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Part – Newstatenabenn

    • Northwest Austin voters oust City Council’s only conservative
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    Northwest Austin voters oust City Council’s only conservative

    Sakege Posted on

    Tuesday’s elections brought surprising Republican victories throughout the voting. The red wave even reached Travis County, a Democratic stronghold, where Republican President-elect Donald Trump received the most votes in his history. But there was at least one notable conservative defeat: Austin City Councilwoman Mackenzie Kelly.

    First elected to represent District 6 in 2020, Kelly lost to former Liberal real estate appraiser Krista Laine by 2.6 percentage points in a two-way race.

    During her first term, Kelly has cast her fair share of conservative votes, but she has been anything but a right-wing firebrand. In the end, that didn’t matter.

    Political experts and insiders said Kelly was a victim of political biases in both the district and the city as a whole, and the current depleted state of partisan politics.

    “It’s hard to be a Republican in Austin,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston. “She was the only conservative voice on the council, and that made her a clear target.”

    Today, all of Texas’ major urban areas lean Democratic, but Austin is the original (and brightest) cranberry in the tomato soup of Texas politics. It has had a deeply Democratic electorate for generations. That has been reflected in the makeup of the 11-member City Council, which is technically nonpartisan but has had a supermajority of self-described liberals in recent history.

    In Tuesday’s election, 68.3% of Travis County voters voted for Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump, compared to 42.38% statewide. (In 2020, 71% of county voters backed President Joe Biden.)

    “A remarkable victory”

    David Butts, a longtime Democratic political consultant in Austin, led a campaign to get other Democrats to support Kelly during this election because of his views on land use. But he said he warned her a year ago that she needed to distance herself from Republicans because her opponents would use that to bring her down.

    Laine’s campaign did just that.

    “MACKENZIE KELLY OPPOSES LGBTQIA+ RIGHTS,” read a digital ad that Laine shared on

    “MACKENZIE KELLY OPPOSES ACCESS TO ABORTION,” said another.

    Sundas Amer, who moved to the district last year and voted for Laine, said postcards he received in the mail with similar messages influenced his vote.

    “What influenced me was that he said Mackenzie Kelly … is a little more in cahoots with Greg Abbott” and other Republicans, he said, referring to the Texas governor.

    Jim Wick, who worked as a strategic consultant for Laine’s campaign, said Kelly was “out of step” with voters in his district and that it is a mistake to think of northwest Austin as conservative.

    But in a year in which the Conservatives greatly outnumbered the Liberals, Wick said Laine’s victory was a testament to his years of organizing in the community.

    “It’s a remarkable victory,” Wick said. “She is one of the only Democrats to unseat a Republican in the state, even in the face of overwhelming Republican turnout.”

    In an emotional interview with the American-Statesman on Thursday in his City Hall office, Kelly said many of the claims Laine made during the campaign were misleading. Accusations that she did not support the LGBTQ+ community, for example, were “a slap in the face,” she said, grabbing a framed collage of her and her colleagues outside Austin City Hall on National Coming Out Day.

    But despite his warnings, Butts said Kelly ultimately “stayed true” to his political beliefs and believes that’s what cost him the election.

    Among Kelly’s most controversial dissenting votes: those against the city resolutions condemning the Legislature’s passage of a near-total ban on abortion and another state law imposing restrictions on access to gender-affirming care.

    But he said those votes were more due to the fact that such resolutions, which are not legally binding, had no power to actually change state law.

    “Did I vote against items that people thought would help those communities? Yes. Did I vote against abortion rights? Yes,” Kelly told the Statesman. “But I think it’s extremely disingenuous for an elected official to pass a policy that says ‘to the extent legally possible,’ when it’s not legally possible because it’s not within our means to address it.”

    The fickleness of District 6

    District 6 also has an established history of dismissing incumbents in favor of new candidates with different political leanings.

    In 2020, Kelly defeated incumbent council member Jimmy Flannigan in a runoff. Flannigan, in turn, had unseated conservative Don Zimmerman in 2016.

    In the city’s other municipal districts, it is rare to see candidates use hyperpartisan tactics.

    Butts said he used a similar attack strategy in 2016 to help Flannigan unseat Zimmerman, who was a much more bombastic conservative force than Kelly. Kelly has approved several policies that would be considered bipartisan with his progressive colleagues.

    Laine, who will take over from Kelly in January, said he decided to run for office because he wanted “better services from the city, and also the district, regardless of your political party.”

    Ultimately, he felt it was important to highlight Kelly’s conservative bona fides during the campaign because he encountered some voters who wanted to know each candidate’s political leanings to make a better-informed decision about who aligned with their values.

    Redistricting could also have played a role in Kelly’s loss.

    When council district lines were redrawn in 2021, District 6 lost River Place, a neighborhood that endorsed Kelly in 2020 and was seen as a contributing factor in Flannigan’s defeat. River Place is now in District 10, which had no conservative candidates on the ballot this year.

    Kelly acknowledged that he “lost a significant number of support(s)” due to redistricting. But he also noted that he had gained support from many Democrats in the district “who really believed in what he was doing.”

    “They still voted for me,” Kelly said. “I was missing about 500 votes.”

    Danny Smith, a self-described “hardcore progressive,” was one of those voters. The retired critical care nurse said he disagrees with Kelly on some issues, but was able to interact with her during her first term and was impressed by her work ethic and passion for the job. She is the only conservative he has voted for.

    “I know his heart is in this because I’ve seen it up close,” Smith said.

    No conservative voice

    Kelly acknowledges that she did not influence the fate of many municipal policies. But he said he at least brought a different perspective to political discussions.

    “I thought that was of great value and I did it in a way that I can be proud of,” Kelly told the Statesman. “I was respectful and did not burn out like other council members who have held this position.”

    Rottinghaus said Kelly’s loss is definitely bad for Austin conservatives, who won’t have any representation on City Council for at least the next two years.

    “Without a conservative voice, people who feel the same way… will feel disenfranchised,” Rottinghaus said. “That’s something we’ve seen a lot in this country.”

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