Overview:
-“Detroit, we made this moment together," Sheffield says at election night party. "We claimed it together, and, Detroit, I believe that our best days are ahead of us.”
-Sheffield faces Rev. Solomon Kinloch Jr. of Triumph Church in the November general election.
-Five of the nine City Council seats were contested Tuesday.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with all Detroit precincts reporting results.
Detroit City Council President Mary Sheffield is the top vote-getter in Tuesday’s mayoral primary election Tuesday, taking home 50.82% of the votes with all precincts reporting.
Sheffield will face Rev. Solomon Kinloch Jr., pastor at Triumph Church, on the November general election ballot. Kinloch has the second-highest share of votes, at 17.37%.
The pastor was followed by Saunteel Jenkins, a former city council president and CEO of The Heat and Warmth Fund, at 16.02% of votes.
Attorney Todd Perkins took home 5.36% of votes, followed by former Detroit Police Chief James Craig with 5.19%.
Kinloch has been senior pastor at Triumph Church for about 27 years. The Detroit-based church has more than 40,000 members across a number of campuses. Kinloch also was an autoworker and member of the United Auto Workers union.
Six of the nine mayoral candidates listed on Tuesday’s ballot agreed to in-depth interviews with Planet Detroit on environmental and public health issues in the city, as did write-in candidate Rogelio Landin. You can find the coverage of the interviews at this link.
The top two vote getters face off in the Nov. 4 general election, when voters will decide on the city’s first new mayor in 12 years as outgoing Mayor Mike Duggan campaigns for the governor’s office as an independent in 2026.
5 contested Detroit council seats to be decided in November
All nine Detroit City Council seats are up for reelection, and five of the nine seats were contested in the primary.
For the two at-large seats on council, incumbents Mary Waters and Coleman A. Young II were the top vote-getters, with 32.96% and 32.2% of ballots cast in their favor, respectively. Former Councilmember Janee’ L. Ayers and James Harris will also advance to the November ballot.
In District 2, incumbent Angela Whitfield-Calloway, with 44.56% of votes, and Roy McCalister Jr., with 29.91% of votes, will face off in November.
In District 5, the seat being vacated by Sheffield, Renata Miller, with 23.17% of votes, and Willie E. Burton, with 19.42%, advance to November’s ballot.
In District 7, the seat being vacated by Fred Durhal III, who unsuccessfully ran for mayor in the primary, Denzel Anton McCampbell, who took home 34.5% of votes, and Karen Whitsett, with 33.93%, move on to the general election.
Voter turnout in the primary was 16.69%.
Detroit’s best days ahead of it, Sheffield says
If elected, Sheffield would be the first woman and the first Black woman to hold the role of Detroit mayor. She was first elected to City Council in 2013 at age 26 and has been president since 2022.
Mary Sheffield spoke to supporters at a downtown rooftop venue Tuesday night.
“Detroit, we made this moment together,” she said. “We claimed it together, and, Detroit, I believe that our best days are ahead of us.”
She said the primary win belongs to every boy or girl told to “dream small,” every neighborhood where people feel left behind, every senior who “paved the way” and every college student who wants to stay in the city.
“This is our moment,” she said.
Sheffield has been among the city’s most visible elected leaders over the past several years, spending a lot of time in Detroit neighborhoods and publicly celebrating the city’s accomplishments.
Similar accomplishments and the continued growth of the city could be at stake since Duggan, has helmed Detroit as it exited the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history and surged back to respectability following decades of economic hardship.
The former prosecutor and medical center chief has overseen a massive anti-blight campaign and pushed affordable housing developments across the city.
MORE PLANET DETROIT REPORTING
Annexation is Rogelio Landin’s central strategy in Detroit mayoral write-in campaign: ‘More is more’
Write-in Detroit mayoral candidate Rogelio Landin calls for annexation of 28 communities around Detroit to form a larger, more efficient city.
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The rollbacks in federal pollution regulations are “draconian,” says attorney and Detroit mayoral candidate Todd Perkins.
Detroit mayoral candidate Jonathan Barlow on balancing development, environment: ‘Before they get, they have to give’
By the time a Detroit economic development project reaches the community benefits stage, it’s too late to secure environmental protections, says mayoral candidate Jonathan Barlow.
The stakes for Detroit
The next mayor will inherit a city on much firmer footing than the one Duggan was elected to lead in 2013 when an emergency manager installed by the state to oversee the city’s flailing finances filed for bankruptcy on its behalf.
Detroit shed or restructured about $7 billion in debt and exited bankruptcy in December 2014. A state-appointed board managed the city’s finances for several years. Detroit has had 12 consecutive years of balanced budgets.
Developers have built hundreds of affordable housing units in the city, and more than 25,000 vacant and derelict homes and buildings have been demolished.
The next mayor will be under pressure to maintain that progress and continue to keep the city’s financial and population growth going. In 2023, the census estimated that Detroit’s population rose to 633,218 from 631,366 the previous year. It was the first time the city had shown population growth in decades.
Detroit also is becoming a destination for visitors. The 2024 NFL draft held downtown set a record with more than 775,000 in attendance.
New hotels are popping up in and around downtown. But perhaps the most visual example of the city’s turnaround has been the renovation of the once-blighted monolithic Michigan Central train station.
For decades, the massive building just west of downtown symbolized all that was wrong with Detroit. That’s before Dearborn, Michigan-based Ford Motor Co. stepped in and bought the old Michigan Central and adjacent properties. It reopened in 2024 following a six-year, multimillion-dollar renovation that created a hub for mobility projects.
While no longer a manufacturing powerhouse, Detroit’s economy still is intertwined with the auto industry, which currently faces uncertainties due to tariffs threatened and imposed by the Trump administration. Stellantis, the maker of Jeep and Ram vehicles, has two facilities in Detroit. The automaker said last month that its preliminary estimates show a $2.68 billion net loss in the first half of the year due to U.S. tariffs and some hefty charges.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.