It’s official: Jolie Justus has won the mayoral primary, with Quinton Lucas close on her heels.
With all Platte County, Clay County and Kansas City precincts reporting, here’s how the top seven mayoral candidates finished:
Jolie Justus — 13,702
Quinton Lucas — 13,334
Alissia Canady — 8,950
Steve Miller — 5,461
Scott Wagner — 4,982
Phil Glynn — 4,442
Scott Taylor — 4,079
So, Justus and Lucas — both lawyers who are finishing their first four-year-terms on the City Council — will advance to the June 18 general election.
…The biggest surprise to me is Lucas’ extremely strong showing. Although, like Justus, he had very good organizational support — including the black political organization Freedom Inc. and Local 42 of the International Association of Fire Fighters — I thought Justus would beat him handily.
Clinton Adams, an East Side activist who is aligned with Freedom Inc., said he believed Lucas’ campaign message of the need to rein in tax incentives to developers registered with voters and helped him significantly. He also said he believed a Kansas City Star editorial that was critical of Justus for not doing enough to separate herself from Mayor Sly James cut into her vote.
Adams also said he believed voters gave Lucas relatively large margins on Kansas City’s East Side, where Freedom Inc. is most influential.
…Tonight’s outcome should make for a very exciting and hard-fought general election. Justus had, and should continue to have, a fund-raising advantage, but with Lucas now fighting her on even terms, he will become more competitive on campaign finances. In addition, he will now get equal time under the media’s arc lights, meaning the name identity of both candidates will skyrocket and their positions on key issues will be widely reported.
He could benefit in another important way, too: He probably will get The Star’s endorsement.
A bit of a surprise was the third-place finish of Canady, another first-term City Council member. She benefitted partly from getting The Kansas City Star’s endorsement (along with Glynn), but she also ran a campaign that gained momentum along the way. This election should bode well for her political future.
Another surprise was the relatively weak showing of Miller, a former chairman of the Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission. He was the second-biggest spender, trailing only Justus, but he lost many votes in the Ward Parkway corridor to Glynn. Both are members of Visitation Catholic Church, 51st Terrace and Main, and they tapped some of the same contributors.
Taylor started out with the most funds but faded throughout the campaign.
Wagner, a Northland native, did particularly well in Clay County, but it wasn’t nearly sufficient to make him competitive with Justus and Lucas in the voter-rich area south of the Missouri River.
Congratulations to Jolie and Quinton on outstanding campaigns. We’ve got an entertaining 11 weeks in front of us.
P.S. I take no pleasure in banging on The Star, but for the life of me I don’t understand why the paper’s online story about the mayor’s race does not include any vote counts. All it cites is the percentages of votes that Justus and Lucas got. That is lazy, no-account and shameful reporting. Do the editors expect that readers seeking the statistical results are going to pore over the KC, Platte and Clay election-board websites and compute the vote counts? That’s the job of reporters. (THAT’S WHAT I DID FOR THIS POST!) But The Star has abdicated its responsibility on that important front.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
And the Star’s influential, award-winning editorial board scores again.
Well, like I said in the post, I think Canady benefitted from the endorsement. I don’t know if it was responsible for pushing her to third place, but it certainly helped. Also, the endorsement of Glynn cost Miller some votes. He would at least have been a closer fourth.
All in all, it was a fantastic election, and I’m proud to say I tagged Jolie and Quinton as the only two “live” candidates.
https://jimmycsays.com/2019/03/27/the-star-endorses-who/
Funny how the KC power elite always gets the exact results they want. Two lackluster candidates with basically the same track record of consistent handouts to their donors. Yea, I guess Lucas wants to reign in the tax incentives for developers because of course, he along with Justus has been giving them a free ride at our expense all along.
The real problem with the shrinking Star staff was down ballot. I only found out last week that Platte County had a 1/2 cent sales tax on the ballot for a new jail and additional quarters for the sheriff and county attorney’s staff. I only found out because my mail carrier mis-delivered an advertising flier for one of my neighbors promoting the tax. I am sure a number of my fellow Platte Country voters went to the polls and said what is this? The no’s crushed the proposal.
I was able to find out after spending time digging into it that because the Platte County Commission has tanked the counties’ bond rating (because they refuse the pay for the Zona Rosa bonds previous commissions agreed to pay for), that this plan was going to cost substantially more than if bonds could be issued and then paid off.
That is the type of thing that doesn’t get covered because of the shrinking Star staff.
How many other local ballot issues had similar neglected coverage?
Bill Hirt, you’re exactly right. I was a bureau reporter for The Star for 20 years and we took our zoned Election Guide assignments seriously. In my case, I not only covered elections for the Election Guide, which was published less than a week before a given election, but I covered council races and ballot issues extensively for our zoned editions. The Star no longer has the resources to do that and the community suffers as a result. Sadly, the honchos at McClatchy could care less about this dearth of election coverage. As long as they’re getting their million dollar salaries and five-figure monthly housing allowances, darkness doesn’t matter to them.
Ditto Bill and Mike. I wonder what the Star thinks is its audience. Shrinking Jackson County, it appears. Jackson, 699K. Clay 243K, Platte 101K, Cass 104K, Lafayette 33K., and on the Kansas side, Johnson 691K and Wyandotte 165K. So in this gross depiction of our KC metro, leaving out Douglas County and such, we have 700K in Jackson County and 1,337K on the periphery. Almost twice as many in the surrounding counties as the core of KC. How can a supposed major metro paper totally ignore two thirds of its population and expect to have any subscribers?