Mike Duggan has been declared the new mayor of Detroit. He has a 5 point lead over contender Benny Napoleon with 99 percent of precincts reporting. Duggan becomes the first white mayor of the city in 40 years.
Duggan maintained a 2-5 point spread over Napoleon from early on in the evening.
The former Detroit Medical Center CEO will replace Mayor Dave Bing, but Duggan’s powers are in fact severely limited. Although he’s mayor, the city is currently being run by state-appointed Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr.
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10:37 p.m. ET
With 475 out of 614 precincts reporting
Duggan: 55 percent (55,616)
Napoleon: 45 percent (45,098)
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10:22 p.m.
Duggan, who has been holding a steady lead all night, just increase the distance between himself and Napoleon by another percentage point with over half the precincts reporting.
With 395 out of 614 precincts reporting
Duggan: 55 percent (43,346)
Napoleon: 45 percent (35,628)
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10:15 p.m. ET
With 375 out of 614 precincts reporting
Duggan: 54 percent (39,234)
Napoleon: 46 percent (33,132)
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10:50 p.m. ET
With 315 out of 614 precincts reporting
Duggan: 53 percent (30,249)
Napoleon: 47 percent (26,799)
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9:53 p.m. ET
With 248 out of 614 precincts reporting
Duggan: 52 percent (22,638)
Napoleon: 48 percent (20,368)
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With 211 out of 614 precincts reporting
Duggan: 52 percent (18,566)
Napoleon: 48 percent (16,968)
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9:38 p.m. ET
With 177 out of 614 precincts reporting
Duggan: 53 percent (15,494)
Napoleon: 47 percent (13,965)
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9:29 p.m. ET
With 116 out of 614 precincts reporting
Duggan: 53 percent (10,101)
Napoleon: 47 percent (9,026)
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With 99 out of 614 precincts reporting
Duggan: 52 percent (8,345)
Napoleon: 48 percent (7,751)
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With 63 out of 614 precincts reporting
Duggan: 52 percent (5,121)
Napoleon: 48 percent (4,813)
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9:16 p.m. ET
With 31 out of 614 precincts reporting
Duggan: 49 percent (2,092)
Napoleon: 51 percent (2,189)
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Polls have closed in Detroit where residents decided between former medical center chief Mike Duggan and Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon for the mayor’s job.
According to polls and fundraising results, Duggan, the ex-head of the Detroit Medical Center and former county prosecutor is favored to win, which would make him first white mayor since 1974 in the black-majority city. Duggan campaigned as a turnaround expert, which is something the city desperately needs.
Napoleon, a former Detroit police chief, put a very personal stamp on his platform of public safety in the last day of campaigning.
“Just last night I had a friend of mine who was murdered, and we buried another friend’s brother yesterday,” Napoleon said on Monday. His friend was Dwayne Green, brother-in-law of a well-known Bishop. Green is believed to have died from a gunshot wound to the head.
Of course sorting out Detroit’s financial dire straits will be a major task of the new mayor. The winner will operate under tight constraints from state-appointed emergency manager Kevyn Orr, who’s pushing Detroit through federal bankruptcy proceedings to attack an accumulated debt of $18 billion.
Detroit has undergone a sharp economic and demographic decline over six-plus decades, with the population falling from 1.8 million in 1950 to a remnant of 700,000, largely low-income residents today.
We’ll keep the post updated as the results are tallied.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
