I don’t recall anything like this in prior City of Houston elections, but I might be wrong.
In order to ensure Harris County voters are as informed as possible heading into the upcoming election, the Harris County Republican Party’s Local Government Committee has compiled background information pertaining to each candidate running for office in the nonpartisan City of Houston elections on November 5, 2019. The Committee distributed a questionnaire directly to the candidates and collected each candidate’s primary vote history. Please click the link below to access the information and responses for each candidate. We’ve also included contact information to get in touch with the candidates’ campaigns directly if you have any questions.
Harris County Republican Party
http://www.harriscountygop.com/
In addition to primary voting history, they are using the same four questions for all candidates, regardless of position.
- Would you or your campaign accept political contributions from city contractors or vendors?
- Would you support changing Houston’s strong mayor form of government to a city manager form with a weak mayor?
- Do you support currently maintaining the city of Houston’s property tax cap?
- Do you support using city funds to pay for lobbyists?
There are some interesting results in these questionnaires. For one, I’m surprised that Orlando Sanchez didn’t respond. (UPDATE: Sanchez’s communications director tells me that Sanchez never received a questionnaire.) (UPDATE to the update: Sanchez’s comms director called back to say that the campaign did receive a questionnaire but it was overlooked in the email.) But neither did Chris Brown, so I guess that equals out.
Also, the number of people that are running for office that haven’t voted in either party’s primaries is interesting. I would have thought that people interested in politics would vote in primaries.
Then there is the Mayor’s race. Obviously, Sylvester Turner, Dwight Boykins and Sue Lovell have voted in the past 4 Democratic primaries. No surprise there. But I was a bit surprised to see that Bill King has only voted in one of the past 4 primaries, as a Republican. As has Tony Buzbee. It was also interesting that King was for funding of lobbyists and against replacing the strong mayoral form of government, while Buzbee was for replacing the strong mayoral form of government and against taxpayer funding for lobbyists.
Check it out.