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Dustin Marshall looks like he’s won a runoff election. Again.
Marshall appeared poised to defeat challenger Nancy Rodriguez for the District 2 seat, according to unofficial results. With about a third of the voting centers in, the incumbent held a 1,694-vote lead among 5,850 votes cast.
In early voting, Marshall garnered more than twice the number of in-person voters, and outpaced Rodriguez by nearly 600 votes on mail-in ballots.
If the results held for Marshall, it would be his third runoff win in four years.
Rodriguez beat Marshall by more than 3,000 votes in November’s general election, where over 60,000 voters in District 2 cast a ballot. But she didn’t hit a 50% threshold to be declared the outright winner in a three-candidate race.
In some ways, the runoff win could be viewed as a referendum on the district’s trajectory under the leadership of Superintendent Michael Hinojosa, who — in his second stint with the district — has continued many of the reform efforts of the district’s previous leader, Mike Miles.
Marshall is an ardent supporter of Dallas’ data-heavy approaches. For example, he’s backed the district’s controversial teacher evaluation and merit pay system and has pushed for a more automated way to identify schools in need of repair or replacement.
Rodriguez ran against the district’s Teacher Excellence Initiative, or TEI, since evaluations are in part based on student performance on the state’s standardized test, which she sees as flawed.
TEI was recently used as a model for a state teacher evaluation pilot, steered by former DISD school board member and current Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath. Marshall took over Morath’s seat on the Dallas board in the 2016 special election.
The typical calendar for school board races, with elections in May, was upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. Most districts — including Dallas — postponed their elections until November, where they would run concurrently with the presidential election.
Over the past few months, the race between Marshall, CEO of a freight and logistics company, and Rodriguez, a social worker, took a decidedly partisan turn, despite the fact that school board elections in Texas are supposedly nonpartisan.
District 2 is a doughnut-shaped area around the Park Cities, capturing both sides of Dallas’ political spectrum, including Preston Hollow, Lakewood and parts of East Dallas.
Rodriguez and her supporters labeled Marshall as the choice of Dallas’ well-heeled Republicans, meanwhile touting her endorsements from several local Democratic organizations. Marshall pushed back, questioning her Democratic bonafides.
Marshall raised $574,579 during his prolonged campaign, with $171,887 of those contributions coming during the month-long runoff. Marshall’s runoff total alone was more than Rodriguez raised during her entire campaign: $45,702.
(Marshall’s campaign contributors include Bobby Lyle and Peter Beck, both of whom are donors to The Dallas Morning News’ Education Lab.)