A study found more than half of mayoral races from 2000-2016 in six states went uncontested.
The study, from Rice University’s Center for Local Elections in American Politics, took information from California, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota and Virginia and broke down about 8,000 races by number of candidates, gender and a few other factors.
All told, half of the mayoral races had only one candidate on the ballot — and three percent had literally no one officially in the running.
Melissa Marschall, the study’s lead author, said in the rare instance that no one was on a ballot, it could fall to write-in candidates to take the job.
The overall figure showed mayoral races generally were not competitive, with at least two clear trends.
As a general rule, the smaller the town, the shorter the ballot. More populated cities were more likely to have multiple candidates running, with smaller, rural cities less likely to field even as many as two candidates.
The study also found, over the time it analyzed, mayoral races had grown less competitive. By 2016, 60% of the races analyzed had only one candidate. One caveat: The earlier years of this figure are dominated by more competitive states of Indiana, Louisiana and California. Data became available for Virginia from 2008-16, Kentucky from 2010-16 and Minnesota largely from 2004-16.
Marschall said that trend might go down, at least in the immediate future, given the apparent evidence of a renewed interest in political participation following the 2016 election.
The findings weren’t uniform across the states. Each has different political rules, election calendar and demographic breakdown.
Indiana, Louisiana and a small share of Kentucky cities have partisan mayoral elections, while other states don’t necessarily show what party a candidate is. Indiana, which has closed primaries before partisan mayoral elections, had the most competitive races, followed by California, which the study notes has larger average city size and only has mayoral races for cites, not towns or villages.
The people that did run for mayor were overwhelmingly men. Only 17% of mayoral candidates in these states were women.
And in Louisiana, where people indicate their race when they file their candidacy, 20% of candidates were African-American, less than the 32.6% of people who are African-American in Louisiana cities.
A great deal of the time, the mayoral elections meant the same person keeping the same job. Almost three-quarters of all races had incumbents on the ballot.