A surge in voters – some aware, some not – will choose Raleigh’s next mayor | Opinion
Attention is already focusing on the top of the ticket for November’s election, but in Raleigh there will also be a dramatic contest at the bottom of the ballot – the vote for mayor.
A change in Raleigh’s election schedule adopted in 2021 means this will be the first time that Raleigh voters will choose its mayor – as well as the other seven members of its City Council – in a presidential election year.
The change will bring vastly more voters to what had been until 2022 low-turnout, odd-year municipal elections. The winner will be determined by a plurality without a runoff.
“It will be a lot of people voting who may have never voted in a Raleigh city election,” former Raleigh Mayor Nancy McFarlane told me. “It’s kind of untested.”
The mayor’s race that will unfold amid the clamor of both presidential and gubernatorial campaigns also will offer strong choices.
Terrance Ruth, an N.C. State professor who drew more than 40 percent of the vote in his 2022 challenge to Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin, is running again. City Council member Corey Branch is making a bid. Janet Cowell, chief executive officer of the Dix Park Conservancy and a former City Council member, state lawmaker and state treasurer, is a formidable candidate. Other candidates are Paul Fitts, Delmonte Crawford and James Shaughnessy IV.
Baldwin raised funds last fall but is waiting until April to announce whether she’ll run again. She will have to think hard about entering a race in which she would face Ruth and Cowell, who has the support of two popular former mayors, McFarlane and Charles Meeker.
This mayor’s race will, as always, be nonpartisan and less influenced by the top of the ticket. “The fact that there is not a R or D by (candidates’ names) — which is the way it should be — that confuses people,” McFarlane said. ”Its up to the candidates to make people know who they are voting for.”
The mayoral race likely will turn on how voters feel about Raleigh’s direction. Is it flourishing, or is it losing its appeal as a smaller city with affordable housing, good services and relatively low taxes?
McFarlane, who served as mayor from 2011 to 2019, said Raleigh has planned well and channeled growth, but the pressure of a growing population creates tensions over services and complaints about commercial development and multifamily housing pushing into neighborhoods of single-family homes.
“You create a great product and everybody wants it, and the question is how do you keep it a great product?” she said. “People move here and say, ‘I don’t want anything to change.’ Well, it changed because you moved here.”
McFarlane said the city government needs to improve how it speaks to residents – and how it listens to them – about zoning changes that encourage denser development. “There’s a general feeling this is springing up here and this is springing up there and all of the sudden you can build anything anywhere,” she said. “People got really caught off guard.”
Despite the city’s growth, Meeker said it feels like Raleigh’s government has fumbled too often. He pointed to the city’s slow response to deteriorating conditions downtown, its mishandling of parade rules and the loss of the annual IBMA bluegrass festival. “I don’t feel like things are going that well and it’s time for some new leadership,” he said.
Meeker, who presided over the revitalization of downtown during five terms as mayor from 2001 to 2011, said the city also lacks big goals. “There hasn’t been a big project since Moore Square,” a downtown park renovation that was completed in 2019, he said.
Baldwin declined to comment for this column, but she has successfully guided the city through the pandemic and presided over rapid growth since becoming mayor in 2019.
This historic municipal election of the entire City Council to two-year terms is likely to be the last. City leaders favor switching to staggered four-year terms starting in 2026. But the sweeping vote this November will set the course for a changing Raleigh for years to come.
Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-404-7583, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com
