This governor is about to become mayor

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In Delaware, the governor is about to become a mayor.

That’s right, two-term Delaware Gov. John Carney won the Democratic primary on Tuesday to become mayor of Wilmington, the state’s biggest city. There’s no Republican running in the November election, so Carney is the de facto mayor-elect.

It’s believed to be the first time in modern U.S. history that a sitting governor went on to become mayor. 

It is certainly not the first time that a governor has sought a city-level office, although it is rare. Former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder became mayor of Richmond a decade after his time as governor ended. Jerry Brown helped relaunch his political career by running for mayor of Oakland after serving two terms as California governor. Of course, he went on to serve two more terms as California governor. Former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey is running for mayor of Jersey City next year, and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been rumored to be interested in running for New York City mayor.

“I had to become governor in order to become mayor of the city of Wilmington,” Carney quipped to supporters Tuesday night.

Carney’s unusual job change is one of several notable election results this week, the last primary contests before the general election in November. Both Delaware and New Hampshire voters, for example, chose party nominees for open governor’s seats.

The 68-year-old Carney could not run for reelection because of term limits. He had already served as lieutenant governor and as Delaware’s sole member of the U.S. House of Representatives. All told, he’s run for statewide office seven times.

In April, he announced his intention to run for the city post.

“Our state can be successful only if our city is successful. It’s as simple as that,” he explained at the time. “We’ve driven new job creation in Wilmington, invested more than ever in affordable housing, expanded the Port of Wilmington and built the first new public school in 50 years. As mayor, I would stick to those priorities and focus on the future of our city.”

Carney defeated Velda Jones-Porter, the first Black woman to serve as Wilmington city treasurer, by 7 percentage points. The two clashed over the effectiveness of public schools in the city, on their relationships with politically powerful real estate developers, and on the governor’s decision to let marijuana legalization take effect without his signature.

In his new role, Carney said he would start off his term by holding town hall meetings to get input from people in the community.

He told the Delaware News Journal that one of the biggest differences between serving as governor and serving as mayor is that being mayor would require more collaboration with people at other levels of government. The outgoing Wilmington mayor, Mike Purzycki, has repeatedly clashed with the city council, especially over the mayor’s effort to end a residency requirement for city employees.

Delaware Governor’s Race

But Carney might find working with his successor in the governor’s office a little awkward.

New Castle County Executive Matt Meyer won the Democratic primary Tuesday, beating out Carney’s favorite in the contest. With Democrats dominating the political scene in Delaware, he’s expected to become the next governor.

Meyer won a three-way race featuring Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long and environmentalist Collin O’Mara. Hall-Long secured the backing of much of the political establishment early on, but her candidacy floundered once word got out that her campaign paid $200,000 to her husband, who was her campaign treasurer. Hall-Long fired her husband from the campaign, but she never recovered in the race.

Meyer took 47% of the vote Tuesday, compared to 37% for Hall-Long and 16% for O’Mara.

The result, notes Spotlight Delaware, is that the political dynamics between two of the state’s top leaders coming into the New Year could be fraught.

“Wins by Meyer and Carney set up what could be one of the frostiest relationships between the head of the state and its largest city in years though,” wrote editor-in-chief Jacob Owens. “The two don’t talk and have had a strained relationship dating back to COVID. It will be interesting to see whether that bridge can be mended, especially after the scorched earth campaign that dispatched Carney’s chosen successor, Hall-Long.”

New Hampshire Governor’s Race

Meanwhile, the race has been set in what could be the most competitive governor’s race in the country.

With polls showing the Democratic advantage growing in North Carolina’s gubernatorial race, New Hampshire’s contest may be the only one left that is a true tossup. It has taken on outsized importance because Republican Gov. Chris Sununu decided not to run again.

Republicans Tuesday picked former U.S. Sen. Kelly Ayotte as their candidate for November over Chuck Morse, a former state Senate president. She will face Democrat Joyce Craig, a former mayor of Manchester.

Craig had the closer contest. She beat Cinde Warmington, a health care attorney and a state general councilor (a kind of executive watchdog), 48% to 42%. Restaurant owner Jon Kiper took 10%. Warmington criticized Craig for overdose deaths and homelessness in Manchester during her time as mayor, while Craig knocked Warmington for lobbying for OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma two decades ago.

But Ayotte loomed over the Democratic primary, with each of the candidates arguing they would be the most formidable opponent to the well-known Republican. “Frankly, it’s pretty simple,” Kiper said during a debate last week. “Cinde Warmington will lose to Kelly Ayotte because of her ties to Purdue Pharma. Joyce Craig will lose to Kelly because of homelessness in Manchester.”

With such a late primary, Ayotte and Craig started criticizing each other well before they secured their own party’s nominations. Craig attacked Ayotte’s votes on reproductive rights, including votes in the U.S. Senate to defund Planned Parenthood and remove the requirement for insurers to cover the cost of birth control. Ayotte, meanwhile, has criticized Craig for raising taxes as mayor, saying Craig would bring the “Massachusetts model in the corner office.”

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News to Use

Trends, Common Challenges, Cool Ideas, FYIs and Notable Events

Abortion
North Dakota’s abortion ban is overturned. A state judge struck down North Dakota's near-total abortion ban Thursday, declaring that broad guarantees of personal liberty in the constitution of his conservative, Republican-dominated state create a fundamental right to abortion before a fetus is viable. The state's GOP attorney general promised to appeal the decision, which would take effect within a few weeks. The judge also said that the law is unconstitutional because it is too vague to be enforced fairly. Courts in 10 other states, including California, Illinois and Kansas, have ruled their state constitutions protect access to abortion, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, which challenges bans and restrictions, including in the North Dakota lawsuit. Meanwhile, the Florida Supreme Court agreed Wednesday to fast-track a lawsuit filed by a South Florida attorney alleging that Gov. Ron DeSantis and other state officials are misusing and abusing their offices in opposing Amendment 4, which would protect abortion access until the point of viability.

Law Enforcement
New York City police commissioner resigns amid federal investigation. Edward A. Caban, the New York City police commissioner, resigned on Thursday at the request of Mayor Eric Adams, who had asked him to step aside after federal agents seized his phone last week as part of a criminal investigation. City Hall has been buffeted by four federal investigations, which have resulted in searches and seizures targeting high-ranking officials. But an investigation involving the city’s top law enforcement official is rare, and it casts doubt on the commissioner’s ability to supervise the department and make disciplinary decisions about his own force of 36,000 officers.

Education
South Carolina high court says school vouchers can’t be used to pay private tuition. The state Supreme Court has thrown out South Carolina’s K-12 voucher program as unconstitutional. In a 3-2 split decision, the state’s high court ruled taxpayer dollars can’t be used to pay for private school tuition, saying it violates the state constitution’s prohibition against public dollars directly benefiting private schools. The decision represents a major—and shocking—upset for South Carolina’s ruling Republicans, who were confident the law two decades in the making would be upheld.

Social Media
Youth social media restrictions won’t take effect in Utah after federal court ruling. State lawmakers’ second swing at imposing requirements on social media companies with the goal of limiting young Utahns’ access to their platforms won’t take effect as soon as the legislature planned after a federal judge blocked the law Tuesday, saying it likely violates the First Amendment. Passed earlier this year in response to pleas from parents to curb the mental health harms they say are caused by the apps, the law requires social media companies to verify every user’s age and implement default privacy settings for anyone under 18 years old. Initially scheduled to take effect in October, a district judge put the law on hold while the case continues because he said it “imposes unjustified, content-based restrictions on social media companies’ speech”—the speech being the decisions they make about how their platforms operate. 

Climate Change
Almost 700,000 Washington households receive $200 credit on their electric bills. State Department of Commerce officials estimated 685,113 low- and moderate-income households got the one-time credit as of Thursday, roughly 10,000 more than predicted when Gov. Jay Inslee launched the program in July. Washington used $150 million of proceeds from the state’s auction of pollution allowances to pay for the Washington Families Clean Energy Credits program. The auctions are a centerpiece of the Climate Commitment Act, a 2021 state law intended to drive down carbon emissions. Opponents of the law are targeting it for repeal on the Nov. 5 ballot. Critics say the law is driving up energy costs for consumers and that the credits are too paltry to be of much help.

Public Safety
Ohio schools adopt technology used to alert 911 in Georgia shooting. Some central Ohio school districts are implementing a new technology called the Centegix CrisisAlert, which gives staff the ability to speed up a response from first responders in the case of an emergency. The same technology was present at Apalachee High School in Georgia and law enforcement said it led to a swift response when a student allegedly fatally shot two students and two teachers last week during school. The wearable technology is a fob worn on a lanyard that features physical buttons and connects to district administrators and first responders. If a staff member presses the button a certain number of times, they can immediately report an incident requiring an administrator response, a building-wide lockdown or alert 911 if needed.

Transportation
Head of federal highways agency leaving. Shailen Bhatt stepped down as head of the Federal Highway Administration this week after just under two years in the position. Bhatt was the agency's first administrator of Indian descent. FHWA Deputy Administrator Kristin White will lead the agency in an acting capacity. Bhatt's time at the agency included reacting to some high-profile disasters on the nation's roadways, including the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore after a container ship struck it in March, major damage to a highway in Wyoming due to a June landslide in the Teton Range, and fiery truck crashes that damaged bridges along Interstate 95 in northeast Philadelphia last year and in Connecticut in May. In his role at the FHWA, Bhatt also oversaw the ongoing distribution of more than $350 billion for roads and bridges from the 2021 bipartisan federal infrastructure bill and its formula-based and competitive grant programs.

Natural Disasters
Why cities are getting more rainy. Cities are hot. But scientists are now discovering that cities are often more rainy, too. Most cities receive significantly more rain than the nearby rural regions, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an effect that has become more pronounced over the past two decades as the climate has warmed. The results have profound implications for dense, growing cities, many of which are already struggling to deal with flooding, as they take on the cost of upgrading infrastructure for a hotter world. Cities are magnets for rain for a few reasons. Skyscrapers tend to slow down incoming storms, allowing them to disgorge precipitation. Auto exhaust and factory pollution can seed clouds that unleash showers. And the heat radiating from concrete and asphalt causes more convection in the atmosphere, leading to rainfall.

Education
They were babies and toddlers when the pandemic hit. At school, some still struggle. Scenes of young children struggling to cope have become more commonplace in schools across the country as a generation of babies and toddlers whose early life was marked by the pandemic now enter preschool and kindergarten. Early educators say they’re seeing more children who struggle with speech, communication and managing their emotions than in years past. Experts say many of these children carry more emotional baggage than their predecessors, owing to the stress that coursed through families as isolation, unemployment, sickness and grief took their toll. There’s also a group of young children who don’t have official delays, but missed out on basic social skills when preschool and playdates stopped during the pandemic.

Environment
These states tried, and failed, to cut food waste. One succeeded. Nearly every state-led effort to ban food waste analyzed by researchers appears to be failing—except one, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal Science. It singled out Massachusetts for reducing the amount of food that gets tossed in the trash. But its more troubling findings in other states reveal how one of the most seemingly straightforward ways to tackle climate change is, in practice, a tough problem to solve. Nine states have passed food waste bans aimed at businesses such as chain restaurants and supermarkets. Researchers studied the first five laws and found that from 2014 to 2018, Massachusetts reduced its solid waste by an average of 7.3%. But similar legislation in the other states—California, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont—had no discernible effect. The study identified several factors that could explain Massachusetts’ success, including its extensive network of food waste composting sites, no special exemptions that made it easy for business owners to understand and stiff financial penalties for noncompliance.

Picture of the Week

Today we remember the tragic events that took place in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania 23 years ago. This beam from the North Tower of the World Trade Center resides in our Heroes Gallery and honors the 343 NY firefighters who lost their lives helping others. pic.twitter.com/oaGLifFrkd

— RonaldReaganLibrary (@Reagan_Library) September 11, 2024

Government in Numbers

306,422

The number of visitors as of 11 a.m. Wednesday to vote.gov via the URL pop star Taylor Swift shared on Instagram after endorsing Kamala Harris following Tuesday’s presidential debate.

It is ultimately unclear how many of those people actually registered. Vote.gov only directs voters to their state election websites, where they register. But TargetSmart, an elections data firm, said it looked at its voter registration verification API, which is used by groups like vote.org, and found it peaked after the debate and the Swift Instagram post at more than four times the prior daily average.