Unopposed Local Elections on the Rise

Guest: Melissa Marschall, PhD, Professor of Political Science, Rice University, Director of the Center for Local Elections in American Politics (LEAP) of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research The city of Provo, Utah is having a mayoral election this year. The two-term mayor is not running for re-election, so the field is wide open and eight candidates are running in the nonpartisan race. Based on some new research, that’s fairly unusual. The study looked at six different states over the last 15 years and found that half the time, the mayoral elections went uncontested, with only one candidate. It seems that unopposed mayoral elections are becoming more and more frequent.