DETROIT (AP) — Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan easily defeated attorney Anthony Adams in Tuesday’s election to win a third four-year term leading the Motor City.
Duggan was the clear favorite after first winning in 2013, taking over in January 2014, just after the city emerged from the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. He easily won a second term in 2017.
The incumbent won more than 72% of the votes in the August primary in which the top two vote-getters in the nonpartisan primary moved on to the general election.
“The people of the city have just been tremendously supportive of me for the last eight years. It meant a lot,” Duggan said ahead of the vote.
Duggan is a former county prosecutor and medical center chief executive and the city’s first white mayor since the early 1970s. The majority-Black city has posted balanced budgets and improved services to residents following the bankruptcy and during Duggan’s tenure.
At the start of the coronavirus pandemic Duggan pushed for mass COVID-19 testing for Detroit residents and began mass vaccinations when vaccines became available last winter.
His administration has tackled blight, demolishing about 19,000 vacant and abandoned houses since 2014, but most of that work was paid with federal funds.
Adams was an executive assistant under Coleman A. Young, Detroit’s first Black mayor, and was deputy mayor under Kwame Kilpatrick. In more recent years, Adams has been interim director of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, general counsel for Detroit Public Schools and an elected school board member and board president.
Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey had said a turnout of about 15% to 20% of the city’s 500,000 registered voters was expected Tuesday. That percentage is on par for a mayoral election, Winfrey said.
