Though the races for San Antonio mayor and City Council were officially non-partisan, each of the runoff contests ended up taking sharply partisan shape.
SAN ANTONIO — When Bexar County Elections Chair Michele Carew was asked before the May election what she expected as far as turnout, she says her reply was between 13% and 15%. Due to a number of potential contributing factors that included Fiesta and an overwhelmingly long list of candidates on the headlining San Antonio mayoral race, the eventual number fell short of double-digits.
Carew doubled down on her prediction for the June runoff election, when voters had clearer, two-candidate choices for mayor and the remaining City Council races.
This time, the eventual turnout of 17% (not including a few dozen ballots that came back blank) blew it out of the water.
But comparing turnouts from both elections isn’t so simple; the June runoff was only for the city, which means a smaller overall number to derive turnout from. This year, that amounted to a difference of nearly 416,000 votes between the Bexar County and San Antonio electorates.
And, while the overall turnout in the June election hit 17%, the figure drops ever so slightly to 16.97% for the mayoral runoff between Gina Ortiz Jones and Rolando Pablos, evidently because a handful of voters decided only to weigh in on their council race.
The most straightforward comparison would be to examine that 16.97% figure against past mayoral runoff elections past, of which there have only been five in San Antonio since 1999. This turnout for the 2025 runoff election for San Antonio’s top elected office is the highest since 2005, when the prolonged contest between Phil Hardberger and Julian Castro yielded an 18.8% turnout in that race.
Hardberger won the mayoral seat for the first time in 2005. Castro would succeed him four years later.
The mayoral runoff elections that have unfolded since yielded turnouts between 13.1% and 15.4%.
Bexar County Democrats Chair Michelle Lowe Solis is celebrating her party’s runoff victories – progressive candidates won four of the five races on the June ballot, including Jones’ mayoral triumph – while saying the work continues to get even more people to the polls during local elections.
“We have to do better,” Lowe Solis told KENS 5 the week after the election. “And some of it is education, some of it is we’ve got to meet people where they’re at. But these local elections are extremely important. It (determines) what your streets look like, whether you have sidewalks or water. There’s just so many things that are involved… and the fact (offices) are now a four-year term made it even more important.”
Lowe Solis, a former Department of Defense employee who has led the Bexar County Democrats since November, said her office was involved primarily in get-out-the-vote campaigns leading up the May 3 election, when more than two dozen candidates were competing in a crowded mayor’s race.
When Jones, a former Air Force under secretary appointed by then-President Joe Biden, and Pablos, appointed to state positions by Republican Texas governors, emerged as the top two vote-getters over cybersecurities professional Beto Altamirano and four sitting City Council members, Lowe Solis says her team ramped up their efforts.
That involved not only walking the block and picking up phones for Jones, but creating a series of videos to draw connections between Pablos and Gov. Greg Abbott. “Don’t Abbott My SA” is a refrain the Bexar County Democratic Party shared on its social media channels—a strategy that might’ve helped boost Jones in blue San Antonio.
“We took a very different approach than we typically do, and that was really to make sure there was an understanding of who the candidates were on the other side,” Lowe Solis said. “I think that’s probably been more of a tactic that the Republicans take, but this go-round we wanted to make sure we were punching as well. So we did.”
Often on the campaign trail, Jones framed herself as someone who would safeguard San Antonio’s identity amid the state and federal governments’ policies on immigration, school vouchers and LGBTQ rights. Lowe Solis, citing recent school closure decisions, the size of San Antonio’s federal workforce and ICE detainment tactics, also believes that helped lift Jones over Pablos in the end.
“These are real-life impacts to people and we need a mayor who understands that, and can fight for us, Lowe Solis said. “I think Gina is the right person to do that. And I think the people of San Antonio agreed.”