The Forces Driving More Mayors Out of Office

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The Forces Driving More Mayors Out of Office: Over the next few weeks, the mayors of three major cities appear certain to lose their jobs in primaries. Not just lose but get trounced by margins of 20 percentage points or more. Although their circumstances differ, their races tell us something about the state of politics in 2025, while verifying some eternal truths when it comes to running cities.

The three — Eric Adams of New York, Tishaura Jones of St. Louis and Ed Gainey of Pittsburgh — all happen to be Black and all look like they’ll be replaced by white challengers. That might be a coincidence. It might also reflect the fact that their elections in 2021 came at a time, after the George Floyd-inspired protests and the nation’s so-called racial reckoning, that concerns about fairness for Black Americans was at a peak. Candidates of color scored historic gains that year; this may be a time of loss.

A few years ago, Democrats, who dominate big-city politics, were throwing their lot heavily in with progressive causes in general. Both Jones and Gainey were notably more progressive than the mayors they replaced. Adams ran as a moderate, but Black politicians are often perceived by the public as being more liberal than they are. Following the party’s defeats last year, Democrats now are shying away from anything that sounds less than supportive of public safety and police.

Adams is a special case. The Justice Department may be ready to drop charges against him, stemming from a bribery scandal that has already taken down a significant number of his top aides, but New Yorkers don’t seem as inclined to forgive him. Adams is polling at about 10 percent against a large field currently led by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The primary is in June and there appears to be no chance that an unpopular incumbent can stage the kind of comeback Adams would need in just a short period of time.

Seeing which way the wind is blowing, the local Democratic parties in both Pittsburgh and St. Louis have endorsed the challengers against the sitting mayors. Jones and Gainey are suffering from the problems that have made running for re-election difficult for many mayors over the past couple of years. Downtowns remain hurt by remote work, while homelessness and crime have tarnished their city’s images. “Crime has gone down, but that is not the perception of residents,” says Kenneth Warren, a pollster at St. Louis University. “The response to reported crimes is terrible in the city, and residents react to that as well.”

Both Jones and Gainey have faced multiple challenges, but a couple of high-profile failures stand out. The resignation of Acting Police Chief Christopher Ragland last week in Pittsburgh — a month after he was nominated for the job — means that Gainey will have had at least five different chiefs during his single term in office. The total number of officers in the city is barely half what it was when Gainey took office. “The mismanagement of the department by Mayor Ed Gainey, along with his hand-picked Public Safety Director Lee Schmidt, has left it rudderless and leaderless,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorialized. Gainey is likely to lose decisively in May’s primary against Allegheny County Controller Corey O’Connor.

In St. Louis, the winters are usually warm enough that when snow does fall, it melts by the next day. To save money under such circumstances, the city has a policy of not plowing residential streets. That proved to be a mistake in January, when a storm dumped several inches on the city and a freeze lasted for weeks. Not only did residents have to drive on sheets of ice, but many went three weeks without trash pickup.

When Jones faced voters last week, she received support from 33 percent of them, compared with 68 percent who went for Alderwoman Cara Spencer, who lost to Jones four years ago. The two will compete in a runoff next month. “There is evidence nationwide that mayors have lost when city services tank,” Warren says, “and city services did tank under Jones.”

Mail Voting Remains a Tough Sell With Republicans: Last year, Republicans seemed to change their tune about absentee and mail voting. During his re-election campaign in 2020, President Donald Trump complained that mail voting was a recipe for fraud, and it became a tool used largely by Democrats. But presented with such a logistical disadvantage, Republicans returned to encouraging voters to vote by mail last year. “All of our top-of-the-ticket leaders need to make it clear: If you’re an infrequent voter, use whatever means necessary,” Brandon Maly, chair of the Dane County GOP in Wisconsin, said last spring.

The result was that Republicans made gains in mail voting nearly everywhere last year. In the key state of Pennsylvania, for example, the share of mail votes cast by registered Republicans increased to 33 percent, up from 24 percent in 2020. “When we were looking at daily returns and saw huge gains in the Republican vote-by-mail share compared to previous election cycles, we knew we were on the right pathway to winning this election,” said Matt Gruda, who managed Republican Dave McCormick’s successful U.S. Senate campaign.

Despite mail voting’s importance as a tool, however, it remains tarnished for many Republicans, given Trump’s frequent assertions that it’s “corrupt,” a pillar of his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him. Conservative foundations continue to spend heavily to discourage mail voting, while many Republicans believe having everyone vote in person on Election Day is by far the preferable method.

That spells the end of universal mail voting in Utah. The state adopted a policy of mailing ballots to all registered voters a dozen years ago. A legislative audit released at the end of last year found no evidence of “significant fraud” in the state. Nevertheless, state House Speaker Mike Schultz claims Utah’s voting system is “a mess.”

The Legislature has passed a bill that would phase out universal mail voting by 2029. Despite the lack of problems with the current voting system, lawmakers are determined to address any perception that there might be problems. “Lots of people wrongly believe that we have mass fraud in our elections, and it’s just not true,” said GOP Gov. Spencer Cox, “but we need to restore trust to them as well.”

Odds and Ends: The Eric Adams case resulted in the resignations of several top lawyers in the Justice Department’s public corruption unit. There’s no interest in replacing them. The section, which had 30 lawyers at the end of the Biden administration, is down to five. The unit will be shrunk with cases being handled by U.S. attorney’s offices around the country, according to the Associated Press.

Democrat David Gottfried won a special election for a Minnesota House seat on Tuesday, bringing that chamber into a tie. Democrats were expected to win. After sitting out the session’s opening, they agreed to a power-sharing arrangement that will keep Republican Lisa Demuth in the speaker’s chair but have Democrats and Republicans co-chairing most committees.

Democrats across the country have had an advantage in online fundraising in recent years, with the party’s ActBlue turning out to be more successful than the GOP’s troubled WinRed platform. A new study suggests that may not all be upside.

According to a study by Chenoa Yorgason, a graduate student at Stanford University, Democrats who use ActBlue increase their number of small-money donors but also end up moving farther to the left. Candidates love to hail their support from small donors. Rather than regular folks, however, Yorgason’s study is just the latest finding that small donors are more ideological than the average voter and therefore are contributing to polarization.