We move now to the first of two open seat At Large races, where the candidates were many and the clarity was lacking. Here’s an abridged look at At Large #4:
Dist Ericka Hillyer Baldwin Dolce Javier Plummer
====================================================
A 1,584 1,454 1,475 3,951 1,335 1,400
B 2,994 272 1,022 829 1,124 4,428
C 2,759 8,458 5,248 7,150 1,768 3,517
D 3,250 1,142 1,634 1,663 1,328 8,015
E 2,108 2,666 2,539 7,956 1,443 1,408
F 1,142 711 820 1,804 907 1,217
G 2,525 4,902 3,190 9,212 1,023 1,932
H 1,231 1,329 1,703 1,845 2,601 1,542
I 868 858 784 1,571 2,593 1,411
J 683 566 594 1,319 720 911
K 2,135 1,722 1,297 2,470 1,169 4,470
A 11.00% 10.10% 10.24% 27.44% 9.27% 9.72%
B 20.74% 1.88% 7.08% 5.74% 7.79% 30.67%
C 7.87% 24.12% 14.96% 20.39% 5.04% 10.03%
D 15.22% 5.35% 7.65% 7.79% 6.22% 37.55%
E 9.31% 11.78% 11.22% 35.15% 6.38% 6.22%
F 13.11% 8.16% 9.42% 20.72% 10.42% 13.98%
G 9.15% 17.76% 11.56% 33.37% 3.71% 7.00%
H 9.48% 10.23% 13.11% 14.20% 20.02% 11.87%
I 8.53% 8.43% 7.71% 15.44% 25.49% 13.87%
J 11.08% 9.18% 9.64% 21.39% 11.68% 14.78%
K 12.87% 10.38% 7.82% 14.89% 7.05% 26.95%
There were eleven candidates in the open seat At Large #4 race. Amanda Edwards’ decision to run for the US Senate changed this from a race between an incumbent and two or three challengers you’ve never heard of to a wide open race of 11 contenders you’ve mostly not heard of. Seriously, how many of the six names here do you recognize? How many of the five names I didn’t list can you think of? Most of these candidates raised little to no money and had campaign presences to match. How are people to decide for whom to vote?
Well, one way is by picking a name they recognize. In this race, that name was Anthony Dolcefino. How many votes do you think a first-time candidate who had raised about $12K as of the thirty-day report and whose name was Anthony Smith would have received? He did well in the Republican districts and he’s got Republican endorsements plus the firefighters. Basically, he’s Tony Buzbee at this point, minus ten million dollars.
Along those same lines, Letitia Plummer did well in the African-American districts, and has the Democrats behind her bid. She’ll be riding on Sylvester Turner’s coattails, and the better he does the better off she’ll be. This race is the closest proxy to the Mayor’s race, and the main challenge Plummer will face is ensuring that Turner voters go down the ballot. She can’t afford a 22% undervote rate in the runoff.
I don’t know how many more times we will have to learn the lesson that while there is room in a citywide race for a Nick Hellyar OR a Bill Baldwin to be viable, there is not room in citywide elections for a Nick Hellyar AND a Bill Baldwin to be viable. Hellyar was in the race first, having moved over from District C (along with Dolcefino) following Edwards’ announcement, while Baldwin entered later and raised more money in a short period of time than any of the other candidates. It wasn’t enough to matter.
There’s been some discussion in the comments of previous posts about ranked-choice elections and how they might work in municipal races. I’d like to point out that there would be 39,916,800 possible rankings of these candidates (that’s eleven factorial, for my fellow math nerds), which, you know, is a lot. I might consider ranked-choice voting as an option if it were done like Cy Young voting in MLB, where you pick your top five only. Honestly, even that may be too much – in this race, I can think of at most four candidates that would have been worth a spot on such a ballot of mine. Ranked-choice voting would enable us to get a winner on Election Day. It’s not at all clear to me we’d get results that are more representative or less goofy than what we get now.
Fortunately, ranked-choice voting for an election with 11 candidates does not require voters to select from a list of 11 million permutations of candidates. And unfortunately, ranked-choice voting cannot solve the problems of anonymous candidates and disinterested voters. What it could have done, though, is leave enough information behind to settle the district B race immediately, or as soon as a judge rules on the eligibility of one particular candidate, without leaving those voters unrepresented on council until a post-lawsuit election can be held.
I noticed Hellyar beat Baldwin in C, which is kind of home turf for Baldwin, although Baldwin got less than 3% more in H. Totally agree that their wasn’t room for both.
I am wondering why Dolcefino is being given a pass on his association with white nationalists?!
https://austinautonomedia.noblogs.org/campus-racists-to-city-council/
What is your thought Charles?
Pan, thanks for the link.
No problem. Knowledge is Power.