On November 3, and about a month later in a near-certain December runoff, Houston voters will cast ballots to choose the city’s next mayor for a two-year term. However since Houston’s adoption of term limits in 1991, all mayors have served de facto six-year terms, rarely facing any serious challenge in their respective first and second re-election bids. As a result, if past trends hold for Annise Parker’s successor, this fall Houstonians may well be in actuality electing the person who will guide the city until January 2022.
Most large Texas cities (Austin, Dallas, El Paso, Fort Worth, San Antonio) employ a council-manager form of government under which the mayor’s formal executive powers are minimal and his or her impact on the day-to-day running of the city modest. That is definitely not the case under Houston’s mayor-council system of government, with the strong Houston mayor the second most influential chief executive in Texas after the governor.
Under the city of Houston charter, the mayor is elected for a two-year term and may serve a maximum of three terms. While this framework creates the potential for a mayor to be ousted every biennium, during the quarter of a century in which term limits have been in force, every mayor has served the maximum six years in office (what Mexicans refer to as a sexenio). Of the eight re-election bids by mayors who have held office since 1992 (Bob Lanier in 1993 and 1995, Lee Brown in 1999 and 2001, Bill White in 2005 and 2007, Annise Parker in 2011 and 2013), in only one instance (Brown in 2001) did a sitting mayor face a serious challenge in the attempt to remain in office. And, even on that single occasion, the incumbent was victorious.
In Houston’s nonpartisan elections, political elites, major donors and other influential actors in the city are, at times for primarily strategic reasons, by and large predisposed to support the incumbent mayor in his or her re-election bid. And, in an interrelated vein, prospective mayoral contenders tend to prefer to bide their time until the next “open” mayoral election in four or two years rather than wage what is likely to be a futile challenge against an incumbent.
Excluding the competitive 2001 election, the average margin of victory by the incumbent mayor over the closest rival was 62 percent between 1993 and 2013 (the median was 74 percent), ranging from a high of 87 percent in 2005 when White vanquished his nearest rival, Gladys House, 91 percent to 4 percent, to a low of 29 percent in 2013, when Parker defeated Ben Hall 57 percent to 28 percent.
The seven noncompetitive re-election races contrast markedly with the initial elections of Brown (1997), White (2003) and Parker (2009), all of which were very competitive in the first round with multiple viable candidates, and all of which went to a runoff. With seven candidates (Chris Bell, Steve Costello, Adrian Garcia, Ben Hall, Bill King, Marty McVey, Sylvester Turner) presently on the campaign trail, the 2015 election will be similar to these three “open” elections, with a first round vote fragmented among multiple viable candidates and a second round between the individuals who earn one of the two tickets to the December main event.
We cannot predict the future success of the mayor who takes office in 2016 and how likely he is to face difficulty in any potential re-election efforts in 2017 and 2019. Nevertheless, the most likely scenario is that whoever is victorious this December will repeat the pattern of their four predecessors and remain in office for a half-dozen years. As a result, Houstonians should pay extra special attention to this fall’s mayoral contest, since it may be their last realistic opportunity to have a say in who runs the city until November of 2021.
Mark P. Jones is the Baker Institute’s fellow in political science as well as the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in Latin American Studies and chair of the Department of Political Science at Rice University.
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