Posted on 05/19/2015 11:17:46 PM PDT by Impy
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -
After a long, expensive and sometimes bruising, Jacksonville voters elected a new mayor on Tuesday.
When the first early votes and absentee votes were reported just after 7 p.m., Republican Lenny Curry had a 1 percent lead over incumbent Mayor Alvin Brown. Two hours later, with 98 percent of the 200,000 votes counted, that lead was only slightly larger, but enough to declare victory.
After thanking his family, his volunteers, his donors and the Republican Party of Florida, Curry turned to the future.
(Excerpt) Read more at news4jax.com ...
http://www.news4jax.com/politics/sheriff-candidates-vote-then-campaign-some-more/33101606
Rat Mayor of Jacksonville Alvin Brown, who “won” 4 years ago, is defeated.
Voter fraud is slowly going away in Florida. Scott proved that. 2016 will be solid R.
So is the Republican any better or just a Magic R with a liberal agenda? Unfortunately it’s a question deserving to be asked.
Florida news
Good news is the Republican won
Bad news is Jacksonville, IIRC, used to be a SOLID Republican town. That the R won by only 1 or 2% seems to say to me that it is trending ‘rat.
They just couldn’t fraud up the votes this time.
Am I off base?
Amazing considering demographics.....one third black
Whites are more conservative than average
Military
There have been a number of black shootings in Jacksonville lately. I moved here at the beach just over a year ago. There has been a black mayor. Now I wonder if there will be riots protesting a while mayoR election.
Thanks Impy.
Curiously, one prominent Black Dem pol endorsed the Republican Curry. This was a big defeat for the execrable Corrine Brown.
High Black population and conservative Whites who vote heavily Republican is typical of the Deep South, including Northern Florida. But yeah, it’s good these urban Whites in Jacksonville are still conservative enough to carry the day.
Romney won by 3.4 points, McCain by less than 2. It’s definitely been trending the wrong way, higher Black turnout for O (and this Black mayor) I guess. Scott easily took the county/city(it’s consolidated) by almost 13 points over Crist.
I don’t know much about Mr. Curry, he’s a businessman who was a past chairman of the state GOP (stepped down a year ago to begin his run for Mayor).
Alvin seems to be a great disaster, this should have been a beatdown rather than a close race, the city’s finances are in shambles and violent crime has skyrocketed. That didn’t stop a couple local RINOs from endorsing him, even as he lost all the business support he had 4 years ago. Rubio, Jeb, Rick Perry were all over this race for Curry, since Brown would have used his office to funnel votes to Hillary.
I think that your numbers are for Duval County as a whole, not just Jacksonville (which, I would guess, narrowly was carried by Obama both times).
They are, but it’s a consolidated City/County. So the whole county elects the Mayor so the Prez/Gubernatorial results are good for comparison.
Right?
I wasn’t aware that it was consolidated. So there isn’t a Jacksonville Mayor and a separate Duval County Mayor like they have in Miami and Miami-Dade County?
It happened way back in 1968. The impetus was massive local corruption.
The Jacksonville Mayor and Council govern the entire county. But 4 other municipalities chose to retain their own governments with limited powers (so they vote for Jacksonville Mayor like they would a County Exec and also their own Mayor). 3 of the 4 have their own Police Departments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacksonville_Consolidation
JAX is similar to Nashville. There are still technically a few independent cities within our county, and they elect their own Mayors and I believe even have small police departments, but they all get to vote for members of our Metro Council and for Metro Mayor.
Kinda a weird set up to me. Defeats the purpose of consolidation, doesn’t it?
Yeah. It’s rather like a double-layer of bureaucracy. One of the “satellite towns”, as they term them, voted to disband recently (Lakewood). It was only a square mile in size.
Some of these were created just as the momentum to have the entire county merge with the city was occurring. Had the Metro referendum failed again (it passed on the second try in 1962 after the 1958 one failed), you’d have seen more and more “tiny towns” pop up all over the county ahead of being annexed.
The reason it became so critical is that the old city of Nashville was losing population for the first time in the 1950s (as were countless other cities, especially in the era of “urban renewal”). When the county rejected merger, the city started rapidly annexing adjacent urban/suburban portions in order to stave off decline, though it was frankly a gun to the head of the suburbanites, so that’s what pushed the merger through (though they did throw the suburbanites some crumbs with respect to a large member council, second only to Chicago in size nationally).
Black citizens didn’t want the merger in the old city, because with the decline in population (of Whites), it meant that they’d be able to get control of it before long, perhaps by 1980. Had that happened, the city/county would’ve ended up as polarized as Memphis and would be in bad shape today. Probably a declining city of 150-175k instead of the 650k or so we are now (having now surpassed Baltimore, and we’ll eclipse Detroit probably by 2020 or so — unimaginable in 1950 when Detroit had 2 million, Baltimore had 1 million, and we had just 175k).
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