It could still happen, but the same concerns exist as before.
In a press release early Wednesday morning, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson let everyone know that the effort to recall him had failed “miserably.”
Dallas activist and business owner Davante Peters launched the recall petition in January citing Johnson’s City Hall attendance record and party switch to Republican as reasons he wanted the mayor out of office. It would have taken 103,595 signatures to recall Johnson. While Peters had been collecting signatures since January, he submitted zero to the city secretary.
On his attendance record, Johnson said in the press release that his annual attendance rate has averaged 93.5% the past four years. However, KERA has reported that Johnson has missed more than 130 hours of City Council meetings since 2019.
“This was a big, fat nothing-burger cooked up by self-promoting partisan opportunists and served up by some click-hungry members of our local media whose breathless ‘reporting’ on the subject too often resembled an endorsement of this ridiculous recall effort,” Johnson said in the press release. “My attendance was never truly the issue, and my publicly available attendance record proves it. My Administration’s policies and vision for this city have remained unchanged and unwavering.”
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Reached for comment, Peters said although he did collect some signatures, he didn’t want to submit any because he didn’t want to “show our hand.” This is because he plans on launching another recall effort soon. He said when he initially filed his petition to recall the mayor, he hoped Democratic organizations in Dallas would band behind him, but that didn’t happen. “We’re going to re-strategize, get a new strategy without expecting anything from those organizations,” he said.
Peters called Johnson’s press release “childlike.”
“I don’t take it personally,” Peters said. “I just feel like a more mature person would listen to the concerns and the hearts of the community, and he could have used that press release as an opportunity to allow the community and citizens to understand why he made the decision [to switch parties] as opposed to trying to taunt their efforts.”
See here for some background. I’m not at all surprised at how this played out. I think this is as much a matter of timing and priorities as anything else. Dallas Democratic organizations just have bigger fish to fry right now. Maybe the timing will be better next year. I do think the Dem orgs will be interested when they don’t have more pressing matters to deal with, and I know for sure this will take a lot of resources to pull off. Keep talking to them about when the time could be right, and we’ll see what happens from there.