On Tuesday, Alderwoman Lyda Krewson pulled off a tight victory in the Democratic primary to succeed retiring St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay. Krewson defeated city Treasurer Tishaura Jones 32-30, a margin of just 888 votes; Board of Aldermen President Lewis Reed, who lost to Slay in 2013, and Alderman Antonio French, who became nationally known for chronicling the 2014 Ferguson protests on Twitter, took 18 and 16 percent, respectively. Krewson will face Republican Andrew Jones in the April 4 general election, but she should have little trouble in this heavily Democratic city.
In the primary, Krewson had Slay’s backing, while the local SEIU and 2016 Senate nominee Jason Kander backed Jones; Rep. Lacy Clay, who represents the entire city in the House, endorsed Reed. Jones earned some national attention a few weeks before the election when she penned a letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s editorial board explaining that she was skipping their endorsement interview, arguing that the board members were outsiders who didn’t truly understand the city’s problems and saying she was tired of the paper’s “thinly veiled racism and preference for the status quo past.” (The Dispatch ended up supporting French.)
Jones’ confrontational style seems to have helped her get more attention than French and Reed, which likely helped her outpace them at the polls. However, she had her detractors as well. Last year, Jones made news when she abruptly walked out on an interview with a local TV reporter over how much her city-owned car cost taxpayers. In any case, after her very close loss, it’s unlikely we’ve heard the last from Jones.
Krewson, meanwhile, had looked favored in the limited polling before the election. Krewson was the only major white candidate, while Jones, Reed, and French are all African Americans. St. Louis is a very racially polarized city and elections there often break down along racial lines. As a result, Krewson seems to have benefited from being the only credible white contender, at least to some degree.
As the map from Daniel Donner at the top of this post shows, Krewson did indeed carry the wards with the largest white populations, while Reed and Jones split the areas that had a low percentage of white residents. However, the results look more complex when you peel back a layer: In more diverse but still majority- or plurality-white wards, Jones actually won.
However, it does seem that Jones, Reed, and French split black voters just enough to deny Jones a win. While Jones won five of the six wards with a black population between 60 and 80 percent, Reed carried five of the seven wards that were over 80 percent black. However, he only took about a third of the vote in each one. (French carried the ward he represents on the Board of Aldermen but nothing else.) In a contest decided by fewer than 900 votes, race does seem to have made the difference, but it wasn’t the only factor that explains the results.