Salt Lake City voters have spoken. After months of campaigning and sparring over everything from homelessness to housing affordability, to managing the rapid growth of downtown, Erin Mendenhall will serve a second term as mayor.
In updated election returns as of Nov. 22, Mendenhall leads with a healthy 58.48% of the vote, well clear of second-place finisher and former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson’s 34.46%. Activist and small business owner Michael Valentine garnered 7.06%. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that Wednesday's updated returns included all the scannable ballots in the Salt Lake County clerk's possession.
“As seemed pretty clear last night, these more final results clearly indicate that Mayor Mendenhall has won reelection,” Anderson said. “I wish her the very best and I hope she and her team succeeds.”
Mendenhall’s campaign said Anderson called the mayor Wednesday afternoon to concede.
Speaking to a jubilant crowd of supporters on election night in downtown, Mendenhall stopped short of declaring victory but told those gathered that voters “want Salt Lake City to keep moving forward together.”
“Salt Lakers are not afraid of our incredible future, we're excited by it,” she said. “This election was a repudiation of cynicism and it was a rejection of the politics of fear.”
Homelessness was far and away the central issue during the campaign. All three candidates made it a pillar of their platforms as tensions have run high when it comes to how the city will deal with it.
“You need only to look at my online mentions to know that social media is making things harder,” she said.
The mayor pointed to continuing city efforts to erect tiny home communities and building more city-funded affordable housing as “things that we can and we must do better” in her second term.
Mendenhall first took office in January 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic. She previously served on the Salt Lake City Council from 2014-2020.
The incumbent positioned herself with a track record of working with other elected officials like Gov. Spencer Cox and the Legislature to build relationships as the city continues to be, in her words, a “blue island in a red sea.”
“It doesn't mean that we have to be alone all the time,” she said. “It is devastating to our potential when we believe that disagreeing with our neighbors means we can't work together. This election is proof that voters want a city government that allies with its partners instead of fighting with them. A city government that prioritizes results over politics. And that trades ideas instead of insults.”
Using that track record as a coalition-builder and capitalizing on the reputation that Salt Lake City bounced back after the COVID-19 pandemic was enough to gain trust with voters.
The race was the first mayoral election in Salt Lake City’s history to utilize ranked choice voting. The voting method has been adopted by several municipalities across Utah in recent years.
Voters ranked the candidates from most preferred to least preferred. In a three-way race, if no candidate garners over 50% of the vote, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are dispersed among the candidates that were ranked as their second choice candidate to determine a winner.
Other races in Salt Lake City included four city council positions. District 2 Councilor Alejandro Puy ran unopposed for his first full term in office. In the race for the city’s 4th district, Eva Lopez Chavez narrowly leads incumbent councilor Ana Valdemoros by only 145 votes. In the District 6 race, incumbent Dan Dugan leads Taymour B. Semnani 56% to 44%. In District 7, Sarah Young, who was appointed to fill the remaining term of former Councilor Amy Fowler in July, leads Molly Jones 53.53% to 46.47%.
Results are unofficial until the statewide canvass of election results, which by law can be no later than 14 days after election day, or Dec. 5.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
