Thread: High Number of Write-In Votes in Detroit Mayor Race

High Number of Write-In Votes in Detroit Mayor Race

By STEVEN YACCINO
Published: August 6, 2013

DETROIT — Sheriff Benny Napoleon of Wayne County won a spot Tuesday on the November ballot for mayor of Detroit, but the name of his opponent remained unconfirmed as officials tallied write-in votes late into the night in a primary in this blighted city seeking bankruptcy protection.


Fabrizio Costantini for The New York Times

Mr. Napoleon was the top vote-getter among 14 candidates on the ballot for a job that is largely considered toothless in a city now under state control. But he faced a strong challenge from Mike Duggan, the former chief executive of the Detroit Medical Center, who was forced last month to mount a write-in campaign.

An early front-runner who moved from a nearby suburb to seek office, Mr. Duggan was found ineligible to appear on the ballot after courts said he had submitted election petitions two weeks before he had met the residency requirement.

Late Tuesday, with Mr. Napoleon far ahead of the other certified candidates when the regular ballots for the nonpartisan primary were tallied, Mr. Duggan’s supporters waited for the counting of the write-in votes to be completed. But with the total number of write-ins nearly equal to those cast for the regular ballot, the numbers pointed to Mr. Duggan moving on to November.

A November election between Mr. Duggan, who is white, and Mr. Napoleon, who is black, would present the possibility that Detroit, a city where more than 80 percent of residents are African-American, could elect its first white mayor in four decades. The race would pit Mr. Napoleon’s hometown identity and law enforcement experience against Mr. Duggan’s business acumen, which he says will persuade state officials to return governance to the city sooner.

Mr. Napoleon rallied supporters Tuesday night: “If anyone thinks for any millisecond that we are going to give up this city without a struggle, that we are going to give up this city without a fight, that we’re going to give up this city without every single ounce of energy and blood we have in us, they are in for a very rude awakening.”

The other contenders included Tom Barrow, an accountant making his fourth run for mayor; Krystal A. Crittendon, a former city attorney; Lisa L. Howze, a former state representative; and Fred Durhal Jr., a current state representative.

The contest comes at a time of political tumult in City Hall, which for months has been under the control of Kevyn Orr, a Washington bankruptcy lawyer appointed as emergency manager by Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican. While Mayor Dave Bing and members of the City Council still get paychecks, the move stripped them of most authority, raising questions about how much influence their successors would be able to wield.

And as the effects of the bankruptcy proceedings are felt in years to come, some here worry there could be less city to lead by the time local officials are given back the reins.

Mr. Orr announced Monday that as part of the restructuring process, Detroit would begin formally valuing all its assets, including the airport and the city’s collection at the Detroit Institute of Art. In a statement, Mr. Orr said the appraisal did not mean that he planned to sell those assets.

Mr. Bing, criticizing “how the state defines the word ‘partnership,’ ” announced in May that he would not seek re-election; most of the current City Council also decided not to run again.

More than 50 candidates seeking nine council seats were also on the ballot Tuesday. Reports from across the city indicated low turnout. At Warren E. Bow public school, one of the larger polling sites in the city, the typical stream of voters during previous elections was a trickle at best.

“A lot of people I talked to said they weren’t voting because it doesn’t matter,” said Harvey Moss, 68, a retired city bus driver who cast his ballot for Mr. Napoleon.

As they left, voters wore “My vote counted!” stickers. Some cited having an emergency manager in charge of the city until at least September 2014 — the very reason some may have chosen to skip the primary election — as an impetus for voting in a strong mayor.

“If you don’t have a voice, you don’t have nothing at all,” said Vincent Calloway, 56, a retired construction manager who expressed anger at state officials and voted for Mr. Napoleon.

Asked about the prospect of having a white mayor, voters said that after years of mismanagement in Detroit’s government, race was at the bottom of their priority list.

“All these politicians keep coming and selling people on an idea, but nobody cares for the city,” said Kim Craig, 55, a nurse who voted at a church in northwest Detroit. “We’re looking for someone who can do the job.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/us/detroit-mayoral-primary.html

How underdog story propelled Mike Duggan to top vote-getter in Detroit primary

11:05 PM, August 7, 2013


Detroit mayoral write-in candidate Mike Duggan celebrates with excited supporters after favorable primary election results during a party at the Atheneum Hotel in Detroit on Tuesday August 6, 2013. Ryan Garza / Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press


By Matt Helms
Detroit Free Press Staff Writer



Detroit mayoral candidate Benny Napoleon addresses supporters after the final primary election results continue to come in at the Michigan Conference of Teamsters Welfare Fund building in Detroit on Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2013. Jarrad Henderson/Detroit Free Press / Jarrad Henderson


On the campaign trail, both before he was booted from Detroit’s mayoral ballot and after he decided to run as a write-in candidate, Mike Duggan often boasted of the tremendous ground team he was building — thousands of Detroiters volunteering, after 185 visits to voters’ homes, barbershops and cafés to help in his bid to succeed Mayor Dave Bing.
But in the end, political analysts say, Duggan benefited from something that his supporters and big-money, well-connected downtown campaign donors couldn’t buy: a sympathetic narrative that resonated among residents of a city accustomed to taking big knocks, falling down and picking themselves back up.
There were hints weeks ago that something unheard of was happening in the Detroit mayoral race, even with a presumed front-runner in Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon, who was widely expected to easily sweep into the November general election with little threat from a long-shot write-in.
East Lansing political analyst and pollster Mark Grebner recognized that emerging narrative more than a month ago, when a poll he conducted for Bill Ballenger, the editor of Inside Michigan Politics, found more than half of Detroit voters saying they would write in their choice for mayor in Tuesday’s primary election. Grebner’s poll question listed top candidates who would be on the ballot — Napoleon, Tom Barrow, Krystal Crittendon, Lisa Howze, John Olumba — without naming Duggan, asking voters whom they would support or whether they would consider writing in a candidate.
Then, asked if they would consider writing in Duggan, many said they would.
Ballenger said that led to the conclusion that many would dismiss: Duggan could win the primary outright with as much as 50% of the vote as a write-in. The poll found Napoleon at about 30% and the remainder of the contenders “simply weren’t in the game,” Ballenger said.
“You took the two questions together, it looked to us like overwhelming evidence was that Duggan could pull it off, and that was a month ago,” Ballenger said. “There was no second choice to Napoleon. The question was, could Duggan work the mechanics sufficiently to get people to believe he was clearly the alternative to Napoleon? Clearly he did, and he did it big time.”
Ballenger said Duggan got several big breaks. The first was a lawsuit by Barrow, challenging Duggan’s right to be named on the city’s primary ballot because he filed campaign signatures two weeks too early. Two courts sided with Barrow. Labor activist Robert Davis kept up that fight, trying to have Duggan ruled ineligible to run as a write-in because Duggan failed to make the ballot.
“The biggest break Duggan got was that he became a sympathetic figure, almost a martyr,” Ballenger said. “People don’t like unfairness, and they think Duggan probably got a raw deal and he should have been allowed on the ballot. The story of the campaign was, will Duggan be able to pull this off? That was the story of this whole election.”
Grebner took it a step further, saying the story of Duggan’s ballot woes took on shades of a Greek fable, one easily understood by average voters.
“There’s a very important concept in politics … which is the idea that something becomes a story, it stops being just an event, it becomes like a play with a narrative arc, with a hero and a villain,” Grebner said. “And Tom Barrow was kind enough to make this a novel that people could participate in. A story is so much more powerful than the individual things that make it up. That’s really what happened here: The story of Mike Duggan moving to Detroit to run for mayor and then being thwarted by all the standard villains of Detroit politics — not the people, but the forces — is sort of like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. It’s just a story.
“That’s the real lesson here,” Grebner said, “that this became a story for voters and the public, and they could immediately remember and understand it, and they could discuss it with other people.”
More spending

It certainly helped, though, that Duggan out-raised and outspent Napoleon with cash that helped him saturate radio and TV with ads extolling his experience leading the DMC back from near-bankruptcy. Combined with political action committee ads, Duggan outspent Napoleon 4-1, which Napoleon conceded during his speech to supporters Tuesday night as returns clearly indicated a more than 20 percentage point spread.
Duggan went on to capture the vast majority of 50,328 write-in votes cast, or 53% of the total vote, compared with 28,352, or 30%, for Napoleon. Tuesday’s unofficial results must still be certified by the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, which will meet next week to begin tabulating votes, counting all the variations of spellings of candidates’ names written in by voters and deciding which candidates will receive those misspelled names.
Napoleon said Wednesday he would retool his campaign message but wasn’t planning a major shakeup of staff after Duggan’s strong showing.
“It was stronger than anybody anticipated, and that’s a great testament to Duggan and his team,” an upbeat Napoleon told the Free Press on Wednesday afternoon.
“But the fact is it’s a primary election” with three months before the general election, Napoleon said. “We have to push the reset button and reconnect with voters. It’s a whole new race.”
Napoleon said he was still assessing results and declined to discuss his strategy but said he believes Tuesday’s results were skewed by low turnout — about 17% — and a well-funded campaign by Duggan. Napoleon said that, while his message will be fine-tuned to emphasize his strengths as a candidate, he didn’t anticipate a significant restructuring of his campaign.
From early on, Napoleon touted his lifelong ties to Detroit, a theme he returned to Tuesday night as he spoke to supporters at a Teamsters union hall on Trumbull. Napoleon again had his mother by his side, reminding the crowd that she’s lived in the same Detroit home since 1960.
“There were 13 other people in this race,” Napoleon said a day later. “As we move ahead, now it’s a side-by-side comparison. The messages don’t get convoluted. There were a lot of distractions” in the primary race, including the battle by opponents to boot Duggan.
“I think folks have done what I asked them to do,” Napoleon said. “There’s no need for any major changes. It’s not going to be any wholesale throwing out the bath water.”
Turnaround experience

A clearly delighted Duggan said he would stick through November with a focus on his reputation as a turnaround expert who helped bring Wayne County, the suburban SMART bus system and the DMC back from the brink.
“People really believe that the turnaround of this city is possible, and I think they’re willing to work hard for it,” Duggan said after a whirlwind of media appearances Wednesday. “Now we’ll be able to talk about my history as the prosecutor and at the DMC, and my plan for the city. I think if I had been able to do that from the beginning, my victory margin would have been much larger.”
But the two analysts who first found the groundswell of Duggan support after he announced his write-in bid aren’t so sure it was strictly Duggan’s message that carried the day Tuesday, or that the sense of sympathy for him will last beyond the primary. Sympathy, like memory, may be short in politics.
Ballenger said he expects a slugfest between Napoleon and Duggan.
Considering Duggan, voters may return to an underlying factor in his removal from the ballot, that he moved into the city in 2012 and decided to run for mayor. There’s also the issue of his behind-the-scenes discussions with Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration about whether and when to appoint an emergency manager, his reputation as the late Wayne County Executive Ed McNamara’s “hatchet man,” and that, while he may have stabilized a failing DMC, the medical center ended up being sold to an out-of-state company.
“I think that’s going to be a delicate balancing act for him,” Ballenger said. “He’s obviously going to ride his reputation as the turnaround guy, Mr. Fix It.”
Napoleon, on the other hand, is viewed as the un-Duggan, with voters questioning his financial gravitas and whether “he’s more the go-along, get-along politician who got Detroit into the mess it’s in now,” Ballenger said. Napoleon ran a weak campaign “without fire in his belly, and he allows a damn write-in candidate to beat him in a primary? He’s got to show something. He’s got to display a vision and a game plan for getting things done, that he actually would be better than Duggan in implementing it.”
And what of the voters who chose candidates who lost Tuesday, about 17% of the vote, not including other write-ins?
“I think Duggan and Napoleon are in roughly equal position to get votes from the people who lost in the primary, and that Duggan can make a credible claim to some of Napoleon’s voters,” Grebner said. “Duggan is sitting in the catbird’s seat.”

Contact Matt Helms: 313-222-1450 or mhelms@freepress.com.

http://www.freep.com/article/20130807/NEWS01/308070163/Detroit-mayoral-race-Mike-Duggan-Benny-Napoleon