Heights voters hinder 'anyone but Gabe' bid

Vasquez nets most votes in District H race

After a racially charged campaign to slow down his front-running candidacy, Gabriel Vasquez topped the City Council District H field by getting an overwhelming share of the votes of Anglos in the Heights, while Hispanic strongholds leaned heavily toward his three Latino opponents.

Vasquez, a University of Houston professor and trustee of the Houston Independent School District, managed 37 percent of the vote and beat down a concerted “anyone but Gabe” effort led by state Sen. Mario Gallegos and all three of Harris County’s Latino state representatives.

Vasquez will now square off in a runoff with restaurateur Yolanda Black Navarro, who got 32 percent of the vote in the bitterly contested race to replace Councilman Felix Fraga, who could not run again because of term limits.

“We’re in an extremely good position,” Vasquez said Wednesday. “We’ve garnered the highest number of votes. We’ve withstood some pretty negative attacks. We’ve survived three state representatives and one state senator ganging up against us and putting out all kinds of misinformation.

“Now we’re just going to continue working to put out our message of neighborhood improvement.”

At the nadir of the campaign, Gallegos and state Reps. Jessica Farrar and Rick Noriega teamed up to produce an anti-Vasquez mailer featuring a picture of him bending over and calling him “Vendido,” or sellout. All three also spoke out sharply and frequently against Vasquez, who helped craft a new bilingual education policy for HISD that they claimed was anti-Hispanic.

Political observers say Gallegos sees Vasquez as a threat to his power but, on Wednesday, the senator was neither contrite nor conciliatory.

“Our sole purpose was to let people know who Gabe Vasquez really is,” said Gallegos, whose senatorial District 6 encompasses council District H.

“Where does he stand on school vouchers; why did he take a walk on a recent HISD vote? Where does he stand on affirmative action; why is he willing to reform the existing city program supported by Mayor Lee Brown?”

“Those are key issues that are going to be in the runoff and that affect my constituents.”

But while Gallegos denied that the hot-button issues were racially divisive, an analysis of key precincts Wednesday showed that Vasquez ran strongest in the gentrified Anglo portions of the Houston Heights and Woodland Heights. Voters at Reagan High School cast 492 votes for Vasquez, compared with 141 for Navarro and 86 for Torres; at Heights Presbyterian Scout House, Vasquez got 280 votes, compared with 102 for Navarro and 57 for Torres.

On the flip side, Navarro, who was raised in the district and has a long record of community activism, ran strongest in historically Hispanic boxes. In the venerable Second Ward, or Segundo Barrio, where residents of Precincts 9 and 10 vote near Navarro’s two restaurants on Navigation, she raked in 95 votes, compared with Vasquez’s 13, and 132 votes to Vasquez’s 30, respectively.

Navarros also led Vasquez 94 votes to 66 in Lee Elementary’s Precinct 44; in Jeff Davis High School’s Precinct 46, she led him 139 to 92.

“Gabriel ran a weak second among Hispanics, but on the other hand, he ran a strong first among Anglos,” said University of Houston political scientist Richard Murray. “The question now is, can he get those Anglos interested enough to come back out to vote again?

“I’d assume the other Hispanic candidates will be inclined to endorse Navarro.”

In fact, while Navarro was the main beneficiary of the venomous assault on Vasquez by Gallegos and company, Houston Community College trustee Abel Davila captured 14 percent of the vote, former firefighter Lalo Torres got 13 percent and the sole Anglo in the race, W.L. Rambo, got 4 percent.

With the field now narrowed to just Vasquez and Navarro, political consultant Marc Campos, who worked on behalf of Torres, predicted Wednesday that the dynamics will change.

“Yolanda has yet to be attacked, and that’s a dynamic that I’m sure will be injected into this campaign. She’s going to have to deal with the fact that she just moved into the district,” Campos said.

“Also, if you look at the turnout results, the highest-performing precincts are the Heights and Lindale. Gabe scored well with the Heights, Heights voters are very passionate, and they’re likely to turn out again. Lindale is one of the few precincts that Lalo won, and how excited are those voters going to be without Lalo in the race?

“Do Hispanics come out again? There’s going to be a Hispanic councilman whether they do or not,” Campos said.

Vasquez said Wednesday that he was braced for more attacks but he rejected the notion that Torres’ and Davila’s voters would swerve into Navarro’s column.

“We anticipate that it will get more negative; that’s historically how certain individuals have campaigned in the past. They have a reputation for that and wear it proudly,” said Vasquez.

“But it’s a faulty assumption to believe that all of those other votes are going to Yolanda. There’s a lot of people out there that just want their neighborhoods improved and don’t like all this negative stuff.”

Navarro said she also hoped the runoff would stick to the issues.

“I would like to think that when you go into the runoff, you wipe the slate clean and go from there. From the beginning, we were not involved,” she said of the negative tenor of the race.

“We stayed focused on what we wanted to present, and we’re going to continue to do that.”

Navarro also pointed to her 32 percent share of the vote as proof that the Latino electorate no longer is fractured and fractious.

“There’s been a lot of discussion that we’re not united and the community is split up,” Navarro said. “I’m saying that my 32 percent shows we’re not split.”



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