Mayor gets 72% in tiny turnout; Patmon edges Kilo, goes on to November

Mayor Frank Jackson scored a huge but somewhat hollow victory tonight, winning 72 percent of the vote in a primary with extremely low turnout.

Jackson is at 24,085 votes, while former city councilman Bill Patmon has edged out businessman Robert Kilo for second place, 3,748 to 3,328, with all but one of the city's 345 precincts reporting.

That 72 percent to 11 percent spread cannot be encouraging for Patmon. But at least Cleveland will get a lively debate this fall with Patmon as Jackson's challenger. With his 12 years of experience on council, Patmon knows City Hall and knows how to campaign and make a case against an opponent. He's challenged the mayor on the city budget, the proposed port expansion, and leadership style. (Here is a profile I wrote about Patmon in 2001.)

If Kilo had finished second (which looked like a real possibility for much of tonight), the mayor's race would've been completely docile and uneventful -- at least, judging by Kilo's repeated praise for Jackson and vague message in the City Club debate last week. Kilo's disciplined businessman's approach to the campaign and his very religious message obviously appealed to a decent number of voters. But if Kilo had beaten the much more politically experienced Patmon, it also surely would have been proof that race can still be a deciding factor in Cleveland elections.

Instead, the biggest news is that a wide range of voters seem comfortable with Jackson, receptive to his steady but quiet leadership and thankful for his balanced budgets. On the other hand, Jackson and his challengers did not excite passion. Only about 33,000 people out of a city of 440,000 showed up to vote.

Here's a link to all of tonight's election results.

Mayoral candidates debate at City Club

The five candidates for mayor debated at the City Club yesterday. You can download the podcast here if you'd like to listen. Here's WKYC-TV's coverage of the event.



I couldn't make it, but Henry Gomez did. The Plain Dealer's City Hall reporter was unimpressed. "Jackson's opponents miss key chance to score points," reads the huge headline on his analysis on page 1B today. (He's followed up with further thoughts on his City Hall blog.) But Leon Bibb of NewsChannel 5 says the challengers hit the mayor on the state of the Cleveland schools.

This isn't the first time the candidates have debated. Gomez live-blogged from an August debate in the Lee-Harvard neighborhood: you can read his reports here and here.

WKYC, WCPN interview 5 candidates for mayor

In an election like Cleveland's race for mayor, reporters have a dilemma: do they give equal time to all the candidates, or do they use their news judgment, and the candidates' experience and past success, to figure out who the front-runners are?

If you don't want reporters handicapping the field, if you want equal info about all five candidates for mayor, then check out the interviews on wkyc.com and wcpn.org.

Tom Beres, Channel 3's veteran politics reporter, has posted his video interviews with the candidates. Here are the links to Frank Jackson, Bill Patmon, Kimberly Brown, Robert Kilo, and Laverne Jones Gore. (The videos take a few seconds to appear.)

WCPN reporters Rick Jackson and Eric Wellman have also interviewed everyone. Here are the links to podcasts of the interviews with Laverne Jones Gore, Robert Kilo, Kimberly Brown, Bill Patmon, and Frank Jackson.

The Plain Dealer has played it both ways. City Hall reporter Henry Gomez interviewed all five candidates and analyzed the race on the same day, then evaluated the mayor's first term and let all four challengers take their shots at him.

The City Club mayoral debate is tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. You can watch a live webcast or listen to a podcast afterwards. It'll be broadcast on WCPN, 90.3 FM, at 8 p.m. tomorrow night.

And if all this equality seems way too neutral for a blog, here's my handicapping.