General Election 2024 Preview Part I

non-West Coast edition

Arizona

Phoenix City Council

District 3 (North Phoenix)

Debra Stark (i) vs. Ayensa Millan

Result: Stark 61.5%, Millan 38.5% | Stark wins

Debra Stark is a member of the Phoenix City Council’s ruling moderate bloc, aligned with Mayor Kate Gallego. The moderates have been on the upswing in recent years, with the defeat of progressive councilman Carlos Garcia in 2023 and the elevation of newfound moderate bloc member Yassamin Ansari to congresswoman-elect in the August Democratic primary for Ruben Gallego’s congressional seat. Progressives would very much like to start clawing back some power, and they’re hoping District 3 will be part of their path forward. Immigration attorney Ayensa Millan is progressives’ pick here, and she has Stark scared enough that the incumbent has spent most of her money–more than six figures in all. (Millan, oddly, hasn’t spent much of what she’s raised, at least as of October 20.) Stark should have the upper hand, given incumbency and money.

District 5 (Northeast Phoenix)

Betty Guardado (i) vs. JJ Martinez

Result: Guardado 61.2%, Martinez 38.8% | Guardado wins

Incumbent councilor Betty Guardado is likely to coast in the face of a challenge from ex-cop JJ Martinez, who has a respectable amount of money but nothing like Guardado’s massive war chest. Martinez and Guardado don’t differ much on policy; the biggest difference is that Martinez is somehow even less willing than Guardado to criticize the embattled Phoenix Police Department, his former employer.

District 7 (Eastern Phoenix)

Martyn Bridgeman vs. Anna Hernandez vs. Michael Nowakowski vs. Marcelino Quiñonez (vs. Carlos Galindo-Elvira (i) (special election only))

Result: Hernandez 53.1%, Quiñonez 21.4%, Nowakowski 14.9%, Bridgeman 10.6% | Hernandez wins

Special election result: Galindo-Elvira 53.05%, Nowakowski 25.3%, Bridgeman 21.7 | Galindo-Elvira wins

Yassamin Ansari’s seat is open (and vacant, because she resigned to run for Congress.) That has teed up a concurrent pair of elections for her council seat: a special election to fill out the rest of her term, which runs until April of next year, and a regular election to select a permanent successor. In the special election, appointed incumbent Carlos Galindo-Elvira is running to keep his job until April; Galindo-Elvira is not running for a full term, but he is mounting a serious campaign for a partial one. How that’ll affect the race, we have no idea, but it bears mentioning.

The real race to succeed Yassamin Ansari is a moderate-vs.-progressive war between Marcelino Quiñonez on the moderate side and state Sen. Anna Hernandez on the progressive side. Hernandez got into politics after Phoenix police killed her brother in 2019, becoming an activist for families like hers torn apart by the violence of the Phoenix PD. She won a state senate seat in 2022 and quickly amassed a serious, bipartisan legislative record all while remaining unafraid to cross the powers that be, criticize the police, and make her progressive politics known. Kate Gallego and her allies would rather not see a critic of the mayor’s join the council, and so they’ve landed on Quiñonez, a former state representative. (They’ve completely skipped over ex-councilman Michael Nowakowski, who has perhaps too much baggage.) With such a split field, a runoff seems likely—and on Phoenix’s electoral calendar, that runoff won’t be held until March of 2025, so this first round may end up serving as little more than a preliminary gauge of where the candidates stand. 

Georgia

Atlanta Council At-Large 3 [Special election]

Devin Barrington-Ward vs. Eshé Collins vs. Amber Connor vs. Nicole Evans Jones vs. Duvwon Robinson

Result: Evans Jones 39.6%, Collins 25.0%, Connor 15.2%, Barrington-Ward 13.8%, Robinson 6.5% | Evans Jones and Collins advance to December runoff

The Atlanta City Council killed the referendum to stop Cop City, and now organizers are coming for the Council. Keisha Waites vacated her at-large Council seat to run for a county clerkship, providing the opening that the left, and community organizer Devin Barrington-Ward in particular, was looking for. Barrington-Ward, who is endorsed by the DSA, SEIU, and several Democratic state house members, has a full-spectrum left-wing agenda he’d like to implement, particularly taxing the rich. A more conventional liberal offering comes in the form of Board of Education member Eshé Collins, who has the support of organized labor and some elements of the city establishment, though not nearly as much as public school principal Nicole Evans Jones, who has former mayors Keisha Lance Bottoms and Andrew Young in her corner, but has said very little about how she wants to govern, which is concerning. One thing she has said, specifically, is that she, like every other candidate but Barrington-Ward, supports Cop City. Amber Connor is the obligatory white candidate, and Duvwon Robinson made the ballot but doesn’t have much more of a campaign beyond that.

Louisiana

LA-02 (New Orleans area and River Parishes)

Troy Carter (i) vs. Devin Davis vs. Republicans

Result: Carter 60.3%, Lynch (R) 13.6%, Graham (R) 12.8%, Davis 10.6%, Perrilloux (R) 2.6% | Carter wins

Rep. Troy Carter won his seat in the early days of the Biden administration by winning the votes of Republicans against a fellow Democrat in a runoff. Now, if he has a runoff at all, it’ll probably be a near-guaranteed win against a Republican, saving him from a head-to-head with Devin Davis. Davis is a Gen Z environmental activist with a local focus; parts of this district are known as Cancer Alley for the heavy-polluting chemical plants which dot the landscape, and Davis promises to be a representative who isn’t in the polluters’ pockets. He’s running a scrappy underdog campaign with some support from local progressives, and he’s nevertheless likely to be eliminated today whether or not Carter clears 50% and avoids a December runoff, because a Republican should place second.

Baton Rouge Mayor

Sharon Weston Broome (i) vs. Edward “Ted” James vs. Republicans

Result: Edwards (R) 34.4%, Weston Broome 31.2%, James 28.4% | Edwards (R) and Weston Broome advance to December runoff

One of the ugliest contests in the country is playing out right now in Baton Rouge. Facing slumping polling numbers against former friend turned electoral competitor Ted James, Mayor Sharon Weston Broome’s campaign released an ad of surreptitiously recorded audio, catching James saying that

“Quite honestly, a white man, a white man, if he knows he got to deal with someone Black, he would rather deal with another man than a woman. It’s fucked up, it’s screwed up and honestly, I get to take advantage of it.”

While James claims he was taken out of context, he never disputes he said those words, and the ad ties that into the biggest claim of Weston Broome, and the biggest divide in this election: that James is the puppet of wealthy, white Republican interests who want to break away from the city, and take their tax money with them. The government of Baton Rouge city and its parish (what Louisiana calls counties) overlap significantly, and the parish government is responsible for unincorporated areas, so to avoid having to pay to send poor kids to school, the rich neighborhoods outside of the city incorporated in 2019, setting off five years of legal battles that are only now resolving. While it looks like the GOP-controlled state government will give St. George what it’s asking for, everyone involved knows it would be easier to have a Baton Rouge government that was pliant instead of hostile. While Weston Broome is the latter, Republican-funded (sorry, “bipartisan” funded) James would be the former. 

North Carolina

Raleigh 

Mayor

Janet Cowell vs. Paul Fitts vs. Eugene Myrick vs. Terrance Ruth vs. James Shaughnessy IV

Result: Cowell 59.8%, Fitts 18.4%, Ruth 11.3% | Cowell wins

This is a two-way contest between nonprofit executive and former state treasurer Janet Cowell and public policy professor Terrance Ruth. Ruth ran for mayor in 2022, and actually held the incumbent, Mary-Ann Baldwin, to a 47%-41% margin. He ran a scrappy outsider campaign that year, but this year he feels like even more of an underdog, if anything. Baldwin was an unpopular incumbent, and Democrats, especially Black Democrats, were looking for an alternative. This year, Cowell is a new face, wth plenty of friends in the Democratic Party that are willing to vouch for her, and Ruth is having trouble differentiating himself from her. Cowell has also opened up a wide fundraising lead, pulling in nearly $600,000, while Ruth only has a few thousand at his disposal. It’s just as well—when he does get into specifics about what he’d do differently from Cowell, it’s paying cops more and not rolling back single-family zoning as aggressively. 

City Council At-Large [Top 2]

Stormie Forte (i) vs. Jonathan Lambert-Melton (i) vs. James Bledsoe vs. Joshua Bradley vs. Katherine Pate vs. Reeves Peeler vs. Robert Steele Jr.

Result: Forte 28.7%, Lambert-Melton 24.4%, Bledsoe 14.1%, Peeler 9.85%, Pate 9.3%, Bradley 7.7%, Steele 5.2% | Forte and Lambert-Melton win

Stormie Forte and Jonathan Lambert-Melton are both on the moderate wing of the council, and running for reelection in the city’s final election before they switch to a primary/top 4 runoff format for the at-large seats. They face multiple opponents, including a token Green (Joshua Bradley) and Libertarian (James Bledsoe), as well as two small business owners (Katie Pate and Robert Steele). The most interesting challenger is Raleigh Planning Commissioner and criminal justice organizer Reeves Peeler, who is a favorite of the activist crowd, as well as the AFL-CIO, who endorsed him in lieu of Lambert-Melton.

City Council District A

Mary Black (i) vs. Whitney Hill vs. Mitchell Silver

Result: Silver 40.1%, Hill 33.0%, Black 26.4% | Silver wins

First-term Democrat Mary Black is a staunch progressive, supporting government-owned social housing as a response to the housing crisis and a Workers’ Bill of Rights for city employees. Whitney Hill is a Republican. Mitchell Silver is a more moderate Democrat, backed by the Wake County Democratic Party and the News & Observer, Raleigh’s main newspaper. Black takes an unabashedly activist approach, while Silver, a city planner, is a more traditional politician.

City Council District B

Megan Patton (i) vs. Jennifer McCollum

Result: Patton 54.3%, McCollum 45.1% | Patton wins

Megan Patton is a Democrat, and Jennifer McCollum is a Republican. This election is only nonpartisan on paper.

City Council District C

Corey Branch (i) vs. DaQuanta Copeland vs. Tomara DeCosta vs. Daniel Grant-King vs. Jared Ollison vs. Tolulope Omokaiye vs. Portia Wilson Rochelle

Result: Branch 40.1%, Omokaiye 20.1%, Copeland 10.3%, Rochelle 8.6%, DeCosta 8.05%, Ollison 7.5%, Grant-King 5.0% | Branch wins

Corey Branch has himself to blame for his difficult reelection. He’s only running for Council again after pulling the ripcord on a mayoral campaign at the last minute. The candidates running for what was originally an open seat all decided to stay in, and now Branch is in trouble. The Wake County Democratic Party has endorsed former Raleigh Transit Authority Chair Tolulope Omokaiye, who seems more progressive than Branch. Former Raleigh NAACP president and at-large city council candidate Portia Rochelle is also running to Branch’s left.

City Council District E

Christina Jones (i) vs. John Cerqueira III

Result: Jones 51.5%, Cerqueira 47.9% | Jones wins

First-term Democrat Christina Jones faces a challenge from nonprofit consultant John Cerqueira III, also a Democrat. Jones has the Wake County Democratic Party and the state AFL-CIO on her side, while Cerqueira is backed by the Raleigh police union and the News & Observer. While Cerqueira’s endorsements belie a more conservative candidate than Jones, the two agree on the need for more housing to meet demand in the booming Research Triangle.

Oklahoma

Tulsa Mayor

Karen Keith vs. Monroe Nichols

Result: Nichols 55.6%, Keith 44.4% | Nichols wins

The first round of Tulsa’s nonpartisan mayoral election was held on August 27, and it produced a major surprise: Republicans blew it. The lone Republican in the race, Christian nationalist businessman Brent VanNorman, placed third, narrowly falling behind state Rep. Monroe Nichols and Tulsa County Commissioner Karen Keith, both Democrats. The result is an unusual all-Democratic runoff to lead Oklahoma’s second-largest city, which is swingy and historically Republican. (Joe Biden narrowly carried Tulsa in 2020, but Donald Trump carried the city four years earlier.) The two Democrats are now in the awkward position of needing to convince conservative, Republican voters to vote for them—and appealing to conservatives seems to come more naturally to Karen Keith.

In the runoff, Keith has hammered Nichols as “weak on gangs,” and Nichols, the son of a police officer and a probation officer, contends that she’s only making that attack because of his race. (Nichols is Black, while Keith is white.) She has the endorsement of the Tulsa police union, and in the closing days of the campaign she announced that VanNorman would be on her transition team. Nichols allies have responded in kind, assailing Keith by holding her responsible for systemic sexual abuse at the county’s juvenile detention center—which Keith argues is unfair because, she claims, she was unaware of the situation before the abuse scandal went public. (The Tulsa County Commission, after initially denying any responsibility for the facility, voted to take over the facility after the scandal broke, revamping operations and opening the juvenile detention center to the media.) Both candidates are light on policy, but the police union endorsement and the plan to have VanNorman join the transition give us more reason to worry about Keith than Nichols. Unfortunately, Keith is probably the favorite here, if money is any indication; she has outspent Nichols by more than a million dollars over the course of the race, and as of October 21 she had a further six-figure advantage in cash on hand. And the more conservative candidate is probably who you’d expect to win in a race between two Democrats with an electorate that’s nearly half Republican. Nichols’s best hope is probably that Keith’s overtures to the right have worked so well that Democratic voters are turned off by her runoff campaign—and even then, Keith would only need a small minority of Democratic voters if Republican and independent voters broke overwhelmingly her way as you’d expect.

Texas

Austin

Mayor

Kirk Watson (i) vs. Jeffery Bowen vs. Doug Greco vs. Carmen Llanes Pulido vs. Kathie Tovo

Result: Watson 50.01%, Llanes Pulido 20.15%, Tovo 16.6%, Bowen 8.4%, Greco 4.8% | Watson wins

The 2020 mayoral election was the closest in recent memory, resulting in white moderate Kirk Watson winning a narrow victory over Latina progressive Celia Israel by a margin of less than 1%. Israel would have given Watson a major challenge had she ran again this year, buoyed by presidential year turnout, but she opted against it, leaving Watson, who barely squeaked into office, to face a quartet of unknown challengers. Watson’s half-term has been largely uneventful, though not entirely without controversy, and Watson now stands at a towering financial advantage over his competitors.

Doug Greco, lead organizer with Central Texas Interfaith, is taking on Watson’s coziness with the GOP-controlled state government, and appears to be pleasingly urbanist and progressive on other matters as well. Unfortunately, he’s best known for suing the city to overturn a cap on out-of-city campaign contributions. Carmen Llanes Pulido has a lot of progressive rhetoric, but her main policy push seems to be “[d]efending the rights of homeowners” to block new duplexes and apartments from being built nearby. But the challenger with the strongest chance of forcing Watson into a runoff is former city Councilmember Kathie Tovo, who served from 2011 to 2023. Tovo bills herself as the progressive choice for mayor, and though she's criticized Watson for many different things, is attempting to craft a message about the bigger picture preference for business interests over community input many see as Watson biggest public perception hurdle. The only candidate running to Watson's right is Jeffrey Bowen, a cantankerous old man who needs to take a web design class.

City Council District 2

Vanessa Fuentes (i) vs. Robert Reynolds

Result: Fuentes 85.7%, Reynolds 14.3% | Fuentes wins

Incumbent Vanessa Fuentes will coast against Republican former state House candidate Robert Reynolds, who is barely running a campaign.

City Council District 4

Jose “Chito” Vela (i) vs. Monica Guzman vs. Louis Herrin III vs. Jim Rabuck vs. Eduardo Romero

 Result: Vela 58.5%, Guzman 27.7%, Herrin 6.1%, Rabuck 4.3%, Romero 3.3% | Vela wins

When Greg Casar vacated his city council district in 2022 to run for Congress, a special election was held, and Casar was able to demonstrate how popular he was in North Austin by not only winning a landslide victory in his primary, but by helping his chosen successor, Chito Vela, into a landslide of his own. Vela has since managed to work well with both the progressive and liberal factions in city politics, and, accordingly, looks to be cruising to reelection. Of the two candidates who appear to be running real campaigns, both are to Vela’s right—quite openly in the case of Jim Rabuck, and more subtly in the case of Monica Guzman, who has enough sense to talk about “responsiveness” issues with the council instead of just saying she doesn't like apartments. 

City Council District 6

Mackenzie Kelly (i) vs. Krista Laine

Result: Laine 51.3%, Kelly 48.7% | Laine wins

Mackenzie Kelly is the lone Republican on the Austin City Council, and she’s in deep trouble. Elected four years ago in a low-turnout December runoff, Kelly now has to win under much tougher circumstances. Her district has been redrawn to be substantially bluer, and she can’t count on a runoff to save her, because she only has one opponent and thus will win or lose today. The nonpartisan nature of Austin municipal elections was enough for her in 2020, but in 2024 she’ll have to stretch it a lot farther.

On the council, Kelly does her best to hide her party affiliation, but it shines through every now and then. The Austin City Council passes a lot of resolutions opposing the latest horror produced by the Texas Legislature, and Kelly is a reliable vote against those. She’s also a hardcore NIMBY who consistently opposes moves to make housing more affordable in Austin, a city squeezed by a severe housing crisis. And, of course, there’s her deep ties to the GOP. Still, she’s not without her supporters in deeply Democratic Austin; a firefighter herself, Kelly is backed by the firefighters’ union and the police union. And the local paper, the Austin American-Statesman, endorsed her for “balance.” But Krista Laine, a real estate appraiser and public education advocate, has the council’s progressives and partisanship on her side. Laine distances herself from Kelly’s NIMBYism and likes to highlight her role in defeating a Moms for Liberty-backed far-right school board slate, and if elected she’d likely align with her progressive backers on the council.

City Council District 7

Edwin Bautista vs. Gary Bledsoe vs. Daniel Dominguez vs. Pierre Nguyễn vs. Adam Powell vs. Todd Shaw vs. Mike Siegel

Result: Siegel 39.8%, Bledsoe 19.3%, Nguyễn 14.85%, Powell 11.15%, Shaw 8.65%, Bautista 6.2% | Siegel and Bledsoe advance to December runoff

You may remember Mike Siegel as the affable lefty lawyer who shocked everyone in  2018 when he lost a congressional race that absolutely no one had on their radar as competitive by only 4% to incumbent Republican Mike McCaul. After a rematch that didn’t go as successfully, Siegel has remained active in Texas politics by helping to run Ground Game TX. His return to active campaigning is for a smaller office, sure, but he hasn’t lost a step, and his urbanist, green development-focused campaign is endorsed by heavyweights in Austin politics Greg Cassar and José Garza, as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders. Siegel’s strongest competition are longtime Texas NAACP president Gary Bledsoe and business advisor Adam Powell, both of whom are also running as progressives.

City Council District 10

Marc Duchen vs. Ashika Ganguly

Result: Duchen 50.6%, Ganguly 49.4% | Duchen wins

The final Council contest in Austin dispenses with the unnecessary minor candidate fluff and delivers a pure center vs. left showdown. Marc Duchen, a business owner and homeowner association president has the politics of—well, you can guess—while former teacher and Democratic staffer Ashika Ganguly is a normal progressive Democrat with an urbanist streak. Duchen’s ties to the Travis County GOP, and their thinly disguised front group Save Austin Now, have become an issue on the campaign trail, which Duchen has responded to by trying to paint Ganguly as too young and inexperienced, a potent line of attack in this wealthy West Side district.

El Paso Mayor

Marco Contreras vs. Elizabeth Cordova vs. Cassandra Hernandez vs. Renard Johnson vs. Brian Kennedy vs. Ben Mendoza vs. Isabel Salcido vs. Steven Winters

Result: Johnson 32.5%, Kennedy 24.2%, Hernandez 10.3%, Winters 8.6%, Salcido 7.4%, Contreras 6.5%, Cordova 5.9%, Mendoza 4.6% | Johnson and Kennedy advance to December runoff

El Paso is electing a new mayor, though they’re likely not doing so tonight: the mayoral contest will go to a runoff if no one gets to 50%, which looks unlikely given how packed the field is. A promising candidate is City Councilmember Isabel Salcido, the only one who doesn’t wholeheartedly support bulldozing part of downtown to widen the interstate, and who answered “housing affordability” instead of something about high taxes when asked by The El Paso Times what the biggest issue in the city was. Unfortunately, she’s also a realtor who isn’t really advancing many ideas of her own. Her fellow city councilmember Cassandra Hernandez seems like she has decent policies, but this year she only narrowly avoided criminal charges for abusing a gas card given to her by the city. Business owner Renard Johnson is a soft favorite in the race. He’s raising the most money and has endorsements from organized labor, Beto O’Rourke, and former mayor John Cook. The only conservative with a campaign to speak of is City Councilmember Brian Kennedy, who is pledging to cut the budget instead of increasing taxes.

Speed round for the other candidates: Marco Contreras is a restaurant owner who wants to build an entire second downtown for some reason, Elizabeth Cordova wants to ask Israel how to farm the desert, Steven Winters was in the military, and Ben Mendoza may or may not exist.

Virginia

Norfolk Mayor

Kenny Alexander (i) vs. Giovanni Dolmo vs. Thomas Leeman Jr.

Result: Alexander 59.5%, Leeman 33.45%, Dolmo 6.35% | Alexander wins

Norfolk residents don’t have a particularly exciting choice. Incumbent Kenny Alexander may be a competent administrator, but he has few accomplishments and little sense of urgency for fixing Norfolk’s issues, which include a growing housing affordability crisis. Unfortunately, his only real opponent is self-financing financial advisor Thomas Leeman Jr., whose plans, if he enters office, are, at their most defined, setting up a committee to look at problems, and maybe, if he’s feeling particularly ambitious, having a dialogue. We don’t trust a “business leader” to be hiding his good ideas from the public.

Richmond Mayor

Andreas D. Addison vs. Danny Avula vs. Michelle Mosby vs. Maurice Neblett vs. Harrison Roday

Result: Avula 46.0%, Mosby 25.4%, Roday 13.0%, Addison 11.9%, Neblett 2.9% | Avula carries 6/9 wards and wins outright

The Richmond mayoral contest is going to be decided by one of the stupidest electoral systems devised in this country. If one candidate wins five of the city’s nine wards, that candidate becomes mayor. If no candidate does, the top two vote-getters, regardless of how many wards they won, advance to a runoff, in which the popular vote will once again be discarded for the electoral college of wards.

That runoff stipulation could be particularly important this year, with four serious candidates in the mix. City Councilor and local gym owner Andreas Addison has an ambitious urbanist agenda for public transit and creating a land value tax. He’s struggled with fundraising, however, and he strikes us as the kind of candidate who can survive on enthusiasm and determination alone in his yuppie-central council district where a shoe leather campaign can work, but flounders on the big stage. Pediatrician and former Virginia Department of Social Services commissioner Danny Avula is the fundraising leader, and is running a vague, good-governance outsider type of campaign, but has been criticized by abortion advocates for cutting family planning during his time in the Department of Social Services. City Council President Michelle Mosby is running as the experienced candidate, with a dash of reminding voters she’d be the first female mayor of the city. Nonprofit director Harrison Roday is trying to bridge the “outsider with fundraising chops” lane of Avula with the “urbanist with political connections” lane of Addison, and appears to be doing a good job of it. Roday, who currently sits on the board of the Roe Your Vote Virginia PAC, takes a mainstream liberal tone, but leads with progressive policies that favor tenants, non-police programs to combat violence, and increasing school funding. Finally, activist Maurice Neblett is also running, but has raised very little money. Neblett is running as an indistinguishable business-as-usual candidate, which is disappointing—if you’re seeing a no-chance campaign through to the finish, at least have fun with it.