The Midweek #84: Voting in Bexar County on Track to Reach Presidential Election Levels
Robert Rhodes, the newspaper editor I worked for at the Corpus Christi Caller for a single year in 1978, was schooling me on how to interview people leaving polling stations in the November election. I was a green, second-year reporter up from Brownsville.
“People vote their pocketbooks,” the former Associated Press reporter and editor told me in his trademark New Jersey accent, sensing my inexperience and uncertainty about quizzing people I had never met. “Believe me, most people will tell you how they voted because they don’t want to be associated with the ‘other side.’ Your job is to find out how they voted and why.”
I was covering a promising state legislator named Joe Wyatt, who was running for Congress as a Democrat. His single term in Washington was derailed by his alcoholism. Wyatt later turned Republican and failed in his 1982 comeback effort. The newly elected congressman was quite drunk and acting strangely as he celebrated his victory later that night, in my presence, but cautious editors removed those observational details from my story.
I remember the election for two other reasons: First, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill Clements, a wealthy Dallas oilman and political newcomer, narrowly defeated Democratic candidate John Hill, a Houston attorney and popular, experienced officeholder who had served as Texas secretary of state and attorney general. It was a stunning Republican victory and a harbinger of things to come in the state.
Clements finished with 49.96% of the vote, while Hill finished with 49.24%, a difference of nearly 17,000 votes. The Raza Unida candidate and the Socialist Workers Party candidate siphoned off nearly 19,000 votes, more than the margin of victory. Texas was smaller then and much more rural, with 13 million people compared with nearly 32 million today.
The second reason the election is worth remembering is this: Texas was enjoying considerable economic growth, driven by the oil and gas industry, yet voters were concerned about inflation and the rising cost of living, high property taxes, and the growth in government spending.
Sound familiar?
As I write this Wednesday morning, Bexar County voters continue to turn out in robust numbers for an off-year election. The 2024 presidential election drew 763,198 voters, while early voting and counted mail-in ballots this election have totaled 390,314 votes, or 29% of the county’s 1.34 million registered voters. That already exceeds the roughly 355,000 early votes cast in the entire 2022 midterm. The voter rolls have grown by more than 45,000 people since 2024.
Headlines can drive or depress turnout with three days of early voting left before Tuesday’s Election Day. Amid record spending driven by Republican efforts to keep the state red, I’d predict an outcome that shows “people vote their pocketbooks.” Stagnant wages are no match for five years of inflation that date back to the pandemic and have been exacerbated by the war against Iran and the steep rise in oil and gas prices that followed, rising housing and food costs, and Trump administration tariffs.
I am one of many who believe Texas would be better, more equitable, and just as prosperous state for its fast-growing population if it would revert to being governed by two political parties rather than continue under Republican one-party rule. No Democrat has won a statewide race since 1994.
The outcome will be decided Tuesday although I expect Texans will go to sleep Tuesday night without knowing the final state and national outcomes, and may wait another day or more. That means next week’s newsletter also will be held on deadline. We will know by then the likely outcome of the City Council standoff with Mayor Gina Jones over the size and allocation of the important 2027 bond and the city’s support for the new Spurs arena.
It’s going to be a consequential week, and if any young reporters happen to be interviewing voters as they exit the polls in this final week, my advice is this: Ask them whether they voted their pocketbooks.
Host, bigcitysmalltown
Robert “Bob” Rivard is a veteran American journalist whose 46-year career has taken him across Texas, Latin America, and beyond. He co-founded the Rivard Report (later named the San Antonio Report) with his wife, Monika Maeckle, in 2012, building it into the city’s leading nonprofit news organization before retiring in 2022.
Bob has worked for five Texas newspapers, beginning his career on the border at the Brownsville Herald, then moving to the Corpus Christi Caller, the Dallas Times-Herald, and later serving as a foreign correspondent and chief of correspondents for Newsweek. He returned to Texas as senior editor of the San Antonio Light before becoming executive editor of the San Antonio Express-News (1997–2011).
His journalism has earned widespread recognition, including being named Editor & Publisher’s “Editor of the Year” in 2000 and receiving the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot Award from Columbia University for his reporting on Latin America and the U.S.-Mexico border.
He is the author of Trail of Feathers, a nonfiction book chronicling the disappearance and murder of journalist Philip True in Mexico’s Sierra Madre. The book, published by Public Affairs in 2005, was widely reviewed, excerpted in Esquire, and selected by People magazine as one of five recommended nonfiction works that year.
Bob now hosts bigcitysmalltown, a podcast featuring the people shaping San Antonio’s future. He and Monika live in Southtown, where she runs the Texas Butterfly Ranch blog and previously founded the annual San Antonio Monarch Butterfly and Pol… Read More
