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How much of this Texas legislator's $10 million war chest can go to his mayor campaign? No one knows [1]
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Date: 2023-01-19
However, when then-state Rep. Turner ran for mayor a decade later, the city attorney determined that he could transfer any donations that fell within these amounts: For instance, if a donor gave Turner’s legislative campaign $12,000, he would be able to use $5,000 of that on his mayoral bid. (There are no contribution limits for legislative campaigns in Texas.)
This allowed Turner to enter that race with $900,000 already available, and Houston’s current city attorney, Arturo Michel, suggests that his predecessor’s 2015 interpretation was correct. McGuinness writes this “would mean Whitmire can use up to the max from each individual donor, which can be hard to trace.” He adds that it’s possible that one of Whitmire’s opponents could go to court to try and further restrict how much money he can transfer over, though no one has said they’ll do this.
What we know for sure is that Whitmire, who has the support of several prominent Republican donors, hauled in $1.1 million last year specifically for mayor. The 2022 numbers for the other declared candidates are below:
former Harris County interim clerk Chris Hollins: $1.7 million raised, $1.1 million on-hand
former City Councilwoman Amanda Edwards: $1.4 million raised, $1 million on-hand
attorney Lee Kaplan: $1.3 million raised, $1.2 million on-hand
All the candidates will compete in the November nonpartisan primary, and a runoff would take place later unless one contender won a majority.
Hollins, who attracted widespread attention in 2020 for implementing efforts to expand access to voting during the pandemic, has already called Whitmire's Democratic loyalties into question by reminding voters that he did not support Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo during her competitive re-election fight last year. Edwards, who would be the first Black woman to lead Houston, previously took fifth in the 2020 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate.
Kaplan, for his part, is a first-time candidate who says he’s running because of the “maddening difficulty of dealing with the City bureaucracy.” Houstonia Magazine writes that he wants to “create a more progressive Houston, by tackling issues that face the city head-on.”
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/1/19/2148125/-How-much-of-this-Texas-legislator-s-10-million-war-chest-can-go-to-his-mayor-campaign-No-one-knows
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