DETROIT (WWJ) -- Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan has been elected to a third term, defeating challenger Anthony Adams.
Duggan, who earned more than 72% of the vote in this summer’s primary mayoral election, was leading by a sizable margin just before 10 p.m., when the Associated Press called the race for the incumbent.
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A low voter turnout was expected Tuesday, estimated to be at around 15% of the city’s population, which some political analysts said favored Duggan as the incumbent.
With an estimated 80% of precincts reporting shortly before 10 p.m. there were only about 75,000 votes tallied.
In the lead-up to Tuesday’s election, Duggan had focused on building on the work he has done over the last eight years, including reducing blight, creating jobs in the city, big development projects and improving neighborhoods.
During his victory speech late Tuesday night, Duggan gave his vision for what the next four years will look like.
“If you’re in one of those neighborhoods that still has abandoned houses, even after we’ve taken 16,000 down, even after we’ve rehabbed 8,000, if you’re still in a house with blight, we’re gonna get there in the next four years and every single house is either going to be occupied or it’s going to come down," he said. "We are going to remove blight from all the neighborhoods.”
He also promised those in neighborhoods with lots of vacant land that the city and Detroit Land Bank would allow residents in those neighborhoods to decide what they want to see come to those areas.
Another focus for Duggan has been improving public safety in the city. Earlier this fall he told WWJ during the Mackinac Policy Conference there were more cops on the streets throughout the summer and it was working.
"You don't need a poll to know that Detroiters want more police presence. Every single neighborhood meeting I hear that," Duggan said at the time. "I look at the disconnect between some of the stuff I see reported in the media — 'defund the police' — and talking to the average Detroiter who had no interest in that at all."
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During a media scrum at his victory party in Midtown, Duggan said he plans to work with new members of City Council in regards to the recent towing corruption scandal that saw multiple council members and police officers in hot water.
“I would say 90% of the problems deal with towing and the system that was under the Board of Police Commissioners had no controls on it and I’ve been dismantling it and I’m going to continue dismantling it,” Duggan said.
The mayor says Detroit Police Chief James White is expected to address that topic on Wednesday, but he says he’s planning to have “complete transparency on all towing assignments.”
He also noted there will likely be more announcements of people involved in the scandal, though not necessarily elected officials.
“It was just way too much money on a system that didn’t have tight enough monitoring and we’re going to clean it up,” Duggan said.
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Adams, a former deputy mayor under Kwame Kilpatrick, had also been emphasizing the need to reduce crime in the city and stabilize the neighborhoods.
“Killing children is a public health emergency, which has to be addressed,” Adams said in an interview with the Detroit Free Press earlier this year. “Crime and poverty intersect, and you can't attack one without addressing the other because if that was the case, we would have completely eradicated crime in the city of Detroit.”
Adams said early Tuesday it had been “an incredible journey talking to the people of Detroit and really understanding their issues and concerns.”
Duggan told WWJ the COVID-19 changed the way he had to campaign, but he was proud of the support he got prior to election day.
“People have just been terrific this entire campaign,” Duggan told WWJ Tuesday morning. “It isn’t the kind of campaign I would have liked -- I would have liked to have been in crowds day after day, going from senior center to senior center and backyard to backyard. But I think people have understood.”
Duggan said he had about 15,000 campaign signs in Detroiters’ yards across the city and said “the people of Detroit have just been terrific.”
Detroit voters on Tuesday were also at least four new city council members to vote for, as well as a new city clerk.
Detroiters also voted on three proposals, including whether to establish a Reparations Task Force (Proposal R), whether to decriminalize some drugs (Proposal E) or whether to amend the city charter to give residents more say on how the city spends its money (Proposal S).
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