Salt Lake City mayoral candidates state Sen. Luz Escamilla, left, and Erin Mendenhall, right, spent time greeting voters on Election Day Tuesday morning. | Jeffrey D. Allred, Deseret News
SALT LAKE CITY — Erin Mendenhall is in the lead to become Salt Lake City’s next mayor.
Mendenhall has 59% of the vote while Escamilla has 41%, according to early results posted shortly after polls closed at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
Results aren’t final — and they won’t be until the official canvass is complete in two weeks. Depending on how many last-minute ballots remain to be counted — likely thousands, according to the Salt Lake County Clerk — the margin could narrow or even close.
If Mendenhall’s lead holds, Salt Lake City will have elected a City Council member to the mayor’s seat for the first time in 30 years, not since Palmer DePaulis was re-elected in 1987.
More results are expected to be posted throughout the night Tuesday, with another batch slated for Thursday at 3 p.m.
At Escamilla’s storefront headquarters on 900 South near State Street, about two dozen volunteers were still making calls early Tuesday evening, pausing only to clap and cheer at the sound of a bell being rung, signaling an undecided voter had been convinced to back her.
“It comes down to getting the vote out, where are the undecideds going to go,” Tim Chambless, a longtime political science professor at the University of Utah, said as he looked over the sparse room. Chambless said because voters had two strong candidates to choose from, some were having difficulty deciding.
About the only decorations in the barebones space besides campaign signs were a cluster of green and blue balloons tied to a table of brochures and buttons, and sheets of white paper taped to a wall as a makeshift screen for election results. Several state lawmakers, including House Minority Assistant Whip Angela Romero, D-Salt Lake City, were among the dozens of supporters gathered.
Escamilla said she was knocking on doors in the Glendale neighborhood until about 6:30 p.m. and told reporters shortly before the first results appeared that she felt good about the race. But the state Senate minority whip also said she isn’t expecting a winner to be declared tonight.
”It’s going to be a long week,” Escamilla said.
Just before the first batch of results posted at 8 p.m., supporters at Mendenhall’s election night party at Publik Coffee Roasters mingled, ate and drank as they waited, chatting over the loud music. Lights bordering the room splashed Mendenhall’s campaign colors, pink and blue, on the walls. As time went on, the crowd and anticipation grew. Mendenhall remained absent from the crowd, watching the first batch of results post from another room.
Polls placed Mendenhall as the front-runner in the race, though political pundits and candidates predicted a razor-thin race — one that likely wouldn’t be decided on election night. Pollsters have seen a path to victory for Escamilla, but predicted it would hinge on her campaign’s ability to rally enough supporters to drop off their ballots or go to the polls Tuesday.
In the final days leading up to Election Day, polls had also showed a large chunk of Salt Lake City voters still undecided.
In the August primary, final-day supporters pushed Escamilla over the finish line to advance to the November ballot. When a big batch of about 8,000 votes were posted two days after polls closed, only then did Escamilla surpass former state Sen. Jim Dabakis for the second-place slot to advance to the general election.
Tuesday night marked the end of a lengthy campaign season that began over a year ago when the first primary candidates jumped into the race to challenge Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski, who later bowed out of the race, citing a complex and private family situation.
The August primary whittled down a crowded field of eight candidates to Escamilla and Mendenhall, marking a historic chapter for Salt Lake City: the first time two women would face off to become mayor of Utah’s capital.
The winner will become Salt Lake City’s third woman to be elected mayor. She’ll succeed Biskupski, who made history and national headlines when she narrowly unseated former Mayor Ralph Becker in 2015, becoming the city’s first openly gay mayor.
Escamilla’s campaign garnered national attention, including from the Los Angeles Times. An immigrant from Mexico, Escamilla, 41, has been heralded as a “powerhouse” symbolizing hope for minorities in Salt Lake City. She’s promised to bring more equity to Salt Lake City’s diverse west side, which has long been seen as an area of diminished opportunity.
Mendenhall, 39, has served on the City Council for two terms, representing an east-side district. She got her start in politics through air quality advocacy, co-founding Breathe Utah and serving as chairwoman on the state’s Air Quality board. She has said her lifelong war with air pollution pushed her into public office, and air quality shapes the “lens” through which she sees every issue confronting Salt Lake City,
Political and economic pundits have stressed the importance of Salt Lake City’s mayor for not just the capital city, but also Utah as a whole and its place in national politics. While Salt Lake City’s mayor acts as one of the state’s few powerful Democratic voices and a symbol of Utah’s minority party, pundits say the mayor must also work alongside state leaders to represent a city that acts as a gateway to the rest of the state.
In a contest between a senator and a councilwoman, this year’s race has been characterized as a competition of state versus city experience. A key question posed to voters was to choose between a state lawmaker promising to bring state relationships off Capitol Hill or a city councilwoman with nuts-and-bolts knowledge of the city’s inner- workings.
The contest between Mendenhall and Escamilla has been fairly civil, after both candidates pledged to run “clean” campaigns — though when there was tension in debates, it was mostly over the controversial Utah Inland Port Authority, which surfaced as the biggest hot-button issue in this year’s race.
Overall, the tone of this year’s race has been largely positive with candidates intent on sticking to the issues. That’s in contrast with the much more contentious and at-times bitter 2015 race between Becker and Biskupski.
from Deseret News https://ift.tt/2JVx3mN
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario