Five Takeaways from the Raleigh City Council Election

This Tuesday marks the last day of meetings for a Raleigh City Council that was led, for the last five years, by outgoing Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin. Baldwin decided not to run for reelection, but on Election Day, voters largely chose to continue moving the city in the same direction that Baldwin has taken it during her tenure by embracing growth, investing in transit, and preserving parks and greenways. 

As the Baldwin era comes to an end and we look ahead to the new council’s swearing-in on December 2, here are our five biggest takeaways from the Raleigh City Council election. 

Residents are generally happy with how things are going and voted to stay the course 

Since she announced her plan to run in January, Raleigh Mayor-elect Janet Cowell, who won in a landslide taking 60 percent of the vote, has said she feels that, overall, Raleigh is headed in the right direction. 

“We have a high quality of life, vibrant and diverse neighborhoods, and residents who make this a special place to live,” Cowell wrote in her INDY Week candidate questionnaire last month. She noted that rapid growth has brought new opportunities and wealth, but also displacement and burden for some, and she promises to work to ensure that Raleigh is a “city that works for everyone.”

Before the election, we asked if Raleigh voters would choose to change or stay the course, and we seem to have our answer: voters connected with Cowell’s message and across-the-board elected incumbents in every council seat except for District A. 

Voters chose experienced candidates

It’s not unrelated to being happy with the way things are going, but when given the chance to pick newcomers over incumbents, unlike two years ago when they elected four millennials to the city council, this time voters picked candidates with experience in office in Districts B, C, E, and for the at-large seats.

The only exception came in District A where voters unseated first-term incumbent Mary Black in favor of Mitchell Silver. But Silver, too, is an experienced candidate: a former City of Raleigh planning director for a decade before working as New York City’s parks commissioner, Silver has an insider’s knowledge of how city government works and was even responsible for writing Raleigh’s guiding documents, the comprehensive plan and unified development ordinance that has put the city on its path for growth through 2030. 

At the top of the ticket, Cowell has served in government roles for most of her career. She was a Raleigh city council member in the early 2000s before serving as a state senator and state treasurer. 

Right-leaning candidates fared surprisingly well

The last time Paul Fitts, a Republican mortgage lender, officially ran for mayor, it was in 2017 against long-serving mayor Nancy McFarlane. He took away just under 15 percent of the vote (or about 7,800 votes) against McFarlane, who won with more than 48 percent of the vote, and the other Democratic challenger, Charles Francis, who netted about 37 percent of the vote. (In 2022, Fitts won 1.4 percent of mayoral votes, or just over 2,000 votes, as a write-in candidate). 

This year, Fitts placed second in a field of five candidates, winning more than 18 percent of the vote, or more than 40,400 votes, placing well ahead of the other Democrats in the race, Terrance Ruth and Eugene Myrick, who won 11.3 and 6.4 percent of the votes respectively. Ruth had placed second in a close race against Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin in 2022, running just six points behind her. 

It was a similar story in other races. 

In District A (the city’s most conservative district) Republican candidate Whitney Hill placed second with 33 percent of the vote, behind Silver’s 40 percent haul and ahead of Mary Black’s 26 percent. (Hill came in third in District A in 2022, behind Black and candidate Catherine Lawson, winning about 29 percent of the vote). 

And in the at-large races, where candidates are elected citywide, conservative (though officially unaffiliated) candidate James Bledsoe placed third out of seven candidates, winning more than 48,400 votes, or 14 percent of the vote behind incumbent winners Stormie Forte and Jonathan Lambert-Melton. Forte won about 29 percent of the vote, or more than 98,700 votes, and Melton won 24 percent, or more than 83,800 votes. 

A perennial candidate, it was Bledsoe’s best-ever showing. In 2022, he ran for an at-large seat and placed fifth out of seven candidates with 12 percent of the vote, or a little more than 31,200 votes. In the 2019 at-large race, Bledsoe came in last out of six candidates with five percent, or about 4,500 votes. 

Raleigh and Durham are very different cities, and their municipal elections reflect that

In Durham’s municipal election last year, city council member Nate Baker was the top vote-getter in the three-seat at-large races between six candidates, winning nearly 23 percent of the vote. Baker ran a strong grassroots campaign with a deep bench of volunteers and a message about building an inclusive city with green infrastructure. 

In Raleigh’s at-large races this year, which also featured six candidates, Raleigh planning commissioner Reeves Peeler ran a similar campaign to Baker’s, but he didn’t see the same results. Peeler placed fourth, winning about 10 percent of the vote and running well behind incumbents Melton and Forte. 

While Peeler (and District A candidate Mary Black) hoped to appeal to a core base of support from working-class residents, renters, and young voters—the same demographics that Baker targeted in Durham—they fell short where Baker succeeded.

Peeler told the INDY he realized during his campaign that running for office in Raleigh is fundamentally different from running for office in Durham.

“We have more top-end wealth in Raleigh, there’s probably overall greater inequality,” Peeler said. “There’s more luxury development pressure. Our zoning code paves the way for big houses to be built and small ones to get torn down faster than other places. And because of Raleigh’s history as a strong economy, a state capital, lots of jobs, great schools, people move here more from out of state.”

Does it mean young, progressive candidates like Peeler, Black, and Baker will have a harder time running grassroots campaigns targeting younger working-class voters and renters in the future? That remains to be seen. 

District E broke its seat-flipping streak 

Finally, some stability in District E after four election cycles that saw the seat flip as many times. 

Incumbent council member Christina Jones defended her seat against a well-financed challenger, change management professional John Cerqueira, but it was a tight race: Jones won with 51.5 percent of the vote to Cerqueira’s 48 percent, or with a difference of just about 1,700 votes. 

District E is one of the city’s fastest-growing in Raleigh, and also one where that growth doesn’t always seem to be the most productive, with teardowns of older single-family homes giving way to much larger single-family homes dominating the residential landscape. But it’s also home to residents who oppose growth, or density, in general: in 2023, homeowners in  District E’s wealthy Hayes Barton neighborhood filed a lawsuit against the City of Raleigh over its missing middle development policy in an effort to block the construction of new townhomes.

In 2015, Bonner Gaylord, the COO of Kane Realty, won a third term in District E. In 2017, Gaylord narrowly lost the seat to eventual Livable Raleigh co-founder Stef Mendell, who ran on an anti-development platform. In 2021, a growth-friendly attorney, David Knight, unseated Mendell, and in 2022, Jones defeated Knight by running a campaign focused largely on community outreach and engagement. 

That strategy seems to have worked for Jones: she’s one of the most visible and active district council members, even if some see her as divisive and anti-development.

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