Craig Stoker
When Craig Stoker pulled the flyer out of the mailbox, he chuckled.
It was a political mailer, one of many deployed this fall in Odessa, the West Texas city in the heart of the oil-rich Permian Basin.
His opponent, incumbent City Council member Denise Swanner, compared her stance to his. The two were total opposites except for the fact that both were in relationships with men.
It was the latest attempt in a Republican stronghold to tie Stoker’s sexual orientation to his support of the LGBTQ+ community and, by extension, the Democratic Party.
The people behind the advertisement wanted voters to elect candidates who advanced conservative values, only this election was supposed to be nonpartisan.
While Stoker and his allies had hoped the local election would be about infrastructure and city services, his opponent attempted to shift the battlefield to national political issues. Across the country, Republicans were running countless attack ads on Democrats for their support of transgender people.
The strategy backfired — at least in Odessa. The three City Council incumbents lost, a stunning result that analysts and longtime observers say revealed voters’ desire for local elected leaders to focus on roads and garbage pick up, not national flashpoints.
Stoker, the scion of a prominent Odessa family, became the first openly gay man elected to Odessa’s City Council. He won his at-large seat with 56% of the vote at the same time President-elect Donald Trump won all of Ector County with 76% of the vote.
“At the end of all of this, we are neighbors. You’re electing the people you live with,” Stoker said. “And no matter what happens, what you say about each other, the energy you put out about each other, you still have to live together.”an
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Long story short, Odessa had previously elected three wingnuts to its Council, including the Mayor. Earlier this year, they passed an anti-trans bathroom ban. And then, not much later, they all got unelected, and it wasn’t close. Turns out even Odessa was able to want local electeds that prioritized local issues over national hot-button stuff that had no positive effect on anyone’s life. Maybe there’s something we all can learn from that.
Taylor Sheridan should write this political tomfoolery into an episode of ‘Landman’.
“[Soandso] became the first openly gay man elected to Odessa’s City Council. He won his at-large seat with 56% of the vote at the same time President-elect Donald Trump won all of Ector County with 76% of the vote.”
Comment: This is flawed data-based reasoning: The city and the county are different geographic units and therefore the respective electorates are also not identical, even in the same election. A better comparison would be with the Trump vote in the portion of the county that constitutes the territory of the city (assuming that such data is available).
In the 2020 census, Ector County’s population was 165,171, Odessa is the county seat and its population was 114,428. While there is much overlap, these units are not identical.
Compare this to judicial elections in Harris County with different geographic bases: Judge Steven Kirkland (334th District Court in 2016) needed to win a majority of votes of the entire county whereas Steve Duble running for Justice of the Peace 1-2 in 2022 had better odds in the smaller JP district overlapping inner-city Houston and Montrose, running as a gay candidate (leaving aside the matter of intra-party competition).