What Went Down During The 2021 Elections

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms stunningly announced earlier this year that she would retire after only one term, leaving behind an open-seat race for mayor of one of the largest cities in the South.

Unlike many other mayoral races today, this isn’t a race between a moderate and a progressive either. Instead, most candidates have tacked toward the center, especially by calling for more police officers as crime rates have spiked in the city. The likely front-runners are former Mayor Kasim Reed and City Council President Felicia Moore, but City Councilman Antonio Brown, City Councilman Andre Dickens and attorney Sharon Gay are also in contention.

A spike in violent crime has brought the issue into the 2021 elections — particularly in municipal campaigns like the Atlanta mayoral election, but also in the Virginia governor’s race. In Atlanta, former mayor Kasim Reed, whose previous administration was marred by corruption scandals, has made crime the centerpiece of his campaign, arguing that he’s the only candidate with the experience necessary to combat the surge. In Virginia, meanwhile, Youngkin has seized on crime as a way to attack McAuliffe. In ads, Youngkin has tried to tie the Democrat to efforts to defund police departments and close prisons, saying that the state would become less safe under McAuliffe’s watch.

Crime is a perennial but puzzling political topic. Politicians love to talk about crime on the campaign trail, but struggle to address it when they get into office. That’s largely because Americans have a lot of anxiety about crime, regardless of whether the crime rate is actually rising or falling. But even people who have devoted their lives to studying crime rates don’t really know why crime goes up or down.

Add to that the fact that the current crime spike is especially weird and hard to understand — what we’re seeing is really an uptick in homicides, while property crime has actually been on the decline — and it gets even more complicated to understand how voters will react. For instance, Democrats are often depicted by Republicans as softer on crime, but at this point it’s not clear if Democrats will suffer because of Americans’ worries about crime. The outcome of today’s elections could be a clue.

More than a year after the murder of George Floyd by members of the Minneapolis Police Department, Minneapolis voters have a chance to drastically alter city government at the ballot box today.

First, they will choose to reelect or oust Mayor Jacob Frey, who was criticized for not doing more to reform the police both before and after Floyd’s murder. Two progressives, community organizer Sheila Nezhad and former state Rep. Kate Knuth, are running against him in the ranked-choice election, and each has urged her supporters to rank the other second and “don’t rank Frey” to maximize the incumbent’s chances of losing.

Nezhad and Knuth are also strong supporters of City Question 2, a local ballot measure that would replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a Department of Public Safety that would focus more on social services and report to the City Council. However, another local ballot measure, City Question 1, would undermine that by giving the next mayor — be it Frey or one of his opponents — a lot more power vis-a-vis the council in the future.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the entire structure of city government, especially with regard to public safety, could change in Minneapolis today, along with the people who make up that government.