Nonpartisan approach helped White win, experts say

Nonpartisan
approach helped White win, experts say

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

“When a former chair of the Democratic Party of Texas
carries Precinct 217 [mostly Republican area of River Oaks],
something is a little different about an election,”
said Houston political scientist Richard Murray.

Murray and Bob
Stein, dean of Rice’s School of Social Sciences, shared
their perspectives on why the mayoral election was different
and how Mayor Bill White won it during a forum hosted by
the School of Social Sciences Jan. 15 for Rice students,
faculty, staff and alumni.

“Bill White
was never partisan,” said Stein, the Lena Gohlman Fox
Professor of Political Science, despite the fact that White
had been a fund-raiser for President Bill Clinton and had
served as the leader of the Democratic Party in Texas. “What
Bill did very early on was recruit moderate to centralist
Republicans to give him money, to give him votes, but most
importantly to say this is a man who can make a lot of money
but can also run this city.”

This approach
built “friends for the city” rather than “partisan
friends,” Stein noted.

Murray, director
of the Center for Public Policy and professor of political
science at the University of Houston, said the climate was
right for a nonpartisan approach.

“If we look
at the country and our state, one of the things that we
see clearly is a terrific increased polarization of our
voters … the Ds [Democrats] versus the Rs [Republicans],”
he said. “A very large number of Americans don’t
like this polarization and have been increasingly turned
off by both political parties.”

Surveys have
shown “an incredible mix of attitudes and opinions
on many issues,” Murray said. “There are a lot
of voters out there who are not highly partisan, particularly
on the major issues that confront the city.”

“Bill White
was able to talk to each of the communities about issues
that brought them together rather than took them apart,”
Stein said, citing the issue of drainage as an example.
When White noted the right of a citizen not to suffer the
consequences of living down the stream from a developer
who is building homes and not taking care of flooding, “that’s
something that rings true to a middle-class white voter
in Meyerland and to an African-American voter in the Fourth
Ward,” Stein said. “That’s a smart way to
talk about politics.”

This broad appeal
was critical to winning the election in a city like Houston,
where the electorate is now barely more than 50 percent
Anglo-American. Stein noted that when he joined the Rice
faculty in 1979, about 75 percent of the voters were Anglo-Americans;
political candidates could win by supplementing a majority
of the electorate with a small number of African-American
and Hispanic voters. “When the political game is winning
among a nonmajority community, you have to win across all
those communities,” Stein said.

Both Murray and
Stein acknowledged that a year ago they considered White
a long shot because he was running against Orlando Sanchez,
a Hispanic Republican who had lost the previous mayoral
election to incumbent Lee Brown by only 9,000 votes, and
also against Sylvester Turner, an African-American Democrat
who was likely to win at least most of the African-American
votes (33 percent of the electorate).

In the general
election, White won about 40 percent of the Republican vote,
23 percent of the African-American vote and 39 percent of
the Hispanic vote. “These are significant numbers because
this is a candidate who understood how you build inclusive
coalitions rather than exclusive ones,” Stein said.

Stein suggested
that in pluralistic electorates, where voters are not dominated
by one ethnic or racial group, the fear that the voter will
decide solely on the basis of the candidate’s racial
group affiliation drops off. “When you’re a majority
minority population, the majority is either Anglo or some
minority ethnic, and there’s that sense of threat:
you’re either in or out,” Stein said. “But
in a plurality electorate, you’ve got a chance to make
a deal.”

White succeeded
at appealing to enough of the various minority groups to
make it into the runoff, which he won by nearly 63 percent
of the votes.

Stein credited
Houston voters for their ability to make discerning opinions
about candidates on more than just race. Surveys taken during
Lee Brown’s three terms indicated that job performance
was more important to voters than race. The probability
an African-American would vote for Lee Brown dropped to
54 percent in 2001 from 92 percent in 1997 — a reflection
on dissatisfaction with the mayor’s achievements, Stein
said.

“Race affiliation
is still very strong,” Stein said. “It’s
very significant and it can trump such things as party and
ideology and even job evaluation.” Some voters will
pick a candidate on the basis of ethnic background and skin
color because they want to be represented by someone who
has had similar cultural or historical experiences. Others
will avoid voting for someone solely because they are biased
against a particular skin color or ethnicity.

“But the
good news story is that [Houston] voters are quite willing
to evaluate candidates in a low-information municipal election,”
Stein said.

White’s
broad bipartisan coalition should allow him to begin his
term with an advantage, Murray said. “His voter coalition
puts him in a better position to engage in the very difficult
work of governing, to build coalitions issue by issue that
include people from different perspectives and backgrounds,
to de-emphasize the reality that most members of council
are Democrat or Republican when it comes to partisan politics.
They don’t have to function on city council in that
fashion.”

The forum was
the first of several the School of Social Sciences plans
to host this year to acquaint its alumni and the community
with the research done at the school, which will celebrate
its 25th anniversary in 2004. Stein thanked the James A.
Baker III Institute for Public Policy and the Baker Institute
Student Forum for providing the space for and personnel
to assist with the mayoral forum.