Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
San Antonio’s next mayor will be Gina Ortiz Jones, a 44-year-old West Side native who rose from John Jay High School to the top ranks of the U.S. military on an ROTC scholarship.
Jones defeated Rolando Pablos, a close ally of Texas GOP leaders, with 54% of the vote on Saturday night in a high-profile, bitterly partisan runoff.
Thanks to new, longer terms that voters approved in November, this year’s mayor and City Council winners will be the first to serve four-year terms before they must seek reelection.
The closely watched runoff came after Jones took a commanding 10-percentage-point lead in last month’s 27-candidate mayoral election, but weathered nearly $1 million in attacks from Pablos and his Republican allies.
At the Dakota East Side Ice House, a beaming Jones said she was proud of a campaign that treated people with dignity and respect.
She also said she was excited that San Antonio politics could deliver some positivity in an otherwise tumultuous news cycle.
“With everything happening around us at the federal level and at the state level, some of the most un-American things we have seen in a very, very long time, it’s very heartening to see where we are right now,” she said shortly after the early results came in.
When it became clear the results would hold, Jones returned to remark that “deep in the heart of Texas,” San Antonio voters had reminded the world that it’s a city built on “compassion.”
Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” blared over the speakers to the roughly 250 supporters celebrating with drinks on a hot evening.
At Pablos’ watch party, he said Jones’ overwhelming victory surprised him. The conservative Northside votes he was counting on to carry him didn’t wind up materializing.
“The fact is that San Antonio continues to be a blue city,” Pablos told reporters at the Drury Inn & Suites’ Old Spanish Ballroom near La Cantera. “This [race] became highly partisan, and today it showed.”
An unusual race
After an overwhelmingly long ticket discouraged much voter interest in the first round, San Antonio’s mayoral race suddenly took on new significance when it came down to a runoff between Jones, a two-time Democratic congressional candidate, and Pablos, a close ally of Texas’ GOP leaders.
The two City Hall outsiders boxed out a host of candidates with more local government experience, including four sitting council members, and sent local politicos scrambling into their partisan camps for an otherwise nonpartisan race.
It also drew major interest from state and national political interests, with Republican and Democratic PACs each targeting a position that could be a springboard for a future politician from either party.
Between the candidates and their supporting outside groups, the runoff had already drawn roughly $1.7 million in spending as of May 28 — the last date covered by campaign finance reports before the election.
Both 2025 mayoral runoff campaigns and their supporting outside groups spent big on mailers, text messages and TV ads.
At a recent Jones rally on the West Side, new Texas Democratic Party Chair Kendall Scudder said Republicans’ willingness to sink unheard-of money into symbolic victories was enough to spur the Democratic state party to spend money on Jones’ behalf near the end of the runoff — in a city where Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans.
“These races are supposed to be nonpartisan, they are the ones making them not nonpartisan,” Scudder said of Texas Republicans. “They are the ones that are coming in and flooding money into these races … and we have to stand on the front lines of that.”
Third time’s a charm
For Jones, who most recently served as Air Force Under Secretary in the Biden administration, this is the third high-profile race Democratic interests have expected her to win.
She came close in 2018 in Texas’ 23rd Congressional District, losing by roughly 1,000 votes to Republican Will Hurd, then lost by a larger margin in the same district two years later to U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio.
Both were multimillion-dollar, top-tier races in the battle for the U.S. House, and the losses stung so much that Jones chose to watch last month’s election results in private — even though she’d led every public poll leading up to it.
At her watch party on Saturday night, Jones was joined by the iconic local activist Rosie Castro and former Mayor Julián Castro, as well as representatives from an array of outside groups that helped her in the race: Texas Organizing Project, Vote Vets, and labor unions, to name a few.
Underscoring the growing progressive influence at City Hall, Councilmembers Jalen McKee-Rodriguez (D2), Phyllis Viagran (D3), Edward Mungia (D4) and Teri Castillo (D5) also attended.
Another new progressive, 24-year-old Ric Galvan, was celebrating a narrow victory for District 6 on the city’s West Side.
The Democratic National Committee, Texas Democratic Party and Democratic Mayors Association all put out statements congratulating Jones.
“With her win in a heavily-Latino city, Mayor-elect Jones will continue the legacy of Mayor Nirenberg and move San Antonio forward,” Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin said in a statement. “From school boards to city councils to mayoral offices across the state, Texas voters are making their voice heard loud and clear: They want strong Democratic leaders who will fight for them.”
Bucking rightward shifts
Going into the night, conservatives controlled just one seat on San Antonio’s City Council, while Republican elected officials on the whole have been nearing extinction in Bexar County.
Nevertheless, Republicans saw a big opportunity in the nonpartisan city election.
Mayors of Texas’ major urban centers have steadily become less progressive as longtime incumbents termed out, and in the November election, President Donald Trump flipped two historically blue counties in South Texas — fueling greater intrigue about Hispanic voters becoming more Republican.
Pablos and his allies sought to cast Jones as a progressive zealot, with a PAC supporting him dubbing her the “AOC of Texas” in recent days and the San Antonio Police Officers’ Association threatening that she would defund the police (something Jones has said she doesn’t plan to do).
San Antonio mayoral candidate Rolando Pablos concedes to Gina Ortiz Jones at his watch party on Saturday.
Credit:
Vincent Reyna for the San Antonio Report
Pablos purposefully dropped the “Ortiz” from her name nearly every time he was in front of a microphone, and ran ads accusing Jones, who is Filipina, of pretending to be Hispanic.
It was an unexpected approach from a well-known business attorney with good relationships on both sides of the aisle, and deviation from the “unity candidate” he set out to be more than a year ago when describing plans for his first political venture in San Antonio.
Pabos said Saturday that he was proud of the race he ran, even when it got ugly. The crowd at his watch party even booed Jones when her face came on the TV screen after early results were announced.
“I think that my team did a great job. I think we ran an excellent campaign,” said Pablos, who vowed to continue looking for ways to serve the community. “What we did is we just laid everything out for everybody to look at and consider.”
A vision built from personal experience
Jones, whose family grew up leaning on housing vouchers and other forms of government support, crafted a campaign around protecting San Antonio’s most vulnerable residents — particularly in times of political uncertainty at the state and federal levels.
She was one of the most vocal critics of the city’s plans for a roughly $4 billion downtown development project and NBA arena for the San Antonio Spurs known as Project Marvel early in the race, saying she instead wanted to focus city resources on expanded Pre-K programs, workforce development and affordable housing.
It was a major contrast to Pablos, a former San Antonio Hispanic Chamber chair, who vowed to focus on bringing major corporations to San Antonio, and led even some left-leaning members of the business community to view her with uncertainty.
A surprising number of progressive elected officials either stayed out of the runoff entirely or publicly backed Pablos.
Jones seemed undeterred by that dynamic, saying often on the campaign trail that her own approach was rooted in personal experience with leaders who only listen to the privileged few.
She joined the military under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell more than two decades ago at Boston University, and will now be the city’s first mayor from the LGBTQ community.
“That experience [of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell] showed me the importance of when you are in leadership, always having the humility to ask, ‘Who am I not hearing from? And why am I not hearing from them?” Jones said at a recent San Antonio Report debate.
Jones pointed to San Antonio’s ongoing struggle with poverty — despite major investments over many years to try to change that reputation.
“We’ve had, I think, too many leaders listening to too small a part of our community.”
Big news: 20 more speakers join the TribFest lineup! New additions include Margaret Spellings, former U.S. secretary of education and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center; Michael Curry, former presiding bishop and primate of The Episcopal Church; Beto O’Rourke, former U.S. Representative, D-El Paso; Joe Lonsdale, entrepreneur, founder and managing partner at 8VC; and Katie Phang, journalist and trial lawyer.
TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.