A few weeks ago, on June 7th to be precise, Gina Ortiz Jones cruised to victory over Rolando Pablos in what the San Antonio Express-News described as “a hyper-partisan runoff election to replace term-limited Mayor Ron Nirenberg.”
Jones ultimately prevailed by a commanding margin of at least 12,000 votes in an election featuring the participation of over 142,000 voters and a voter turnout of approximately 17%.
Jones, who was sworn into office on June 18th, made history as San Antonio’s first openly gay mayor and “just the third woman elected to the city’s top post.”
Pablos, incidentally, was born in Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, and lived in Ciudad Juárez until moving to El Paso at the age of nine. He would eventually move to San Antonio to attend the University of Texas at San Antonio and then St. Mary’s University.
At least initially, Pablos seemed proud of having worked closely for decades through multiple appointed roles with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and other Texas Republicans. At one point, he even bragged about his close relationship with Abbott claiming that the governor “would answer his phone calls.”
While Pablos’ connections to Abbott and Trump may have appealed to the city’s Republican voters, especially in the city’s North Side districts, these connections may not have endeared him to many of San Antonio’s Mexican American voters.
Of course, it’s not like Pablos didn’t try to gain traction within San Antonio’s Mexican American community. In fact, Pablos repeatedly attempted to seek refuge in the light of his Mexican American heritage. It just didn’t seem to pan out for him in the end.
At one point, for example, he would accuse Jones, who is Filipino American and has never described herself as Latina, of using her mother’s maiden name of Ortiz to pander to San Antonio’s Mexican American voters. The Pablos’ campaign would also run ads insinuating that Jones was attempting to misrepresent her ethnicity. In one ad, for example, a voiceover advised Jones to ‘drop it — you’re not Latina’ before proceeding to urge voters to ‘vote for the real thing.’ Another “more explicit” ad circulated by the Pablos campaign accused her of adding ‘Ortiz to your name … to make us think you’re one of us.’
There is, of course, an irony to be noted at this point. Although Pablos claimed to be the only “real” Latino in the race, he seemed oblivious to the inherent conflict that exists between supporting Trump and Abbott, on the one hand, and representing the interests of a predominantly Mexican American city like San Antonio on the other.
Unfortunately, at least for Pablos, many of San Antonio’s Mexican American voters were very attentive to this contradiction. I realize this is completely anecdotal, but the word ‘vendido‘ came up a lot, for example, in a conversation I had with a friend of mine from San Antonio when I mentioned Pablos to her in the aftermath of the election.
In any case, I am guessing that Pablos probably ended up regretting his decision to inject partisan politics into what is, at least technically, a nonpartisan seat.
His nod to his Republican connections would ultimately be, in the words of Molly Smith, a reporter with the San Antonio Express-News who, by the way, was formerly a reporter for the El Paso Times and El Paso Matters, the proverbial “nail in his coffin” so to speak.
As noted by Smith, Jones was able to effectively cast the city’s nonpartisan mayoral runoff “as a chance to rebuke the far-right policies of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and President Donald Trump.” On the campaign trail, she frequently referred to Pablos as an ‘Abbott puppet’ who would ultimately do the governor’s bidding.
Various Democratic organizations also did their part to portray the “the runoff as a referendum on Gov. Greg Abbott and President Donald Trump.”
On election day, for example, Democratic voters received text messages urging them to help “stop MAGA Republican Rolando Pablos from taking over our city[.]”
And in the days leading up to the runoff, Fields of Change, a political action committee based in Washington, D.C., circulated a mailer reading: “Greg Abbott-Appointee Rolando Pablos is trying to bring MAGA to San Antonio. Voting in the upcoming run-off election for mayor is the only way to stop him.”
The Bexar County Democratic Party rose to the occasion, too. According to the San Antonio Current, the BCDP, for the “first time in recent memory, weighed in on a San Antonio mayoral race, officially a nonpartisan political contest.” A few days before the runoff, for example, the BCDP “unleashed a 30-second video attacking mayoral candidate Rolando Pablos’ connection to Gov. Greg Abbott.”
The local Democratic Party may have felt compelled to intercede in order to highlight the extensive financial support that Pablos had received from a newly constituted Republican political action committee with ties to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called the Texas Economic Fund.
According to an analysis developed by the San Antonio Express-News, TEF spent “more than $600,000 since April 24 on mailers and TV ads attacking Jones and print ads supporting Pablos.” The PAC also spent over $200,000 in support of Pablos’ campaign ahead of the initial May 3rd election.
In the end, however, even this formidable financial support wasn’t enough to propel Pablos to victory in a city where Abbott has been described as “deeply unpopular.” In 2022, for example, “the last time the governor was on the ballot, he won 37% of the city’s vote — worse than Trump did in November 2024 when he won 41%.”
This same analysis noted that San Antonio “hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1995, when voters elected oral surgeon William ‘Bill’ Thornton, who served one term before failing to even make it into the 1997 runoff.”
This result in the mayoral runoff is perhaps not surprising in a city where “nearly 58% of San Antonians voted for Democrat Kamala Harris against 41% who picked Republican President Donald Trump.”
As Kelton Morgan, a Republican political consultant active in San Antonio politics, acknowledged, in ‘a citywide race in San Antonio, a Democrat is going to beat the Republican 105% of the time.’
It’s not difficult, of course, to notice some of the striking similarities that exist between San Antonio’s latest mayoral contest and El Paso’s mayoral runoff of 2024.
El Paso’s current mayor, Renard Johnson, like Pablos, is closely aligned with Gov. Abbott. I am not exactly sure what Johnson did to ingratiate himself with the governor, but Johnson was apparently on such good terms with Abbott that he would be placed by the University of Texas System Board of Regents on the advisory search committee that appointed Heather Wilson to the presidency of the University of Texas at El Paso.
It apparently didn’t bother Johnson in the least that Wilson had been loyally serving in a cabinet-level position within the Trump administration just prior to her selection.
Johnson also didn’t seem to mind that the recommendations for selecting UTEP’s next president provided by twenty-eight prominent Mexican American community leaders were categorically dismissed by both the search committee, and, ultimately, by the UT System Board of Regents as well.
As a member of the search committee, Johnson was in a uniquely privileged position to oppose Wilson’s selection and side with elements of El Paso’s Mexican American community who opposed Wilson’s appointment. He chose instead to side with the other members of the committee which included the likes of Dee Margo, Woody Hunt, and Paul Foster, all high-profile supporters of the Republican Party in general and Trump in particular.
In the immediate aftermath of Wilson’s appointment, Johnson would speak glowingly about her, and, after winning the mayoral runoff, would enthusiastically reaffirm his ‘complete confidence’ in Wilson absurdly referring to her as a ‘champion of the region.’
Needless to say, this position puts him at variance with a number of local organizations including the El Paso County Democratic Party and the UTEP College Democrats who called for Wilson’s resignation in May of 2024.
Perhaps more importantly, his position on Wilson puts him at variance with important elements of El Paso’s Mexican American community who continue to view her appointment as unacceptable.
Johnson supports Wilson because, like Pablos, Johnson is apparently just fine with Trump. In fact, he readily accepted an endorsement during the runoff from former mayoral candidate Steven Winter who was described in an article by El Paso News as El Paso’s “MAGA Mayoral Candidate.”
Johnson has also been more than happy to accept individual contributions from some of Trump’s biggest local financial supporters as well.
Speaking of financial contributions, it would, of course, be remiss of me not to mention the significant role that Republican PACs played in both mayoral runoffs. Like Pablos, who received support from a Republican PAC called the Texas Economic Fund, Johnson also received extensive financial support from a Republican political action committee conspicuously named Project Red Texas. As reported by KVIA, this particular PAC was funded, in large part, by Hunt and Foster, Johnson’s buddies from the governor’s search committee and two of his most valued constituents.
Interestingly, Project Red Texas espouses a mission that is remarkably analogous to the stated objective of the TEF. The TEF was “created to promote conservative candidates at the local level — from school board races to county judgeships.” Project Red Texas similarly targets local races to promote conservative candidates, but its focus is on Democratic strongholds in Texas which essentially means targeting places with large Mexican American populations like El Paso and South Texas.
There’s also one other somewhat obscured similarity hiding in plain sight that should be acknowledged. Even though he has attempted to conceal it at times, Pablos is a Republican. As one San Antonio Express-News article noted, voters unfamiliar with Pablos “probably didn’t even realize that he was a Republican.” Pablos’ campaign signs and website completely avoided the term Republican describing him instead as a ‘fiscal conservative.’ Even the biography featured on his campaign website avoided specifically referencing the fact that, as mentioned earlier, he had worked closely for decades through multiple appointed roles with Abbott and other Texas Republicans.
And, like Pablos, as Rich Wright once astutely noted in an insightful El Chuqueño article entitled “Local Democrats have lost their Way,” Johnson is also a Republican. He has just done a much better job of hiding it than Pablos.
There is, however, at least one significant difference to note between the two runoffs. In San Antonio, Democrats closed rank and defeated the Republican candidate. In El Paso, local Democrats endorsed him.
