Councilman Ed Oakley, an openly gay candidate, won't become a new mayor of Dallas.

Oakley lost to a wealthy retired businessman Tom Leppert, who
won the most expensive mayoral race in Dallas history. Leppert received about 58 percent of the vote in the final but still unofficial results of the runoff, beating Ed Oakley by more than 13,000 votes.

A victory by Oakley would have made him the first openly gay mayor of a major US city, according to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, a Washington-based gay rights group.

Oakley's candidacy also helped dispel the image of Dallas as an archconservative oil city in the heart of the US 'Bible Belt'.

"That image of Dallas is pretty dated. I would call it a moderate city now, certainly not liberal, but it is not the conservative icon of 30 years ago," said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.