Congrats to Kincannon!

Odd that Knox County is not reporting more of the vote counts.

I didn't see that coming

It's over. Kincannon wins. Parker wins. Lomax was SO close. Now there will be three people of color on Council.

It appears Knoxville's Good Ol' Boy and Downtown Prayer Meetin' Club died with the Knoxville News Sentinel.

been really enjoying watching knoxville right-wingers spiraling & moaning about the new "marxist" mayor!

i understand the political value of spreading disingenuous rhetoric about the views of opponents, but i think they've been getting high on their own supply way too long if local GOP politicos can't suss the difference between a liberal and a marxist when talking amongst themselves.

today's funny comes from one of these threads (on burchett lackey andrew davis's public facebook profile) : eddie mannis hilariously crying about not winning even though he "held true to the GOP"

What i love is how city elections are "non-partisan.". Can we drop that sham already?

I’ve been voting and supporting candidates in city elections a long time, and for the majority of that time most people genuinely didn’t know or care what party a candidate was affiliated with, if any. When George Wallace and Marshall Stair were elected to City Council no one thought to ask whether they were a Republican or a Democrat. They wanted to know if they were good for the city. Both have served admirably in spite of belonging to different political parties.

It wasn’t until around 2010 that polarization filtered down to the local level and showed up first in the county. It revealed itself in the defeat of two long serving highly qualified Democratic judges in favor of two barely known Republicans with questionable qualifications. They were elected solely because they had an R after their name on the ballot and even leaders of the local Republican Party were surprised and questioned the voters’ judgement. Another casualty of this trend was Finbarr Saunders, who had easily won election to County Commission as a Democrat but lost re-election to a Republican with questionable credentials.

I did a lot of door knocking and phone banking in this last election and there are still many voters who don’t know or care about party affiliation, but obviously, many more do care than used to and they turn out to vote. And Democratic voters outnumber Republican voters.

At Compass, we did a little more breakdown of the votes and precincts, and it's striking how much the mayoral results in particular mirror partisan election breakdowns.

There are 44 city precincts. In 2016, Donald Trump carried 19 of them and Hillary Clinton carried 25. (The precincts have widely varying numbers of registered voters, so winning the most precincts doesn't necessarily equal winning the most votes. But there's a general correlation.)

In the Nov. 5 mayoral race, Eddie Mannis won 16 of 19 Trump precincts, and zero Clinton precincts. Indya Kincannon won all 25 Clinton precincts, plus three Trump precincts.

Mannis did a lot better than Trump in several Democratic precincts, including a few in East Knoxville where he had really staked a lot of his campaign. He got within a point or two of winning a few of them. Kincannon also did better than Clinton in a number of Republican precincts, including the three she won.

But the overall voting patterns -- at least in that race -- look very partisan, no matter how much anyone wants to talk about nonpartisanship. Obviously there were (presumed) Republican candidates for City Council who did better in their races than Mannis did in his, so it also had to do with how well people knew the candidates and also what they thought of their opponents.

Pretty close, with some variations. In general, Fugate and Testerman did better in precincts where Mannis also did better. But they also obviously won some that he did not.