Gina Ortiz Jones, the openly LGBTQ former Under Secretary of the Air Force, won 27.2 percent of the ballots cast in a 27-way-race for mayor of San Antonio, on Saturday, May 3, making her the top vote-getter and sending her into a runoff for the seat with former Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos. Pablos came in a distant second in Saturday’s balloting with about 16.61 percent of the vote.
Jones has been endorsed by the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund.
As San Antonio Current pointed out, this is the first San Antonio mayoral race since 2009 not to feature an incumbent, and in addition to the 27 candidates, this race was noticeable for the “influx of hundreds of thousands of dollars in outside cash. …
“Despite raising more than $500,000 and engaging in a vigorous boots-on-the-ground campaign, tech entrepreneur Beto Altamirano came in third with roughly 12 percent of the vote. Of the five current and former City Council members in the race, only District 4’s Adriana Rocha Garcia broke the 10 percent threshold,” according to the Current.
SA Current also notes that neither Jones or Pablos has worked previously in San Antonio city government, with Jon Taylor, a political scientist with the University of Texas at San Antonio, telling the Current, “The big picture observation is that the voters thought that outsiders with no city council experience were preferable to sitting and former city council members.”
Jones, according to LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, is a first-generation American raised by a single mother in San Antonio who attended Boston University on an Air Force ROTC scholarship. She served as an intelligence officer in the Air Force and deployed to Iraq. After leaving the military, she advised on military operations in Latin America and joined the Defense Intelligence Agency as an inaugural member of U.S. Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany.
Jones went on to serve in the Executive Office of the President leading portfolios at the intersection of economic and national security, and in 2021, President Biden nominated Jones and the U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed her to serve as the 27th Under Secretary of the Air Force. She was the first woman of color and first out lesbian to serve as the under secretary of any military department and was recognized for her service with the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the department’s highest civilian award.
Jones returned home to San Antonio in 2023. She serves on the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America Board of Directors, the The Asian American Foundation Advisory Council and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She has advanced degrees from Boston University, the University of Kansas and the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies.
— Tammye Nash
WHO CARES IF SHE’S A LESBIAN….THE MAIN FOCUS SHOULD BE, IS SHE QUALIFIED??