HOW IT STARTED: Houston Mayoral Runoff: Why It Might Matter to the Rest of the Country.

Kevin Williamson recently wrote the article “Republicans Must Save the Cities,” in which he noted that no city larger than San Diego has a Republican mayor. Tonight, if you hear that Bill King won Houston’s runoff mayoral election, then we will see what Republican fiscal leadership in a major U.S. city can do today. Because in many ways, Houston is like other distressed U.S. cities.

Lost in all of the Houston economic powerhouse stories of growth and employment are the city of Houston’s horrible finances.

Houston has odd borders complete with about half a dozen pocket cities. A true city of Houston map looks like a nibbled-on slice of Swiss cheese. It is all too difficult to explain in most urban-analysis reports, so the economic powerhouse everyone reads about is actually the greater Harris County area. The growth, the jobs happen there.

Why do businesses and residents locate outside the city limits? Taxes and regulations — the things others often moved to “Houston” to get away from.

The county is run by a county commissioner and treasurer, all fiscal Republicans. (Full disclosure, I have worked for Orlando Sanchez, currently Harris County treasurer, as a campaign and research advisor many times since 2001.) But the city of Houston has been run by Democratic mayors for decades and is on the brink of bankruptcy. Like other U.S. cities in dire financial straights, we have unfunded public pensions, poor budgeting, and tax base flight.

—Leslie Loftis, PJ Media.com, December 12^th, 2015.

How it’s going: Houston’s Democratic mayor reveals the Texas city is BROKE after decades of overspending that’s left it with a $160 MILLION deficit and has stopped them from even being able to pay firefighters.

—The London Daily Mail, today.

Houston’s last Republican mayor left office at the beginning of 1982.