McCracken Camp: There Will Be a Runoff

With nearly all the vote counted, mayoral candidate Brewster McCracken surely must be intimidated by the 47.5% support that rival Lee Leffingwell pulled tonight, but McCracken spokesman Colin Rowan says his candidate won't concede, and there will be a June runoff. McCracken garnered 27% tonight, and former mayor Carole Keeton Strayhorn took 21% (possibly signaling the end of her political career? Please?).

"I think we wish the gap had been narrower," Rowan said at Cuatros in West Campus. "We'll have to figure out how we overcome the advantage Lee has from having all the inside politics.

"Tonight is a pretty good indication of what happens when you're the outsider candidate."

McCracken, after six years on the City Council, is an "outsider"?

"Absolutely," Rowan said. "Lee has been the candidate of the endorsing groups. There's nothing wrong with that, it's not an indictment of Lee at all. Brewster is clearly not the candidate of political institutions, and that's what we saw tonight. Lee has the predictable turnout and Brewster has to overcome that.

"A lot of people don't know about Lee. There's a lot to learn about Lee, things that he disclosed in the last financial report. He's taken donations from [infamous, failed Republican gubernatorial candidate] Clayton Williams, and we haven't. He's the environmental candidate, and we think that's kind of ironic. There's challenges to working on a campaign when you work for a guy who's known as a boy scout.

"Brewster ran a campaign of ideas, and I do think that part of what you saw tonight was the result of what happens when you run a campaign of ideas in local politics – you get kicked in the teeth and suffer the consequences."