In this last week of the 2023 Memphis mayor’s race, there are no doubt many lessons to be learned. One of them is surely that, with four leading candidates running neck-to-neck here at the end, we have outlived the 1991 judicial settlement imposed on at-large city races by the late federal judge Gerald Turner.
The four candidates are, alphabetically, Floyd Bonner, Shelby County Sheriff; Willie Herenton, a five-times-elected former city mayor; Van Turner, a former county commissioner and, until recently, NAACP head; and Paul Young, president and CEO of the Downtown Memphis Commission.
All are well-credentialed, and all have had their moments during the demanding year-long contest now concluding.
All of them, consonant with the city’s largely Black demographic, are African-American, a fact rendering the existing no-runoff provision obsolete and irrelevant.
What none of them will have — and you can bet on it — is a majority of votes from their fellow citizens. One of them will win by a plurality, and probably a razor-thin one as well. (For the record, there are 13 other mayoral candidates on the ballot, who will run distantly behind the leaders.)
Here is a brief rundown on the circumstances confronting each of the four leading candidates — once again rendered alphabetically.
Floyd Bonner: Twice-elected comfortably as the Democratic candidate for sheriff, Floyd Bonner began his run a year ago as the probable front-runner but has been cast since in a villain’s role by critics, mainly on the political left, who see the number of jail deaths on his watch to be a scandal. Bonner’s hard-line position on crime will sway many votes from law-and-order advocates and from Republicans, whose party officially “recommended” him. And he’s still in the running, though events — especially the recent indictment of his jailers in the Gershun Freeman case — have unmistakably damaged his chances.
Willie Herenton: Against most people’s expectations, the former mayor, who led the city for 17 years in fairly recent political history, was originally thought of widely as just an Auld Lang Syne candidate. But, as a variety of unofficial polls (where he led) made obvious, he still has standing among numerous inner-city Memphians. And the 83-year-old Herenton has exuded an air of authority, coupled with his promise of “tough love” for juvenile offenders, that to some degree crosses demographic lines. In theory, however — and probably in reality — there’s an ABH (Anybody-but-Herenton) lobby that is busy in these late hours trying to decide which of the other candidates has the best chance of turning him back.
Van Turner: The ex-county commission chair and former Democratic Party chair and, until recently, the local head of the NAACP, has been, more or less publicly, nursing mayoral ambitions for years. And, in advance of running, he was boosted by his well-known efforts on behalf of expunging Confederate monuments, as well as by his highly visible role in reacting to the Tyre Nichols tragedy and other such outrages. But he started slow, both in fundraising and in campaign mechanics, and he didn’t mount a real surge until these last couple of weeks, when he got prestige endorsements from several ranking Democrats and a serious infusion of independent-expenditure cash from one of them, state Representative Justin Pearson. As final election day grew near, Turner was giving opponent Paul Young a real tussle for late-breaking votes from progressives.
Paul Young: The Downtown Memphis Commission CEO has youth on his side (both his own and among what polls indicate to be a tide of millennial and Gen Z voters). He also benefited from a fundraising bonanza that ran to more than a million dollars and was fed significantly by established commercial interests, and from the fact that, as a campaigner, he avoided any gaffes as such and was never, in any true sense, off the clock. A longtime cog in major appointive positions, both city and country, but a first-time candidate for political office, he developed a degree of support from most major factions of the electorate. The most unusual aspect of his campaign was that, for better or for worse, he never articulated any platform ideas that could be considered specific. He was for better education, for economic development, for an answer to poverty, etc., etc., and that was pretty much as far as it went. The most impressive — and most convincing — part of his appeal was his assertion that he was not interested in “politics,” but just wanted to “do the work.” As indicated, he was vying with Turner for late-breaking progressive votes, and the outcome of that struggle could be decisive for his hopes.
What early voting, now ended, demonstrated was a tilt toward older voters. If election day continues the pattern, that would enhance the possibility of a dead heat involving two or more of the top four candidates.
