When it’s all said and done, San Antonio’s 2025 mayoral race may be the most expensive, crowded and confusing election in city history.
There are 27 candidates on the ballot, from a true variety of political, social and economic backgrounds. Statewide and national political action committees are funneling significant funds into the race — and the candidates who aren’t on the receiving end of that outside money are scrambling and self-funding to keep up.
To help make sense of it all, the San Antonio Report will be hosting a debate on Tuesday to illustrate what sets the candidates apart from each other, with the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce as our partner in hosting the event.
The eight candidates on Tuesday’s stage will be, in random order, Clayton Perry, Beto Altamirano, Melissa Cabello Havrda, Manny Pelaez, Gina Ortiz Jones, Rolando Pablos, John Courage and Adriana Rocha Garcia.
As we set out to build a manageable stage for this debate, we considered local polling, fundraising across 2024 and 2025 as well as the professionalism of campaigns — a rubric that includes endorsements received and our assessment of the candidate’s ability to get voters to the polls during early voting and on Election Day.
We thought the stage would end up shorter, but as the race has unfolded, a top tier of candidates has remained relatively tight, even after the most recent wave of campaign finance reports. Our stage will reflect that.
San Antonio has a $1,000 individual contribution limit for mayoral campaigns, but individual candidates are allowed to contribute unlimited amounts of their own money to their campaigns, and political action committees are not beholden to the contribution limit at all.
The top fundraisers across the entirety of the race are Pelaez, Altamirano, Pablos and Ortiz Jones. Pelaez and Altamirano have the most cash on hand heading into the final stretch, followed by Perry and Pablos.
These totals take into account personal loans to campaigns, which we included for this reason:
As San Antonio Report political reporter — and debate moderator — Andrea Drusch pointed out in her story about the race this week, there is limited time left ahead of early voting, which begins April 22, for candidates to make their cases with message alone.
Money will be crucial in the race’s final days, so a snapshot of the race’s leaders at this point in time must include those with the most cash on hand. But money isn’t the only metric.
The only independent polling on the race was conducted months ago, on Feb. 17-20 by UTSA. None of the candidates broke single-digit support and roughly 56% of likely voters said they were either unfamiliar with the candidates or undecided.
Ortiz Jones took 9.3% in the February survey, while Courage took 7.9% and Pelaez took 5.5%. Four other candidates took between 3% and 4% support in the UTSA poll: Cabello Havrda, Altamirano, Rocha Garcia and Perry.
While the 19 other candidates in the race have pockets of local support, our editorial assessment of the top tier of candidates at this moment is that the eight who will be on Tuesday’s stage are the race’s current leaders.
As a local nonprofit newsroom, we work incredibly hard to fully cover races like this one. On our website now, we have an in-depth 2025 Voter Guide, which includes as much information as we could gather on all 27 candidates, including Q&As with each of the candidates that illustrate their viewpoints on some of the city’s most pressing issues.
Our goal in this debate is not to choose winners and losers, but to spend between 75 and 90 minutes (we added a little time to accommodate the eight-person stage) helping voters better understand the policy positions and leadership capability of a number of candidates who want to call themselves San Antonio’s next mayor.
We believe this lineup will serve that purpose — and while we can’t feature every candidate, we hope Tuesday’s event will make civic engagement in our city easier, not harder.
“Polling results and fundraising have long been the standard for making a debate stage, so we’re not doing anything new,” San Antonio Report publisher Angie Mock explained Friday.
“We understand that candidates who are not included in our debate are naturally disappointed. Our goal for Tuesday’s debate is to have productive and meaningful discourse so that San Antonio voters have the information they need when they go to the polls. And based on the overwhelming registration for the debate, voters really want to learn more about the most viable candidates at this stage in the race.”
We look forward to seeing you there — and if you can’t join us in person, we will post the video from the debate on our website and YouTube late Tuesday evening.
Andrea Drusch contributed to this report.
