Mayor Nick Tennyson and former county commissioner Bill Bell advanced into the general mayoral election Tuesday night, handily winning a primary marked by low voter turnout.
Meanwhile, in the two Durham City Council races, incumbents Thomas Stith, Dan Hill and Lewis Cheek and former Durham city employee Cora Cole-McFadden finished as the top vote-getters.
Only 15,212 people turned out to vote, according to unofficial results released Tuesday night by the Board of Elections. The results do not include transfer and provisional ballots, which have not yet been counted.
In the last municipal election two years ago, 20,400 people voted in the primary; that number increased to 28,093 in the general election.
"It's obvious with the relatively low turnout that anything could happen four weeks from today," Hill said.
Tennyson garnered 52.2 percent of the votes for mayor and Bell picked up 44.4 percent, while City Council member Brenda Burnette and activists Ralph McKinney and Stephen Hopkins won less than 2 percent each.
"I think that it's good to be above 50 percent. I hope that's the way it finishes," Tennyson said. "We've got to face the fact that it's going to be a whole lot more people voting [in the Nov. 6 general election]."
Bell also said he was pleased with the results, explaining that he thought the expected increase in voter turnout would help him overcome Tennyson's initial lead. "In my opinion, an incumbent always has an advantage," Bell said. "I'm going to take more of the campaign to the voters."
Burnette said she was disappointed by her third-place finish, but added that she is "seriously contemplating" a write-in campaign. "I love politics," she said.
"Losing is one thing, but I love the whole process: the questionnaires, the forums, the whole process. Results are not the end. I just like to do it," she said.
In the competition for the Ward 1 City Council seat, Cole-McFadden, the city's former director of equal opportunity and equity assistance, won 58.1 percent of the vote. She will face Jeffery White, a political newcomer who finished second with 17.9 percent, in the general election.
McFadden said she owed part of her success to the endorsements she received from most of the city's major political action groups. "They really paid off," she said. "Plus, I worked very hard [to win support from] the community."
Incumbent Jacqueline Wagstaff and Duke University Medical Center employee Ray Ubinger were eliminated from the race, with 14.5 percent and 9.5 percent of the vote, respectively. Hill called Wagstaff's elimination "the biggest surprise" of the night. Ubinger had said earlier that he would mount a write-in campaign if he lost.
The closest race of the night was for the three at-large seats on the council, where seven candidates competed to be among the six advancing to the general election.
The five incumbents in the race finished at the top of the list, all within 5.5 percentage points of each other. Stith led with 20.3 percent of the vote, followed by Hill, Cheek, Tamra Edwards and Angela Langley.
The sixth candidate advancing to the general election remained in doubt Tuesday night, with only a 36-vote margin separating challengers Joe Williams and Steven Matherly, who garnered 5.8 percent and 5.7 percent respectively. The final result should be known once election officials count the transfer and provisional ballots, a task they expect to complete by Friday.
Most of the candidates agreed that the small number of voters made the primary only a partially reliable indicator of the potential outcome of the general election.
"I don't know how much this really tells us because the turnout was so small," Cheek said. "I think it was close enough with the top five so that nobody can really feel comfortable in the at-large race."
Rebecca Sun contributed to this story.
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