Partisanship in United States mayoral elections (2016)
Twenty-five of the 100 largest U.S. cities held mayoral elections in 2016. While many local governments officially hold nonpartisan elections, most mayors across America's 100 largest cities are affiliated with a political party. At the end of 2016, when Republicans controlled the U.S. Congress and two-thirds of all state legislatures, close to two-thirds of the top-100 mayors were affiliated with the Democratic Party.
In 2016, four mayoral offices changed partisan control. Republicans gained one seat overall, while Democrats lost one seat. In Corpus Christi, Texas, Dan McQueen (R) defeated the Democratic incumbent. Jenn Daniels (R) replaced the outgoing unaffiliated mayor in Gilbert, Arizona. Stockton, California's Republican incumbent was defeated by Michael Tubbs (D). Finally, in Fremont, California, Lily Mei (unaffiliated) defeated Bill Harrison (D). This brought the total balance of mayors to 64 Democratic, 30 Republican, and six others.
For more information on Ballotpedia's 2016 municipal election coverage, click here. For more details on highlighted mayoral elections, click the tabs below.
2016 election
Partisan breakdown
As a result of 2016 elections, Republicans gained one mayorship in America's 100 largest cities. In Fremont, California, Lily Mei (unaffiliated) defeated incumbent Bill Harrison (D). Although only 16 of these cities held officially partisan elections, many candidates who run in nonpartisan races are endorsed by or otherwise affiliated with local political parties. Mayors with a known political affiliation are treated as members of that party for the purposes of this study even though they may hold a nonpartisan office.[1]
In 2016, Democratic mayors significantly outnumbered Republican mayors in America's 100 largest cities, and the Democratic Party's control over these mayoral offices was greater than its control over any other major political position. The party's 65 percent of control was higher than its control over the U.S. Senate (44 percent), U.S. House (43 percent), state legislatures (43 percent), and governorships (36 percent). Governing magazine attributed this success to the fact that populations of cities tend to be socially liberal.[2]
2016 mayoral races
- See also: Partisan risk
In 2016, there were 25 mayorships up for election. Twelve incumbents were Republican, 11 were Democratic, one was nonpartisan, and one was of unknown affiliation. These positions accounted for 44.4 percent of all Republican mayors, 16.4 percent of Democratic mayors, 33.3 percent of nonpartisan mayors, and 33.3 percent of unknown mayors. This large percentage of seats up meant that Republicans were on the defensive in 2016. San Diego's Kevin Faulconer, the only Republican mayor in the 10 largest cities, was up for and won re-election. He defeated two Democratic challengers in the city's primary election with 58 percent of the vote. If a Democratic candidate had won that election, the largest city with a Republican mayor would have been Jacksonville.
*Denotes an incumbent who ran for re-election.
Corpus Christi
Incumbent Nelda Martinez, a member of the Democratic Party, was first elected in 2012 and was re-elected in 2014. Nueces County, of which Corpus Christi is the seat, voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election since 2000. The filing deadline for candidates who wished to run in this election was August 22, 2016. The following candidates were certified for the ballot:
In addition to a history of voting for Republican presidents, Nueces County makes up a part of Texas' 27th Congressional District. Although Solomon Ortiz (D) held the seat from 1983 to 2011, the seat changed party hands in the Republican wave of 2010. Blake Farenthold (R) won election by less than one percent, but followed it up with victories of 17 and 30 percent in 2012 and 2014, respectively.
McQueen defeated Martinez in the general election, which was a rematch of the 2014 race. They, along with two other candidates, ran in the 2014 mayoral election. In that race, he garnered 14 percent of the total vote. In 2015, McQueen launched a committee to explore running against Frenthold in the 2016 Republican primary, but declined to do so.[3]
| Mayor of Corpus Christi, General Election, 2014 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Candidate | Vote % | Votes | |
 Nelda Martinez Incumbent |
51.8% | 23,141 | |
| Bob Jones | 29.6% | 13,254 | |
| Dan McQueen | 13.7% | 6,106 | |
| Lee McGinnis | 4.9% | 2,206 | |
| Total Votes | 44,707 | ||
| Source: Nueces County Clerk's Office - Official 2014 Election Results | |||
San Diego
Incumbent Kevin Faulconer was endorsed by the Republican Party and won a special election in 2014. The election was called when the previous mayor Bob Filner (D) resigned amidst a sexual harassment scandal. In previous presidential elections, Barack Obama (D) carried the city in 2012 and 2008, though George W. Bush (R) was favored by San Diegans in 2000 and 2004. The following three candidates were certified for the ballot in March 2016:
Faulconer won the primary election outright, earning almost 60 percent of the vote. Although the race was officially nonpartisan and party labels did not appear on the ballot, each candidate was either endorsed by or affiliated with the Republican Party or Democratic Party in the past.
Chris Jennewein of the Times of San Diego noted that Faulconer's campaign strategy contrasted with that of Donald Trump (R). "In contrast to Trump and the Tea Party, Faulconer practices the politics of inclusion. He began his re-election campaign with an ad in Spanish, and called for the first debate of the campaign to be on Spanish-language television," Jennewein wrote. He believed that Faulconer's refusal to endorse Trump and choosing to not appear at a May rally for the Republican candidate may have made him more favorable to Democratic and Independent voters in the city.[4]
The chart below reflects voter registration in San Diego as of November 1, 2015. At that time, there were nearly 50 percent more registered Democrats than registered Republicans in the city. The 29 percent of voters who did not state a political preference constitute a large swing vote in the city.[5]
Stockton
Mayor Anthony Silva (R) was first elected in November 2012, less than six months after the city filed for bankruptcy. He campaigned against then-mayor Ann Johnston (D) by criticizing a year of high crime rates and failure to properly oversee the city's finances. After his victory, Silva pushed for an increase in sales taxes to pay for law enforcement costs, which ultimately reached the ballot in November 2013 after adjustments by the city council.[6][7]
Tubbs, a member of the city council, defeated Silva in the November 8 general election. Tubbs also received more votes than Silva in the primary election, beating the mayor 33 percent to 26 percent.[8] Stockton's voter registration skews heavily Democratic. The chart below displays figures as of May 23, 2016.[9]
Among America's 100 largest cities by population, Stockton is the northernmost California city with a Republican mayor. It is located in the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland Combined Statistical Area, where all of the namesake cities have Democratic mayors.[10] If Democrats regain control of city hall, Fresno will become the state's northernmost city with a Republican mayor.
Background
Number of big-city Republican mayors decreased between the 1990s and 2010s
When Bill de Blasio (D) was elected as mayor of New York City in late 2013, Bloomberg Business noted that none of America's largest 12 cities had a Republican mayor. In 1993, however, six of the mayors serving in the 12 largest cities were Republican.[11] While the situation is not quite as one-sided—with Kevin Faulconer and Lenny Curry scoring Republican victories in San Diego, California, and Jacksonville, Florida, respectively—Republican influence in America's largest cities has declined.
Bloomberg Business pointed to a trending demographic shift as the leading cause for the decline of Republican mayors. "[M]iddle-class Americans have been leaving cities. Immigrants and younger voters who have moved in, for the most part, aren’t voting Republican," wrote Mark Niquette. Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution agreed, saying that racial and ethnic minorities—groups that traditionally vote Democratic—live primarily in large urban areas and accounted for 83 percent of the national population growth from 2000 to 2008.[11]
Mick Cornett (R), at the time the mayor of Oklahoma City, said there was a lack of Republican Party interest in the largest mayoral races. "The Democratic Party uses mayors as spokespeople and as examples of success. The Republican Party seems to not want to allow Republican mayors to be part of the story," he told Politico in 2013. Then-mayor of Mesa, Arizona, Scott Smith (R), said that the national party had "completely ignored mayors" and put its focus on ideology rather than governing practically.[12]
What power do mayors really have?
A 2011 study by researchers at the University of Michigan and Georgetown University found that a mayor's political alignment could have an impact on certain items within a city's budget. The study showed that particularly in the area of police and fire spending, where cities have significant discretion, elections of Republican mayors correlated with an increase in spending, while the election of a Democratic mayor correlated with a decrease in spending. "There might not be a Republican way to collect the trash, but there is a Republican way to spend on policing and fire protection," the authors wrote.[13]
Ballotpedia surveyed city budgets for America's 100 largest cities in April 2015 and found that the average budget in these cities was $2.146 billion, while the median budget was $800 million. In most cities with a strong mayor-council form of government, the mayor is responsible for presenting a city budget for the city council to pass.
In many other areas of urban politics, however, the 2011 study found that the political affiliation of mayors had little to no effect. They noted that this was due to two factors: lack of constitutionally provided status and shared responsibility. On the first account, unlike state governments, there is no provision in the national constitution giving cities their own status. Shared responsibility between federal, state, and local governments—and the funding it provides to cities—also restricts a mayor's domain of influence. Thus, public safety, which is an area where city and county agencies have the most decision-making power, can be directly influenced by mayoral partisanship.[13]
In Arts Journal, Andrew Taylor argued that mayors actually have a more direct impact on the average citizen than other executive officials at higher levels of government. He wrote:
| " | Mayors can make a daily and direct impact on the lives of their constituents — road repair, public safety, public works, execution of policy citizens can see and experience. While that means their personal actions can shape their city, it also means they’re continually subject to the mundane.
Governors and presidents, on the other hand, often govern abstract things that aren’t perceivable by constituents in everyday life. Economic policies, global treaties, industry regulations, trade agreements. Their work requires collective action on a broader scale, and their accountability is more diffuse and opaque.[14] |
” |
| —Andrew Taylor (2014)[15] | ||
Conflict between cities and state legislatures
As cities became more Democratic and state legislatures became more Republican, conflicts between the two levels of government increased. Some states passed laws to preempt city ordinances on issues such as minimum wage, plastic bag bans, and LGBT discrimination. In 2016, 89 mayors in 31 states surveyed by the U.S. Conference of Mayors said they felt they had better relations with the federal government than they did with their own state government.[16]
Governing magazine said that President Barack Obama (D) turned to cities, where he won the majority of the votes in 2012, in order to implement policies that he could not pass through a Republican Congress. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto (D) stated, "In Congress, programs like that are suffocated to death. [...] In Pittsburgh, we’re like an urban lab where they can be sent to grow."[16]
One state where this divide between cities and the state government became prominent was North Carolina. The North Carolina State Legislature came under Republican control in 2010 and Pat McCrory (R) won the governor's mansion in 2012, while Obama won major victories in each of the state's large cities in both 2008 and 2012. In September 2015, the legislature heard, but failed to pass, a bill that would have prevented cities from enacting minimum wage, affordable housing, landlord-tenant relations, and anti-discrimination ordinances.[17]
When the city council of Charlotte, North Carolina, passed an updated version of the city's LGBT nondiscrimination ordinance in February 2015, state officials spoke out against it and promised action. In March 2015, a special session of the state legislature passed a bill that nullified Charlotte's law and prevented local governments from enacting such laws in the future.[17]
See also
Footnotes
- ↑ Ballotpedia determined the partisan affiliation of each mayor in one of three ways: When multiple media outlets identified someone as affiliated with one political party, we used that identification; if a mayor previously ran in a partisan election for another office, we used the party he or she was affiliated with during that campaign; and when party affiliation was not clearly defined by one of the other two methods, mayors were contacted directly.
- ↑ Governing, "Why Democratic Governors and Republican Mayors Have Become Rare," July 16, 2015
- ↑ Corpus Christi Caller Times, "Dan McQueen explores bid to unseat Farenthold," June 8, 2015
- ↑ Times of San Diego, "Kevin Faulconer and a New Republican Politics of Inclusion," July 10, 2016
- ↑ San Diego City Clerk, "Voter Registration in the City of San Diego," accessed November 1, 2015
- ↑ Merced Sun-Star, "Mayor of bankrupt Stockton isolated, under investigation," July 21, 2013
- ↑ The Record, "Mayor's race is wide open," May 6, 2012
- ↑ San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters, "Election Results," accessed June 8, 2016
- ↑ California Secretary of State, "Report of Registration as of May 23, 2016 - Registration by Political Subdivision by County," accessed July 18, 2016
- ↑ Office of Management and Budget, "OMB Bulletin No. 13-01," accessed July 18, 2016
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Bloomberg Business, "Republican Big-City Mayors Are an Endangered Species," December 5, 2013
- ↑ Politico, "GOP big-city mayors vanish," October 20, 2013
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 Gerber, E.R., Hopkins, D.J. (2011). American Journal of Political Science. Midwest Political Science Association. (pages 326-339)
- ↑ Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.
- ↑ Arts Journal, "Mayor, Governor, President," April 21, 2014
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 Governing, "Beyond North Carolina's LGBT Battle: States' War on Cities," March 25, 2016
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 The Atlantic, "North Carolina Overturns LGBT-Discrimination Bans," March 24, 2016
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