives the qualifying runs, which is to say who can get enough of those donors and groups and volunteers on board to make themselves viable. I figure by February we’ll have a much clearer idea of what the field will really look like.
is his base the GHP and who else? The unions won’t like him, he can’t relate to anyone worth less than $5mm, and outside of the Country Club types nobody knows who he is.