Memphis voters go to the polls Thursday, Oct. 5, to cast the last round of votes to decide who will be the city’s new mayor and elect at least five new faces to the Memphis City Council.

Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. in a relatively short nonpartisan ballot of 61 candidates in 14 races — a 17-candidate race for mayor and 44 candidates across races for all 13 council seats.

The Daily Memphian’s Election Day coverage will include an ongoing live blog that will begin with the polls opening, track turnout throughout the 12 hours and have the latest vote totals from the Shelby County Election Commission in the 11 contested races on the ballot.

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Once trends are clear, we’ll also talk to candidates to gauge their reactions. And of course, bring the results as they come in after the last voter casts their ballot.

Nearly 58,000 citizens have already cast ballots either through early or absentee voting. There are 373,091 registered voters in Memphis.

If the 2023 election follows trends in the previous two city elections, in 2015 and 2019, the early and absentee votes will be about half of the total turnout, which would then equate to about 30% of the electorate. 

But past elections do not guarantee what will happen; a combination of candidates, issues and voter concerns, goals and participation can alter expectations.

What makes this election unique from past city elections?

The early and absentee voting turnout of 57,951 is the highest turnout for the 14-day period since 2007, when about 77,000 early and absentee ballots were cast.

It’s the first election since 1971 with an incumbent mayor serving out his term of office and not seeking reelection.

It’s also the first election since 1982’s special election that an incumbent mayor hasn’t been running.

Mayor’s race themes

The story of the mayor’s race is four competing strategies that resonate with broader questions about the city’s politics that are likely to endure once the election results are certified.

And there are the things no campaign can plan for, including a court case over whether Van Turner and Floyd Bonner Jr. could run for the office, since neither lived within the city limits until earlier this year.

Chancellor JoeDae Jenkins ruled there is no mayoral candidate residency requirement in place now although the winner must live in the city upon being certified as the winner.

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Bonner was being urged to run for Memphis mayor even before he had won reelection last year as Shelby County Sheriff. The momentum made him a close second to Downtown Memphis Commission president Paul Young in fundraising.

His appeal has been simple and its implications revolutionary for the mayor’s role in law enforcement. Bonner is relying on his law enforcement experience and pledges to make that the driving force of his administration.

His critics point to what they say is mismanagement at the Shelby County Jail at 201 Poplar Ave. The Daily Memphian reported in June that there had been 40 deaths inside 201 Poplar since 2019. The Commercial Appeal recently expanded that data, finding 52 deaths had occurred since 2016 for those in SCSO custody.

The custody of prisoners awaiting trial after arrest is one of the sheriff’s key duties.

Conversely, city government’s role in the local criminal justice system ends once police officers deliver someone they have arrested to the county jail.

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Turner, a former Shelby County commissioner and former president of the Memphis Branch NAACP, formally announced his candidacy the same day as Young — Sept. 1, 2022.

Young immediately began building political name recognition, of which he had less than any other major contenders. He did that with a daunting schedule of fundraisers that gave him the top dollar figures in the pack.

Young began with appeals to voters heavy on details of projects he has worked on at the DMC and at the helm of the city’s Housing and Community Development division.

Over time those appeals have been mixed with more discussion about his background and calls for a new generation of leadership to spread the city’s prosperity to areas where it hasn’t taken root.

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Turner’s strategy started later as the former chairman of the Shelby County Democratic Party sought to build a “blue” wave of support in the nonpartisan election, similar to the wave local Democrats have built in the last two partisan county elections.

Turner’s role as head of the city’s longest-running and dominant civil rights organization garnered him national exposure in the reaction to the January beating death of Memphian Tyre Nichols after a police street crime unit pulled him over.

The blue-wave strategy is a test of whether the different political groundings of city and county elections are still a legitimate difference in a state and a nation where partisan differences have come to define politics.

Former Mayor Willie Herenton is making his second bid for mayor since leaving the office in 2009. And without an incumbent running, Herenton is much more active than he was in 2019.

That means door-to-door campaigning and going to voters instead of voters coming to Herenton as they did four years ago.

Acknowledging it’s been 16 years since he was mayor, he’s also emphasizing his status as the only candidate who has been mayor — and the longest-serving mayor in the city’s history.

The strategies from candidate to candidate are different even as they’ve all recognized crime as the top issue.

The appeals, including those of businessman J.W. Gibson, Memphis-Shelby County Schools board member Michelle McKissack and State House Democratic leader Karen Camper, also overlap in the voters they reach.

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For some voters the gap in the appeals gives way to calculations about who wins if the candidate they vote for doesn’t.

Memphis People’s Convention co-founder Rev. Earle Fisher concluded by the August gathering of the city’s progressives and activists that the priority — ahead of positions on specific issues — should be who can win at the polls.

“This is about probability, not ideology,” he wrote ahead of the convention.

 On The Daily Memphian’s “On The Record” podcast, also ahead of the convention, he was even blunter.

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“If their personal favorite has a 10% chance in terms of viability, we have to communicate that to the public if we actually want them to be adequately engaged and equipped and educated on the issue,” he said. “That’s the rationale. And so far as viability is concerned, it’s not about what is possible.”

What are the trends from recent city and other election cycles?

A majority of the city’s voters haven’t turned out for a city election since 1991.

Across other election cycles featuring county, state and federal offices, only presidential general elections consistently see a majority turnout countywide.

The November 2018 state and federal congressional midterm elections were the last nonpresidential general election in Shelby County to draw a majority turnout countywide. That broke a drought that went back to the 1994 midterm elections.

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Various get-out-the-vote efforts — aligned with candidates and nonpartisan organizations — have raised expectations and turnouts during the early voting period in recent years.

But instead of matching the bump in early-vote turnout, Election Day turnout has been lackluster. It has amounted to moving around the same amount of votes so that more of it comes during the early period.

Runoffs

There is no runoff provision in the mayor’s race or the six races for super district seats on the city council. The winner is the candidate with the most votes; it doesn’t have to be a majority.

The runoff provision is in place for the seven single-member district council races.

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If no candidate in one of those races gets a majority of the votes cast, the top two vote-getters advance to a Nov. 16 runoff election.

The unopposed

Two of the 14 races on Thursday’s ballot were decided in July when Super District council members JB Smiley Jr. (Super 8, Position 1) and Jeff Warren (Super 9, Position 3) drew no opposition in their reelection bids.

Smiley nevertheless has been campaigning with television and social media advertising.

He’s doing it to prove that it’s possible, with no runoff provision in the mayor’s race, for a council member to get more votes than the winning candidate for mayor.

Early voting total highest since 2007 Memphis elections

“What if a council member gets more votes than the (new) mayor? I’m going to say I’ve got a mandate,” Smiley said during a Sept. 12 city council discussion. 

Smiley ran a statewide campaign last year in the Democratic primary for Tennessee governor and lost to Dr. Jason Martin of Nashville by less than 2,000 votes. He is weighing another statewide bid for U.S. Senate next year.

The 100,000-vote mark

The last three city elections have seen an average of 91,000 votes in percentage turnouts ranging from 18% in 2011 to 28% in 2015.

With another crowded field, and multiple experienced and well-known candidates in the race, some of the campaigns and candidates have said the new mayor could win with 25,000 to 30,000 votes when all of the votes are totaled Thursday night, if turnout is in the ballpark of 100,000.

That would be a new milestone. It’s also likely something proponents of 2024 ballot questions, to bring back the runoff provision in city elections and/or allow for partisan city primary elections, will use to make their point.

Since Memphis began the mayor-council form of government with the 1967 elections, there have been 16 elections for Memphis mayor, including special elections in 1982 and 2009. A runoff provision was in place up to the 1991 race, but mayoral elections in Memphis have been without the provision since then. 

Attack ads blanket the airwaves in the home stretch of Memphis mayor’s race

No mayor has ever been elected with fewer than about 42,000, even when winning without a majority.

And 2023 isn’t the most crowded field for a Memphis mayor’s race. The record was 25 candidates in the 2009 special election, which A C Wharton won with 65,529 votes.

The lowest winning vote total of the 16 mayoral elections under the mayor-council form of government was the 41,829 total Jim Strickland posted in his 2015 upset of Wharton.

The highest winning vote total was 130,278, which Dick Hackett ran up in his 1983 victory.