The Churn
Welcome to New Atlanta: Butter’s Takeaways From Yesterday’s Runoff Elections
Mike JordanDecember 1, 2021
Atlanta has a mayor named Andre.
Mayor-elect Dickens will be ATL’s 61st chief executive officer, and comes to the job at a time when the city is certainly facing a slew of challenges. Those include infrastructure, housing affordability, income inequality, inflation that’s the highest in the country, and yes, crime.
To give him credit, Dickens overcame a lot to win the race, even though he checked a lot of the boxes needed for victory, at least for those putting candidates through an ATL purity test. He’s a native Atlantan, unlike Moore, who is from Indianapolis. Dickens graduated from Mays High School, which makes him a product of Atlanta Public Schools, specifically in the SWATS. He also got an engineering degree from Georgia Tech, and a masters in economic development from Georgia State.
So yeah, it only makes sense that The Culture showed up for him in a major way.
Here are a few things we took from the election last night.
Kasim’s voters decided they couldn’t do anything with Felicia.
Turns out that the race wasn’t even close. With almost 79,000 votes counted, the final tally had Dickens beating Moore by almost double. Remember that in the general election, Moore had almost twice the vote count as Dickens, but that was of course when Kasim Reed was in the race, so it does at least appear that Reed voters weren’t willing to make the leap to Moore, despite he and Dickens feuding during the general campaign, and Reed not coming out to endorse him after not making the runoff.
After a anxiety-inducing election season that began back when Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms announced her decision to leave office at the end of her first term, the anticipation was that former mayor Kasim Reed’s entry into the race meant he’d almost certainly win a third term, following in the footsteps of Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first Black mayor. But as it turned out, Reed’s support waned as critics accused him of corruption, aiding in Atlanta’s gentrification issues, and bullying. Even Reed seems to think a certain issue of eminent domain in Peoplestown helped him lose the general election contest. But former City Council President Felicia Moore, who received 41% of the vote to Andre Dickens’ 23% — just around 600 votes more than Reed — on November 2, seemed to have been a less desirable candidate once the choice didn’t include the former mayor.
That Kyle Rittenhouse thing probably did it.
Before precincts closed last night, the early vote in Atlanta already had Dickens ahead of Moore by more than 5,000 votes, with just under 30,000 early votes counted. The race never went the other way. For so many voters to have decided they’d rather have Dickens, who flipped his performance from just under half of Moore’s voters in the general to just under double her take in the runoff, something had to have occurred. Sure, it could have been those undecided voters (at least 20% by most polls before yesterday), but what probably did Moore in was her dreadfully bad social media snafu responding to Kyle Rittenhouse’s not guilty verdict. By the time she was saying Ahmaud Arbery’s name in a later post, the vibes had already settled in.
City Council looks way different.
Dickens isn’t the only surprise in the election; a lot of new faces are coming to City Council and other positions in city and local government. Atlanta’s new City Council President Doug Shipman, founding CEO of The National Center for Civil and Human Rights (NCCHR) and former CEO of the Woodruff Arts Center, defeated five-term District 5 Councilwoman Natalyn Archibong. Shipman is well-liked by Atlanta creatives, and depending on how well he and Mayor-Elect Dickens get along (Dickens was a board member at the NCCHR), the city’s arts community could have reason to be excited about the future.
And these are young leaders. Dickens, at 47, is the OG of a crop of younger-than-usual elected leaders coming into office, such as Liliana Bakhtiari, who’s in her early 30s and came back to defeat Mandy Mahoney by a wide margin this year after losing her 2017 Council race against Natalyn Archibong (who just lost to Shipman).
Incumbents took Ls on Ls on Ls.
Archibong wasn’t the only elected official to be voted out. After pushing Cleta Winslow, the Council’s longest-serving member, out of her seat in a rematch from a 2017 runoff, Atlanta native and Army veteran Jason Dozier won the District 4 race, and Antonio Lewis defeated Councilwoman Joyce Sheperd, who’d held the District 12 seat since 2004. Of course, Kasim Reed wasn’t in office already when he missed the threshold for the mayoral runoff, but the message was kind of the same: Atlanta wants fresh blood.
City Council presidents make terrible mayoral candidates.
Historically, if you have aspirations to be mayor of Atlanta, you don’t want to be the Council president. That’s been true for lots of elections, from Marvin Arrington losing to Bill Campbell, to Robb Pitts losing to Shirley Franklin, to Caesar Mitchell losing to Kasim Reed. Former Council presidents Lisa Borders and Cathy Woolard both failed to make runoffs in their attempts to win the mayor’s office, and Felicia Moore proved to be no different. In other words, if Council President-Elect Doug Shipman wants to break that chain, that creative community connection is gonna come in handy.