This November, Houston’s elections for mayor, controller and City Council produced some surprises. Incumbent Mayor Annise Parker was re-elected but only avoided a run-off by less than 1 percent of the votes cast, the smallest margin in a general election since Mayor Lee Brown was forced into a run-off in 2001. Moreover, several incumbent council members found their own electoral margins smaller than expected, including at-large Council Members Stephen Costello, Melissa Noriega and Jolanda Jones and District A Council Member Brenda Stardig. Jones and Stardig will be in run-off elections on Dec. 10.
Why did so many incumbent officeholders have difficulty in their re-election bids? Surely a weak local and national economy comes to mind as a reason for voter dissatisfaction, especially when incumbent officeholders were responsible to cutting services and raising fees in a weak economy. But if this was the cause of declining vote margins for incumbent officeholders, why didn’t all incumbents suffer a diminution in their electoral margins? A majority of incumbent council members as well as City Controller Ron Green were re-elected with more than 60 percent of the votes cast. And an October KUHF/KHOU survey showed that voters’ perceptions of the local economy was not related to either their evaluation of the mayor’s job performance or their support for her re-election. Strong opposition might have been another explanation, yet the mayor and Council Members Costello and Noriega drew weak opponents who spent only a fraction of each incumbent’s campaign expenditures.
Another possible explanation is that voters were dissatisfied with the mayor’s and at least some council members’ performance in cutting services and raising fees. Most notable among the latter is the drainage fee adopted by the voters in the 2010. Recall that this initiative was supported by the mayor, but not all council members. Moreover, the fee was adopted by a narrow margin of 50.9 percent. Of those surveyed in the KUHF/KHOU poll who continue to support the fee, it remains controversial with only 49.5 percent of voters.
Click images to zoom in.
Is it possible that the drainage fee was influential in the mayor’s re-election bid and those of some council members? To approximate an answer to this question, I have reported the relationship between the percent of vote cast in this November’s election by precinct for Parker and several council members (on the vertical axis) and the vote cast in 2010 against the proposition to adopt a citywide drainage fee (the horizontal axis). (Zoom in on the images pictured left by downloading this pdf.)
If voters in 2011 were voting against the mayor and other council members because of their support of the drainage fee, we would expect the slopes for this relationship be negative, i.e., a higher percentage of votes cast against the drainage fee is related to a lower percentage of votes cast for Parker and other incumbents.
Parker, Costello and Noriega were strong supporters of the drainage fee and the graphs below show they were punished by voters at the ballot box for their support of the drainage fee. For these three candidates, the slopes are negative and relatively steep, indicating voters in precincts that balloted against the drainage fee also voted against these incumbents. Bradford and Jones, who opposed the drainage fee, did not suffer a loss of votes in precincts that voted against the drainage fee. But they also do not gain votes in precincts that voted against the drainage fee. Their respective votes are unrelated to voter opposition or support of the drainage fee. Finally, there is the case of Stardig. She reported voting for the fee in 2010 but her constituents voted against the fee by a 55 to 45 percent margin. Her vote in 2011 is negatively related to the vote cast against the drainage fee in her district, but the relationship is far less pronounced than for Parker, Costello and Noriega.
The voters adopted the drainage fee in 2010 — so why is it an issue for voters one year later, if it even is an issue? The proposition on the ballot did not specify there would be fee, how much the fee would be, or who would pay or be exempted from the fee. All of these decisions were made by the mayor and council after voters adopted the proposition. Consequently, we might speculate that many voters felt misled, uninformed or simply ignorant of what they voted for: buyer’s remorse. The drainage fee might be the fault of the voters, but its consequences fall on the pocketbooks of the voters and in the ballot box for some of their representatives. If the fee was an issue in November’s general election and remains an issue in December’s upcoming run-off election, expect to see the drainage fee return to the City Council for further discussion and possible revision.
Robert Stein, Ph.D., is the fellow in urban politics at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. He is also Rice University’s Lena Gohlman Fox Professor of Political Science and a nationally recognized political analyst and expert on elections.