We’re quickly approaching San Antonio’s first open mayoral election in 16 years, and the stakes for local voters couldn’t be higher.
A whopping 27 candidates threw their hats in the ring to replace outgoing Mayor Ron Nirenberg, and 59 candidates are running for 10 City Council seats, all of which are up for grabs on Saturday, May 3, smack-dab in the middle of San Antonio’s annual Fiesta celebration.
At the same time, a number of Bexar County municipalities are also holding their own elections, plus bond and school board elections in several districts.
That’s a lot of candidates to keep track of.
The San Antonio Report’s government and politics reporter Andrea Drusch has been working overtime to get to know all 86 candidates by tracking campaign filings and finance reports, attending live events, dissecting their websites, conducting in-person interviews, and wrapping together everything we know about them into a single Voter Guide where you can find out more about what they hope to accomplish if elected.
The next mayor and council members will decide what San Antonio looks like for decades to come.
We’re in the midst of multiple city-shaping economic development efforts like a downtown stadium for the Missions baseball team and a possible relocation of the Spurs to Hemisfair in the works, at the same time the city is facing ongoing challenges of housing affordability, public safety and infrastructure, to name a few.
Today’s Voter Guide launch is just step one of our comprehensive plans to cover the upcoming races.
On April 8, we’ll host a mayoral debate with the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce that is free and open to the public. Send us your questions by text, and maybe you’ll hear them asked on the debate stage!
We’re also partnering with KLRN to tape and air a new edition of the Voter Guide show we premiered last year, with the goal of reaching as many voters as we can with the detailed information in this guide. Our team is also working hard to put together forums in the four open City Council races, with more details on those to come soon.
Putting together the Voter Guide has become a labor of love at the San Antonio Report. We spend months tracking down candidates and sifting through Q&A responses with the lofty goal of creating individual candidate profiles for each candidate on the ballot.
This year we faced a new challenge when we noticed an uptick in AI-edited imagery being used by various campaigns in official campaign materials.
This came as a surprise — and does not live up to our journalistic standards. In the era of LinkedIn headshot generators, we decided to allow handout images for the Voter Guide in cases where we didn’t have a better option.
For our news coverage, however, our standard will remain that we will only use staff-produced photos, without the use of AI, to cover these candidates.
Over the years, readers’ response to the Voter Guide has been so overwhelmingly positive that we know this effort is an essential part of our nonprofit newsroom’s civic engagement work.
Each election, we try to improve the process and answer voters’ questions more fully than we ever have before. This year we also sought to add some clarity about what these City Council districts look like, with maps made by photojournalist Brenda Bazán.
If you have ideas of tools you’d like see in the next Voter Guide, let us know!
You can click through each page of our 2025 Voter Guide here:
