Summary
Odessa, Texas voters ousted three City Council members a month after they passed an anti-trans bathroom ban.
Craig Stoker, the city’s first openly gay council member, won an at-large seat with 56% of the vote, defeating Denise Swanner, whose campaign attacked his sexuality.
Stoker focused on infrastructure issues, while Mayor Javier Joven, a supporter of the bathroom ban, also lost reelection.
The controversial ordinance imposes fines and lawsuits for violations, sparking backlash. The local GOP declined endorsements, citing LGBTQ+ and abortion issues as state matters.
Here’s a more general article about the Odessa city elections.
The strategy backfired — at least in Odessa. The three City Council incumbents lost, a stunning result that analysts and longtime observers say revealed voters’ desire for local elected leaders to focus on roads and garbage pick up, not national flashpoints.
Basically, in 2020 the county GOP actively endorsed candidates in the nominally nonpartisan election, and this time they went back to their historic tendency and didn’t. Stoker is from a locally well-known family and while openly gay and supportive of the arts and obviously concerned with the residents of the community, is also known to be business-friendly and hardly a progressive firebrand. The incumbents went hard on culture war bullshit and hate, which doesn’t play nearly as well when they don’t have the precious “R” by their names on the ballot, especially when they seem to have ignored the city’s actual needs while obsessing over it.
So the correct moral of this story is “reasonable people win elections when partisanship is removed”.
Which I can vouch for. The county I live in made their elected positions (sherriff, county commissioner, a few others) all nonpartisan positions elected via a top-two runoff election about 15 years ago . All of a sudden, the overtly racist backwater shitheels started losing every single election and the people who gave a shit started winning.
I suppose “gay and supportive of the arts” is as progressive as one can hope for in a lot of Texas.
In the Permian Basin? You’re not wrong. This isn’t really a case of blue city in red county. Odessa city population makes up over 2/3 of 74% Trump-voting Ector County’s and is the literal Friday Night Lights town. This should not be dismissed as an important moment. It definitely is.
you do know there is a movement of gay and lesbian people who are GOP and want to break off from the rest of the community right?
