Editor’s note: Next year’s Memphis mayoral election to replace term-limited incumbent Jim Strickland is the latest in a long line of mayoral and city council races with historical implications. This story takes a look the maneuvering behind the races. 

Before the first candidates declared for the 2023 race for Memphis mayor, there was the campaign to change city government.

Most of that campaign ended last month as the deadline passed to get city charter amendments on the Nov. 8 ballot this year.

It began earlier this year with a bid by Memphis City Council members to put a charter amendment on the August or November 2022 ballots that would extend term limits from the current two consecutive terms for Memphis City Council members to three terms and apply to current second-term council members.

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That was the original proposal by council member Martavius Jones, who wanted the three-term limit to apply only to the council and not to the mayor.

The council instead put a charter amendment applying to both the mayor and council on the Aug. 4 election ballot with Jones voting against the referendum ordinance.

Memphis voters rejected it, just like they did a differently worded ballot question to do the same thing four years earlier.

Waiting in the wings was another ballot question to allow local political parties to call for partisan primaries in city elections — something the city charter specifically forbids.

The referendum ordinance aimed at the Nov. 8 ballot cleared two of the three council votes before Jones tabled it.

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After the August election defeat of the term limits extension, Jones brought the primaries charter amendment back for a final vote and the council rejected it on a 6-6 tie vote.

But the action was pulled off the council minutes for that meeting before the rejection would have become final.

Council member JB Smiley Jr. moved for reconsideration with a twist. Instead of city primary elections, Smiley proposed an amendment bringing back the runoff provision in the mayor’s race that was stricken from the city charter 31 years ago.

The charter provision was struck down in a 1991 federal court ruling for the mayor’s race in the same ruling that abolished citywide or at large council seats.

U.S. District Judge Jerome Turner ruled the intent of those who drafted the 1967 city charter was to make it politically impossible for a Black candidate for mayor to win by requiring a runoff between the top two contenders if no one got a majority of the votes cast in the October elections.

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Turner left in place the runoff requirement for the seven single-member district council seats. The council replaced the at-large council seats with two council super districts with three council seats in each super district. The runoff provision does not apply to super district seats.

Smiley saw no problem with making the significant change in the ordinance on third and final reading of the referendum ordinance instead of starting over with the first of 3 votes or “readings.”

But other council members balked and the measure was voted down, killing it at the deadline for getting it on the November ballot.

What’s left on the table is a restructuring of the City Council ahead of the October 2023 ballot as the council takes a second look at redistricting to reflect population shifts in the 2020 U.S. Census.

The council made minor adjustments to district boundaries earlier this year for the Nov. 8 special election for council District 4 following Jamita Swearengen’s election on the August ballot as Circuit Court Clerk.

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Jones has talked over several years about a council restructuring that would do away with the super districts and instead take the council to a set of 13 council district that cover the entire city once.

The seven single-member districts currently in place cover the entire city. The two super districts divide the city into halves, covering the entire city a second time.

The council is expected to take a look at some kind of major change to council districts in the new year. Council member Michalyn Easter-Thomas is calling for more public input in the second look, similar to an ad hoc committee of citizens used by the Shelby County Commission in its 2021 redistricting.

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The commission restructured to a set of single-member districts after the 2010 U.S. Census.

Jones has backing from several civic groups for a move away from super districts.

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But he has also wondered aloud about whether the council would be required to put the restructuring to voters in a referendum given the path from the federal court order that led to the creation of the super districts.

The council created the super districts in time for the 1995 Memphis ballot. Voters then approved the super districts in a charter referendum. Turner also gave court approval to the super districts.

That was after he left the matter of what should replace the at-large council seats to the council.

Behind the attempts to change the structure of city elections is the belief that it’s too easy to thwart the will of a majority of voters by getting lots of candidates to run — specifically, lots of Black candidates facing a lone white contender.

But the conversation becomes a lot more pointed once it gets to the matter of who the spoiler candidates are.

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And the more candidates there are, the more get accused of splitting the vote.

Motivations differ for getting into a race. Candidates usually don’t campaign as spoilers, although supporters of the late Judge Otis Higgs in the 1983 race for mayor were chanting “We beat John Ford” on election night when Dick Hackett won his first full four-year term as mayor.

Ford, a Black state senator and former City Council member, finished second.

Higgs was making his third bid for mayor in as many city elections after taking incumbent Wyeth Chandler to runoffs in 1975 and 1979 that drew more voters to the polls for the runoff than turned out for the October election day.

During the 2019 mayor’s race, former Mayor Willie Herenton accused County Commissioner Tami Sawyer of splitting the Black vote in his unsuccessful challenge of incumbent Mayor Jim Strickland.

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Sawyer finished third with almost 7% of the vote.

Strickland’s campaign consultant, Steven Reid, said categorically in a 2019 election post mortem on The Daily Memphian Politics Podcast that Sawyer did not split the Black vote.

“That was an absolute fallacy. Tami Sawyer’s vote was coming from Mayor Strickland,” Reid said on the podcast. “She was either taking the ‘change’ vote, because Herenton was basically representing the past and the way things had been for so long, or she was directly going into City Council District 5, which was Strickland’s former district, where she was doing her heaviest campaigning and seemed to be doing most of her town hall meetings and her meet and greets.”