Odessa elected its first gay City Council member

City Council member Craig Stoker poses for a photo at Odessa City Hall on Dec. 3. (Credit: Julian Mancha for The Texas Tribune)

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ODESSA — When Craig Stoker pulled the flyer out of the mailbox, he chuckled.

It was a political mailer, one of many deployed this fall in Odessa, the West Texas city in the heart of the oil-rich Permian Basin.

His opponent, incumbent City Council member Denise Swanner, compared her stance to his. The two were total opposites except for the fact that both were in relationships with men.

It was the latest attempt in a Republican stronghold to tie Stoker’s sexual orientation to his support of the LGBTQ+ community and, by extension, the Democratic Party.

The people behind the advertisement wanted voters to elect candidates who advanced conservative values, only this election was supposed to be nonpartisan.

While Stoker and his allies had hoped the local election would be about infrastructure and city services, his opponent attempted to shift the battlefield to national political issues. Across the country, Republicans were running countless attack ads on Democrats for their support of transgender people.

The strategy backfired — at least in Odessa. The three City Council incumbents lost, a stunning result that analysts and longtime observers say revealed voters' desire for local elected leaders to focus on roads and garbage pick up, not national flashpoints.

Stoker, the scion of a prominent Odessa family, became the first openly gay man elected to Odessa’s City Council. He won his at-large seat with 56% of the vote at the same time President-elect Donald Trump won all of Ector County with 76% of the vote.

“At the end of all of this, we are neighbors. You're electing the people you live with,” Stoker said. “And no matter what happens, what you say about each other, the energy you put out about each other, you still have to live together.”

Finding his place

Stoker spent years figuring out his place in the world. Like so many sons, he tried to follow in his father’s footsteps.

Craig Stoker, far right, and his mother Carole Stoker, center left, deliver a meal to Rosetta Cuba as part of Meals on Wheels on Dec. 3. (Credit: Julian Mancha for The Texas Tribune)

Stoker and his sister were adopted by Ray and Carole Stoker when they were infants.

Ray Stoker was a respected attorney who, in 1985, was appointed chairman of the Texas State Highway and Public Transportation Commission. He later became chair of the newly created Texas Department of Transportation, among other state appointments.

Like his father, Stoker attended Baylor University. He explored architecture, communications and marketing degrees, but none stuck. Stoker never graduated.

Seven years later, he moved from Waco to Austin. His upbringing, he said, had prepared him to network his way through the political realm. He spent about a year at the Capitol as a Senate messenger, fetching lunches and coffees and making copies for legislative aides.

He returned to Odessa in 2010, selling cell phones and insurance. In 2014, he volunteered at a at Food 2 Kids, a program that supplied meals for students. Later, the program’s board members invited him to attend their meetings. That led to a job as executive director. Today, Stoker is the executive director for Meals on Wheels in Odessa.

The job with Food 2 Kids, Stoker said, had been the start of the civic engagement he had sought for years in Austin and Waco but had not found.

The job was also revealing. He said he began to notice the often fraught relationship between business owners, developers and the City Council. The proposal to open a luxury hotel downtown faced opposition. Food truck owners had to jump through confusing legal hoops because of an ordinance that required them to establish a kitchen separate from the trucks.

Frustrated with the stagnating growth in Odessa, Stoker in 2018 ran for an open seat on City Council. He lost the race but was tapped by the winner to serve on a board to revitalize the downtown area.

Craig Stoker, who is director of Meals on Wheels Odessa, speaks with volunteer Alice Drake on Dec. 3. (Credit: Julian Mancha for The Texas Tribune)

In the following years, Stoker remained civically active, acting as the voice that favored business-friendly initiatives and promoting arts programs. Those positions earned him praise among other civic leaders and the ire of conservative local officials.

While he lost the race, he remembers it fondly. It had been the last friendly election he remembers in the city.

Odessa City Council moves to the right

Two years later, the Odessa City Council would undergo a dramatic transformation. Stoker and his peers were shocked as the local GOP broke with tradition to endorse candidates — Javier Joven, Denise Swanner and Mark Matta — who promised to outlaw abortion travel and other conservative policies that were outside the norm of city politics.

The three won, forming a majority on the six-member council. They followed through with their promises, making Odessa the first Texas city to adopt an abortion-related ordinance, but only after the state adopted its near-total ban. The group also had a combative relationship with the business community, often doubting whether projects like the town’s first luxury hotel were worth the investment. They also dissolved a group responsible for promoting tourism and banned transgender people from using public restrooms.

Stoker said the council’s often antagonistic positions scared away other residents from engaging with the city. He knew the fight to unseat the three members, including Joven, who was mayor, would be difficult and potentially dirty.

"I understood the outcome was too important. If I could pull this off, what I would have the ability to do completely outweighed whatever they were slinging at me,” Stoker said. “And the ability to represent people who have probably never had a voice in the City Council chamber became too important to me."

Local vs. national issues

The Ector County Republican Party did not endorse any local candidates ahead of this fall’s election. Donna Kelm, the local party’s new chair, said that is not its role.

Kelm, who also presides over the Ector County Republican Women’s Club, added that abortion and LGBTQ issues should be left to the state, not the city council.

That didn’t stop local and national politics from echoing each other in Odessa ahead of the 2024 election.

Just as the Republicans across the United States began to attack Democrats for their support of LGBTQ+ people, Joven and the conservatives on the City Council introduced a proposal to ban transgender people from using certain restrooms in city buildings.

Stoker faced the brunt.

Melissa Michelson, dean of arts and sciences at Menlo College in California and a scholar on LGBTQ politics, said Republican this election attacks were focused acutely on transgender issues. Indeed, Donald Trump’s campaign spent more than $19 million on two anti-trans television ads, according to CBS News.

Landry Pugh and his wife Christina Pugh campaign on behalf of City Council incumbent Denise Swanner and other candidates outside a polling location on Election Day in Odessa. (Credit: Eli Hartman)

“We saw a lot of that during the 2024 election because public support isn't quite there,” Michelson said about the transgender community. “And because there's not as wide a base of public support for transgender people, and because there's still all these very robust myths circling around about them, it's easier to attack them.”

The Odessa Accountability Project, an online publication describing itself as “exposing corruption and abuse of power by local politicians and taxpayer-funded organizations,” regularly criticized Stoker for supporting the LGBTQ community. Jamie Tisdale, who runs the publication, which mainly posts on Facebook, also criticized any candidate over what they perceived as support for LGBTQ people.

“Cal Hendrick and Craig Stoker both promote LGBTQ's agenda, are pro-abortion, anti-Israel, for gay marriage, and would have you believe the same or be called a hater and a bigot,” one post said. Tisdale also accused a local church of promoting support for the town’s LGBTQ community.

In a Facebook post after the election, Tisdale said she would pray for the winners.

“I will also pray they continue moving this city forward and finish the great things outgoing council left in motion, as well as leaving a positive footprint of their own on a city that we all love and call home,” Tisdale wrote.

Tisdale did not respond to multiple requests for comment or interview requests.

Another family supporting the incumbents spent more than $200,000 — an extraordinary amount of money for a local election in a city the size of Odessa — on a political action committee to hire campaign staff that did not live in Odessa and campaign on behalf of the candidates they considered conservative.

Stoker said he was not surprised by the attacks on his sexual orientation. The attacks on the church and his religious beliefs — and the amount of money his opponent’s allies spent — surprised him more.

Campaign flyers for Mayor Javier Joven and City Council members Mark Matt and Denise Swanner sit on a side table inside Casa Ortiz, a local Mexican restaurant in Odessa. One Odessa family spent more than $200,000 supporting the incumbent council candidates, hiring campaign staff that did not live in Odessa and supporting messaging attacking Stoker’s sexual orientation and religious beliefs. (Credit: Eli Hartman/The Texas Tribune)

Centering the debate around social issues may have cost the incumbent and their allies the election, said Craig Emmert, a retired political scientist who taught at the University of Texas Permian Basin.

Emmert said that voters split their priorities when they voted for presidential candidates, mayors, and city council members, adding that, in the local election, voters did not select candidates out of partisan allegiance. He said the election’s nonpartisan status inspired voters to think about issues, not parties.

“I think the results would have been closer and might have even been different if they were running under partisan labels,” Emmert said.

Rebuilding City Hall

Civic leaders said they hope that after years of prioritizing social issues, the new City Council will take on growing infrastructure needs and stabilize City Hall. They want Odessa, known for its blue-collar workforce, to be competitive and grow its economy during a banner period for the oil and gas industry.

In the last two years, issues with the city’s aging water pipes resulted in two citywide outages that left thousands without water. And the city has yet to fill the ranks of its workforce, which saw massive turnover under the last City Council.

The council’s first priority will be finding a permanent city manager tasked with running the city's daily operations. The most recent city manager, John Beckmeyer, hired by the last council, resigned after the election.

Renee Earls, president and CEO of the Odessa Chamber of Commerce, said the city focused on keeping up with the oil fields, temporarily attracting workers. Now, city leaders must find ways to convince workers to stay to bolster the local economy. Stoker, she said, has the experience to deal with those challenges and help the city grow.

“I think our eyes need to be open, our minds need to be open to moving forward as an overall community to elevate Odessa,” she said. “We have competition across the state. We have competition across the country, we have competition 20 miles away to the east. So what we do for Odessa helps all of us.”

Craig Stoker at his first City Council meeting after winning his election. The reconstituted council’s first priority will be finding a replacement for the city manager who resigned following the election. (Credit: Callie Cummings for The Texas Tribune)

Stoker said he hopes the outcome of this election inspires more competition and debate about everyday issues, adding the attacks toward his beliefs and sexual orientation were a distraction.

“None of it was truly about me. It was their fear of losing a seat, losing an election, losing the title,” he said. “I came into this campaign with the mindset that I'm going to have to rely on the work I've done in the community and the reputation I've built preceding me. That's all I got.”

Disclosure: Baylor University has been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

Correction, Dec. 12, 2024 at 1:49 p.m.: A previous version of a photo caption in this story incorrectly listed Alice Drake's position. Drake is a volunteer for Meals on Wheels Odessa.