An exceptionally sleepy May 2 municipal election has some local candidates and party leaders calling to consolidate more elections in November, as the City of San Antonio has recently done.
Only about a quarter of Bexar County voters had races on their ballots, from a patchwork of five school districts, 14 smaller municipalities and one community college board district holding elections on Saturday.
Of those, roughly 11,400 of 319,000 eligible voters — or 3.58% — turned out to vote.
“The May 2 election experienced the lowest turnout I have observed since joining the team,” said Elections Administrator Michele Carew, who started her role in March 2025.
Contributing to this year’s abysmal turnout was an election with no city- or county-wide measures on the ballot.
In 2022, the May municipal election overlapped with San Antonio’s bond election, and more than 92,000 votes were cast. In 2024, the state added elected members to county appraisal district boards, which meant every Bexar County resident had something on their ballot, and about 37,000 raw votes were cast.
(Appraisal District board seats are on the ballot again in 2026, but this time not until November.)
This year, elections workers say many voters showed up expecting to have something to vote on, and had to be turned away. Others believed they were showing up to vote in the primary runoff — a different election that will be held May 26.
“My only thought is just how few people came out to vote in this election,” said Bexar County Democratic Party Chair Michelle Lowe Solis. “[It’s] such a shift from the [March] primary where we had more than 150% increase in total turnout over 2022. Municipalities may want to consider shifting to November like [San Antonio] is doing.”
The Republican Party of Bexar County did not respond to a request for comment on the May 2 election results.
See results by turnout percentage in the map below.
In both deep blue Bexar County and across the red state of Texas, municipal elections and school board races offered some predictable Democratic gains in what’s expected to be a very strong year for the party — along with some scattered bright spots for Republicans.
Here are the top takeaways from a mixed bag May 2 election.
Red response to blue wave
Across the state, neither Republicans nor Democrats had a definitively good night.
Democrats have been benefitting from major backlash to President Donald Trump since his return to office last year, highlighted by to Democrat Taylor Rehmet’s 31-point swing in a Fort Worth special election earlier this year.
Yet on Saturday night, a Republican won a special election for a state Senate seat in the Houston area with a whopping 75% of the vote. Republican Brett Ligon will replace former state Sen. Brandon Creighton, who Gov. Greg Abbott tapped to lead the Texas Tech University System, in a district that’s deeply red. But his overwhelming victory seemed to indicate GOP voters have been rattled by the nonstop news of Democratic over-performance in elections so far this year.
Right-leaning candidates also found success in some non-partisan city elections in Fort Worth, North Richland Hills, Keller and even the Bexar County suburb of Shavano Park.
Meanwhile, left-leaning candidates notched some unlikely victories in the Houston suburb of Pearland, where they won a mayor’s race, and Arlington, where they flipped a council seat.
Democrats sweep school board races
While the municipal elections across Texas offered some mixed results, school board races were largely dominated by one party or the other.
Democrats have been pushing back hard in recent years to reverse conservative gains on local school boards. This year — amid backlash to major school funding changes and state laws limiting what public schools can teach — they seemed to have the wind at their backs.
Two candidates backed by local Democrats won their races against conservatives in North East ISD — completing a sweep that started two years ago when the other half of the board was up.
NEISD is one of the reddest districts in Bexar County, and conservative PACs found success electing candidates there in 2022.
But this year Democratic PACs and teachers’ unions dominated the spending, and the North East Bexar County Democrats (NEBCD) even hired a field director to organize around these races.
That’s as a conservative PAC that had been active in the past dissolved after the last election, and a replacement never seemed to emerge to help conservative incumbent Diane Sciba Villarreal or state Rep. Marc LaHood’s (R-San Antonio) recruit, Cheryl “Cheri” Ann Ettinger, both of whom fell Saturday by large margins.
“There was a notable absence of the opposition,” said Cameron Jones, who oversaw the North East Bexar County Democratic Party’s education campaign. “We were just waiting for that shoe to drop, and I don’t think that it did.”
A similar scenario seemed to played out in North Texas, where conservatives were ousted from a trio of seats on Grapevine-Colleyville ISD’s school board.
Just north of Austin, two left-leaning candidates also defeated incumbents on Lake Travis ISD’s board.
In Bexar County, Jones said that organizing around the education races has been a valuable exercise for Democrats, who got to meet a wide swath of voters they will need to win over to be successful in partisan races this November.
“We got to hear what they care about, what they value in education, in the schools, and honestly get in touch with people that are interested in politics that maybe don’t feel comfortable talking with us initially because we’re Democrats,” she said.
An outlier in Alamo Heights
One exception to Democrats’ school board victories was the wealthy, conservative enclave of Alamo Heights ISD, which serves about 5,000 students.
Two candidates with unabashedly liberal platforms ran railing against the board’s handling of a new parents’ rights law, in a district that typically doesn’t have contested races.
But they were soundly defeated by the incumbents who didn’t lean into the partisanship, instead calling themselves a “consensus board.”
Challengers chalked the losses up to a small community that’s difficult to break into, and prone to sweeping disagreements “under the rug.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily say it just based on our message,” said Bianca Cerqueira, a neuroscientist who was among the challengers who fell short by a wide margin. “… We plan on having more progressive candidates the next cycle and the next cycle.”
School bonds shrunk
Even as left-leaning school board candidates made gains in recent years, many school districts across Texas have seen their bond proposals voted down.
This year Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City Independent School District joined a growing list of districts that had previously been unsuccessful, but came back with a smaller ask — as East Central ISD did last May.
Overall, enthusiasm for bond proposals seemed mixed on Saturday.
SCUCISD had the only school bond in Bexar County, and saw all three proposals pass with more than 60% support. The least popular element, funding stadiums, was underwater in Bexar County but succeeded on the backs of Guadalupe County voters, who made up most of the electorate.
In North Texas, the athletic facility portion of Arlington ISD’s bond election failed while other components succeeded, as did a similar proposal in Ponder ISD.
Dallas ISD’s $6.2 billion bond package was approved by wide margins, but smaller districts, Sanger ISD and Pilot Point ISD, saw theirs fail.
Only one runoff: Alamo Colleges Board
This year Democrats started organizing around higher education races, and in Bexar County, an incumbent backed by the local Republican Party didn’t make his runoff in the county’s only Alamo Colleges District board race.
Read more: Higher-ed political woes rock sleepy Alamo Colleges board race
The contest is now down to two candidates backed by local Democrats: certified public accountant Robert Garcia and longtime Palo Alto College professor Carolyn DeLecour.
The faculty union, which supports DeLecour, is part of a larger organization that’s looking at community college board races across the state.
The runoff in District 9 is the only contest that will appear on the June 13 runoff ballot.
When the same seat went to a runoff in 2020, only about 4,500 votes were cast. But that runoff was in December, when Alamo Colleges was holding its board elections in November.
Early voting will take place June 1–8, with hours still to be determined, Carew said.
Voters will have four early voting and election day sites to choose from: Encino Library, Northeast Lakeview College, Tobin Library and SAC Victory Center.
