Why Brown Isn't in the Runoff

I'm glad Bradley Olson of the Houston Chronicle ran the numbers on cost per vote for the Houston mayoral election. There's an enormous difference between what Roy Morales spent per vote ($1.88) and what Peter Brown spent ($122.14), yet Brown only bested Morales by around 4000 votes. Brown finished third and Morales finished a close fourth. Olson ends with an adage that money alone can't buy an election. True.

There is another old adage that you need to raise money to win, but you don't need to raise as much money as your opponent to win, if you have lots of grassroots support, your opponent has negatives, and you have other advantages, such as being a terrific candidate with the right qualities at the right moment in history for that electorate. That's really what happened here. To have any chance at all to win the Houston mayoral race, there is a bar you have to cross in terms of money raised. Parker, Locke and Brown all crossed that. Republican Morales did not win and will not ever win a mayoral race with such anemic fundraising (~$68K). But even a well funded Republican would have little to no chance of winning in a Democratic town, which is why one didn't run.

There are a lot of Wednesday morning quarterbacks pointing fingers at Brown, because of the enormous amount of money he spent for such a poor result. But, lets's go back to the question we all had about back in January - who is Brown's base? That was answered when voters went to the polls, and with probably the same answer we had eleven months ago. Absent exit polling, my guess is that his base was the one we all thought it was - some white liberals who supported him in the past, as well as some African Americans and a few Republicans, but not enough to get him into the runoff. His only way to get past his lack of a base was to spend a lot of money trying to keep Republicans from voting for the Republican, African Americans from voting from the African American, and then finding something negative on Parker, to peel away any soft support she might have. The one negative he tried against Parker did not work, and in the end, as I've said, affinity matters. His only other hope was that Parker or Locke would do something extremely stupid or be affected by a scandal and that did not happen.

Parker has the built in base from running for 12 years and her long time activism in Houston. She has experience with the City budget that hits a sweet spot in these tough economic times. She had the most donors and the most volunteers. Locke has a lot of support from African American voters, and has insider connections to City Hall, including some Republicans. These two candidate profiles, which eleven months ago seemed the most likely to be the right ones for the two person runoff, in the end, garnered Parker and Locke the top two spots.