City Council Countdown: Meet the Candidates

Two council members are stepping down, and four are competing to keep their seats (Council Member photos via City of Austin)

Austin’s six City Council races for the Nov. 5 election provide a number of interesting storylines.

A term-limited Leslie Pool means District 7 will have new representation for the first time since Barack Obama was president – and with her departure, the last goodbye to a member of the inaugural class of 10-1 Council members (in 2014, after voters amended the city charter, Austin’s city government shifted from an at-large system of representation to one with 10 single-member districts and one at-large mayor). Meanwhile, West Austin voters in District 10 will say farewell to Alison Alter, the second-longest-serving CM on the current Council.

Vanessa Fuentes and Chito Vela, two popular Latinos representing Eastside districts, face their first reelection battles. In the suburban District 6, voters will again decide between a Democrat and a Republican – and for the first time, perhaps, award the incumbent with reelection.

And for the first time, Austin will vote for a mayor at the same time they’re voting for the president of the United States. That’s thanks to a voter-approved charter amendment aligning Austin’s mayoral and presidential elections – a move that is expected to result in a broader swath of the Austin electorate choosing the city’s mayor.

This week we’ve got a broad overview of the six Council elections Austin voters will decide on in about nine weeks. In the weeks to come, we’ll zoom in on each race to provide a more in-depth look at the candidates and issues they’re campaigning on.

District 2

Vanessa Fuentes has been popular and well-respected in her Southeast district since winning the D2 seat with a commanding 56% of the vote in a four-way race in 2020. She has earned a reputation as a studious policymaker and advocate for her working-class constituents.

One indication that her district has been satisfied with her representation at City Hall: she’s only drawn token opposition in her reelection bid. Robert Reynolds will be Fuentes’ only opponent in November, and he’s unlikely to pose much of a threat. If an incumbent elected official is disliked by constituents or community groups in their district – or just perceived as weak and vulnerable to defeat – they are likely to draw more (and more competitive) challengers.

Reynolds doesn’t have much of a public profile and is mostly known within the district as the guy who unsuccessfully ran for an overlapping Texas House seat twice – as a Republican. In 2020 Reynolds was trounced by longtime House District 51 representative Eddie Rodriguez and in 2022 he lost by an even wider margin to Rodriguez’s successor, state Rep. Lulu Flores.

District 4

Fairly or not, Austin’s northeastern D4 will always be thought of among civically engaged types as Greg Casar’s old seat. The congressman was the first to win it, of course, but he also shaped so much of what Austin progressives have come to hope for in their local elected officials.

When Casar ascended to the U.S. House of Representatives, José “Chito” Vela won the special election to replace him handily, taking 59% of the vote in a seven-person race. Whether or not Vela has filled the big shoes left by Casar as a leader on the dais for criminal justice issues is debatable, but Vela has certainly taken the mantle of progressive housing champion and run with it.

That’s likely to be a central issue in his reelection bid, where his most notable challenger will be Monica Guzmán, a tireless community organizer who finished second place (14% of the vote) in the 2022 D4 special election. Louis Herrin, a Republican who became one of Casar’s perennial challengers, is also on the ballot, along with Eduardo “Lalito” Romero and Jim Rabuck – both of whom have little campaign experience in Travis County.

District 6

Austin’s most suburban district, it seems, will always provide competitive races. At a voter level, it is a district that contains the most Republican voters and the most swing voters in the city. As a result, since the district was formed in 2014, no incumbent has won reelection. Don Zimmerman, an extremely conservative Republican, won in 2014, then lost the 2016 election to progressive Democrat Jimmy Flannigan. Flannigan then lost the 2020 contest to another Republican, Mackenzie Kelly.

Kelly, of course, hopes to break that trend while her lone challenger, Krista Laine, hopes to continue it. Kelly has been much less bombastic on the dais than Zimmerman, whose schtick had become tiresome even to Republican voters, but she has been a staunch conservative (in the last budget, she proposed an amendment to eliminate funding for the city’s Equity Office, and hers was the only vote against a Council resolution protecting transgender Austinites). Her less in-your-face conservatism – and likely support from the city’s public safety unions, all of which have endorsed her – will make her a formidable candidate in the northwestern district.

Laine is no political novice, though. She was a central force in the 2022 campaign countering an attempted right-wing takeover of Round Rock’s school board. In that election cycle, the far-right candidates had a lot of money behind them from outside the district, but the candidates endorsed by Access Education RRISD (the group Laine co-founded) each won by a margin of at least 15%. But she is untested in Austin politics (though, critically, RRISD’s school boundaries overlap with the D6 map – which lost some of Austin’s Republican voters and gained Democratic voters when the district was redrawn in 2022 as part of the city’s redistricting process).

District 7

Austin’s North Central D7 is one of two open seats on the ballot in November, and it is easily the most hotly contested. Seven people in total are vying to replace Leslie Pool, who will depart the dais in 2025 as the longest-serving Council member of the 10-1 era and, arguably, the most profoundly transformed from a policy perspective.

image by Austin Chronicle / Map Data via City of Austin

The transformation Pool underwent over the last two years of her 10-year Council tenure – from a steadfast opponent of increasing housing density in neighborhoods to one of the generals marshaling support for policies that could greatly increase housing supply in neighborhoods – will set the stage for this election.

That transformation pitted Pool against some of Austin’s most powerful neighborhoods (Allandale, Crestview, and Brentwood – each of which is filled with neighbors that Pool had allied with on political causes going back decades). This election will test if voters are still on board with a more density-friendly candidate.

Four of the seven candidates have embraced platforms at least somewhat aligned with the “Yes in My Backyard” movement – of those, two-time congressional candidate Mike Siegel appears strongest. Thanks to Siegel’s valiant attempts at unseating powerful U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, voters in the district are likely to be more familiar with him than most of the other challengers, and Siegel’s fundraising has been head-and-shoulders above the competition.

Given the large number of candidates and that there is no incumbent on the ballot, the D7 race is most likely to be decided in a December runoff. At this stage, Siegel appears likely to make it – but whom will he face off against? Adam Powell, a young and energetic campaigner with serious policy chops, is well-positioned to advance. Behind Siegel, Powell had the second-best fundraising haul per campaign finance reports released earlier this summer. But Gary Bledsoe – the legendary civil rights attorney and Texas NAACP president – is likely to win the support of the district’s neighborhood groups that have become disillusioned with Pool and her embrace of YIMBYism. It’s possible that that support could be enough to propel him to the runoff. Todd Shaw, former chair of the Planning Commission, is also on the ballot, along with Pierre Huy Nguyn, Edwin Bautista, and Daniel “Dan” Dominguez.

District 10

Here’s the other open seat among the Council races – Alison Alter chose not to petition for a third term, so West Austin voters will choose Marc Duchen or Ashika Ganguly.

D10 is Austin’s second-most-Republican district, but given that both Duchen and Ganguly are Democrats, the race is likely to center more on local issues than in D6. Namely: housing, where residents in some D10 neighborhoods have opposed Council’s recent forms. Duchen counts himself among one of those skeptics, as he told us in January. He’s also had past involvement with the Austin Neighborhoods Council and Community Not Commodity – two groups that have waged a decadelong battle against attempts by Austin leaders to update the city’s housing rules to enable more housing production throughout the city.

Ganguly is a former Austin ISD teacher who most recently worked for state Rep. John Bucy (a progressive Democrat representing a district that encompasses many of Austin’s northern suburbs). She is supportive of those housing reforms. She’s also a young woman of color facing off against a white man in his 40s – demographic differences that could play a factor in what is one of Austin’s oldest, whitest, and wealthiest districts.

The two candidates remain competitive in fundraising, so this race is likely to remain tight up to Election Day.

Mayor

Who’s afraid of Kirk Watson? High-profile progressive leaders, apparently, as none stepped forward to challenge the incumbent mayor who will be seeking a full four-year term. Watson has four challengers, but none that are (as of now) striking much fear in the Watson reelection campaign.

The lack of a very threatening challenger is testament to Watson’s perceived strength going into November. He has made decisions that have rankled Austin progressives but none that are likely to resonate with enough voters to topple him, City Hall sources and political organizers told us. That’s especially true in this particular election where the Democratic ticket up the ballot will be concentrating on centrist voters.

Combine the electoral environment with Watson’s colossal fundraising advantage (he will likely raise more than $1 million on his own and the political action committee supporting him could raise another $1 million), plus the virtually guaranteed support from Austin’s Democratic clubs and labor groups, and Watson is in good shape to win. But can he do it without a runoff?

Doug Greco, Kathie Tovo, Carmen Llanes Pulido, and Jeffery Bowen are hoping not – their best shot of winning is advancing to a runoff and taking Watson head-on. Of the challengers, Greco has been campaigning the most aggressively – raising a respectable $88,000 between January and June (that’s the highest total among the challengers; but, in the same period, Watson raised $710,000). Greco’s also been attacking the incumbent in public every chance he can.

By comparison, Tovo and Llanes Pulido have been running much quieter campaigns. But Llanes Pulido’s summer fundraising was not insignificant, and Tovo is independently wealthy, so that dynamic could change as campaigns heat up and more voters start tuning in to local races.