Amid all the postgame analysis that has been flying about in the aftermath of last Saturday’s municipal elections, one simple and striking fact bears mentioning: up until a few election cycles ago, sitting council members were rarely challenged. That has changed – big time. Last Saturday’s elections saw competitive races in nearly every district, and three incumbents—David Blewett, Adam Bazaldua, and Carolyn King Arnold—have been forced into runoffs. In general, that’s a good thing. More candidates mean more ideas are brought to the table, more citizens are engaged in the electoral process, and council members are more responsive to the constituents who put them in office.

But this new era of Dallas politics has also created a situation in which runoff elections are almost inevitable, particularly in crowded races where there is no incumbent. This means the city’s general election basically functions like a primary. We saw this in the 2019 mayoral election and in the 2017 mayoral election. When 9 or 10 candidates are running for a single office there is virtually no way one of those candidates is going to secure 50.01 percent of the votes. The first election narrows down the field; the real decision is made in the runoff. That’s a problem. Municipal voter turnout is already very low, and it is even lower in the runoffs. They’re also expensive. But there’s a simple solution: ranked-choice voting.

Ranked choice voting — which we’ve mentioned before — is an electoral process that is gaining popularity throughout the country, particularly in local elections, precisely because it remedies some of these problems. According to FairVote.org, 22 municipalities and states have adopted ranked-choice voting, including some large cities like New York, Oakland, and San Francisco. Ten additional cities and states, including Alaska, are considering or have adopted ranked-choice voting for future use. Austin just adopted it over the weekend.

So, what is ranked-choice voting and how does it work?

As the results of the city council election were coming in Saturday night, a familiar storyline took shape. There were plenty of intriguing political subplots building up to the election. And now we have weeks of limbo as we await a staggering six runoff races that will determine the make up of the next council. But the big takeaway was low turnout.

Every election cycle we are reminded that the city’s government is determined by precious few voters. This year, 67,788 people voted in the council elections, which is about 14 percent fewer than who voted in 2019 (when the mayor was also on the ballot). This year’s turnout was up around 46 percent from the last council-only election in 2017, but turnout was still fewer than 10 percent of the total number of registered voters.

Per usual, northern council districts drew more voters than southern council districts, another depressingly familiar statistic. But what was different about this year was that, in the weeks leading up to the election, Mayor Eric Johnson attempted to influence some of these southern Dallas council races. His influence drove more dollars into the campaigns in an effort to unseat two of his rivals on the city council. It didn’t work, but it got me thinking. There was a lot of money spent on this year’s council election but that money did not translate into huge voter turnouts. It seems like council candidates spend a ton of money each election cycle to win very few votes. But how much?

How much money do council candidates have to spend to turn out a single vote in their favor?

I spent yesterday crunching the numbers, tallying up the 2021 expenditures for the top finishing council candidates in all 14 districts. In some close races, I analyzed the top two or three candidates. In races in which incumbents didn’t face serious opposition, I tallied the expenditure totals for all the candidates. Most new candidates did not report spending in 2020, so I didn’t include incumbent spending in 2020 (there wasn’t a ton save a few candidates, such as Chad West) because it was too difficult to determine if 2020 spending was directly related to the 2021 campaign. These numbers also reflect the latest publicly available figure filed, so they may miss the last week-and-a-half or so of last minute fundraising. In other words, these numbers may be imperfect, but they are pretty close.

The results offer an imperfect metric for determining the effectiveness of council campaigns, but they also reveal several fascinating disparities in how campaign spending drives election results. Here’s one glaring example: District 13 candidate Leland Burk spent about $61.41 for every vote he received in Saturday’s election. His opponent in the runoff, Gay Donnell Willis, spent just $10.31 per vote. So what does this tell us about that race?

I break down the rest of the data and offer some interpretations after the jump:

Although he isn’t on the ballot, there is a lot at stake for Mayor Eric L. Johnson in the upcoming Dallas city election. During his first two years in office, Johnson has struggled to establish a clear mayoral directive. This is partly to do to the fact that his term has been dominated by crises, beginning with the North Dallas tornados in 2019 and continuing through COVID-19, the George Floyd protests last summer, and February’s winter storm. Johnson has also butted heads with many top officials at City Hall, and his occasionally combative approach has alienated a Council that has been unwilling to line up behind his policy agenda.

It makes sense, then, that Johnson is publicly backing a few council candidates that are running against incumbents the mayor perceives as obstacles. In the race for District 7, he has come out in support of Donald Parish Jr., the son of a South Dallas preacher, against Adam Bazaldua, one of the loudest progressive voices on the Council. In District 5, Johnson backs perennial candidate Yolanda Faye Williams against Jaime Resendez in a race that has become framed by Resendez’s vote last fall to reduce the police department’s overtime budget. He did so against the mayor’s objections and has raised around $20,000 since Johnson endorsed his opponent. Behind the scenes, there are whispers that Johnson has also stuck his nose into the races to unseat East Dallas council member Paula Blackmon and Oak Cliff representative Carolyn King Arnold.

But on another level, Johnson’s endorsements don’t make any sense at all. I have spoken with a lot of people who have worked with Johnson over the years or have been following his political career since he first ran for the Texas Lege, in 2009. One thing they say is that Johnson doesn’t endorse candidates. Period. They say he sees it as too risky. Why hitch your political fortunes on someone else’s talents and ideas? Perhaps, then, Johnson’s willingness to come out in support of candidates in this year’s city council election suggests an appreciation of just how isolated he has become at City Hall, or a willingness to adapt to the demands of its unique political culture. Regardless, it represents yet another behavioral shift that has baffled many of Johnson’s former colleagues, friends, and associates who confess that they don’t often recognize the mayor as the man they once knew.

This morning, criminally early, I stumbled across a piece of legislation, House Bill 19, which caught my attention because I had insomnia and there’s this rabbit hole called YouTube that, well, anyway… I had no idea that Texas had such an abysmal record in trucking fatalities on our roads and highways. According to Ware Wendall of Texas Watch, a consumer group, Texas led the country with 685 trucking fatalities last year alone, which was more than Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, New Mexico, Arizona, Kansas, Colorado, and Mississippi combined.

I thought reckless trucking was just a Pennsylvania Turnpike thing, where my parents narrowly escaped death by truck years ago. So I am sensitive. But here’s how I read this bill: it would eliminate the right in a civil case to hold responsible the company that put the commercial vehicle on the road, no matter that they hired a bad driver, or had maintenance or repair problems. Only the driver would be responsible.

First, know that the bill is still in committee. It will morph. Our Texas House representative from Collin County, Jeff Leach, R-Plano, chairs the committee and sponsored the bill. Still my mind flashed through a number of scenarios, and I’d love to know from the legal world—not just personal liability lawyers but including personal liability lawyers—what this could mean.

We’re used to talking about red and blue states, and about neighborhood divides centered around income inequality and the lingering legacy of racial segregation. But to what extent do these two things overlap? Do social economic and demographic factors create red and blue neighborhoods? According to a new study by two Harvard researchers, the answers is they do.

Jacob Brown and Ryan Enos sorted information on 180 million U.S. voters and attempted to map their political divisions on a neighborhood scale, publishing the results in Nature. The researchers don’t know, of course, how people voted in the recent election, but they crunched the data by analyzing public data like demographic information, voter registration, and whether voters participated in party primaries. What they found is that the country’s political divides extend into neighborhoods, and, in some case, even manifest on a block-by-block basis.

In some ways, the broad outlines of the maps aren’t anything new. Hand a red and blue crayon to anyone who pays close attention to local politics and ask her to color in the the political affiliations of the neighborhoods, and you might end up with a map like the one of DFW pictured above. But this data drills gets so granular that it manages to quantify some eyebrow-raising results. For example, as  the New York Times reports: