A look at competitiveness in the 2026 mayoral elections

Twenty-two of the nation’s 100 most populous cities are holding mayoral elections this year. Today, we’re taking a look at the structural landscape of these elections, including how many incumbents are contested, how many candidates are running, and how many offices are open, including due to term limits.

Before we dive in, here is an important note on how we conducted this analysis. Cities vary greatly in how they conduct mayoral elections. Some hold partisan primaries, and some hold nonpartisan ones. In other cities, there are no primaries, and all candidates run in the general election. In this analysis, we looked at the first stage, and sometimes the only stage, of each city’s mayoral election.

So far this year, every incumbent running for re-election in the 100 largest cities has at least one opponent at the first stage of their re-election bid. (For partisan primaries, only major party challengers were included.)

One mayoral election (3.7%) was uncontested in 2025, one (2.9%) was uncontested in 2024, two (6.9%) were uncontested in 2023, and one (3.4%) was uncontested in 2020. There were no uncontested mayoral elections in 2022 or 2021.



https://news.ballotpedia.org/2026/04/15/a-look-at-competitiveness-in-the-2026-mayoral-elections/