Lyda Krewson was elected St. Louis mayor on Tuesday, April 4, becoming the first woman elected to the city’s highest office.
Running against a field of four relative unknowns and the controversial Rev. Larry Rice, Krewson won with a just a little more than two-thirds of the votes cast in a relatively high-turnout municipal general election. Krewson, the Democratic nominee running in a Democratic stronghold, received 68 percent of the vote (39,375 votes).
Republican nominee Andrew Jones received 10,088 votes (17.3 percent), and Rice received 6,102 votes (10.5 percent). Three other candidates split just over 2,000 votes between them, and there were 737 write-in votes (with no campaign for a write in candidate, though state Rep. Bruce Franks Jr. briefly planned to wage one).
By comparison, in the previous municipal general election in 2013, the Democratic nominee (then-incumbent Mayor Francis G. Slay) did almost 15 points better than Krewson did on Tuesday, winning 82 percent of the vote in a much lower-turnout election. Thirty percent of registered voters (59,134 people) voted in the city on Tuesday – more than twice as much voter participation as in the April 2013 municipal general election.
One has to look back to the 2009 municipal general election to see a Democrat challenged the way Krewson was challenged by a field of no-names and a reverend who ran a controversial downtown homeless shelter until only a few days before the election. In 2009, Slay had a real challenge in a former state senator with widespread name recognition among city voters, Maida Coleman. Coleman took more than one-third of the vote (34.3 percent) from then-incumbent Slay (60.7 percent) with two perennial candidates also in the race.
America’s most infamous small-town mayor, James Knowles III of Ferguson, easily won re-election on Tuesday with 57 percent of the vote, running head-to-head against Ella Jones, a recently elected African-American City Council member.
“We had people who came out for us to build some momentum, and we’re going to take this momentum and we’re going to continue to hold James Knowles accountable,” Jones told St. Louis Public Radio.
In Ferguson, the mayor is a council member at large with little operational control over city government, though Knowles became the city’s mouthpiece during the unrest following the police killing of Michael Brown Jr.
Proposition A in Ferguson, which puts a mandate for police body cameras and some protocols for managing them in the city charter, won by a huge margin, with 70.7 percent of the vote, garnering almost 500 votes more than Knowles.
