What Makes Running for Mayor Different

A mayor’s job is not partisan. While some mayoral races are formally partisan, the work of being mayor has nothing to do with party politics — it’s about overseeing and improving the quality of life for the people in your city.

There is no Republican or Democratic way to fix a dangerous intersection. There is no partisan position on whether a park needs trash pickup or whether a neighborhood flooding problem needs new drainage. Voters in a mayoral race don’t primarily care about your party affiliation. What they care about is how you’re going to affect the quality of life in the place where they live — where their children go to school, where they shop, the safety of their streets and neighborhoods.

That reality shapes everything: your message, your tone, your coalition, and the voters you need to reach. Keep it focused on quality of life, and you’ll be speaking the language that wins at the local level.

Know Your City — Really Know It

You cannot talk intelligently about what you’re going to do for the people of your city if you don’t know your city. And cities, particularly dense urban ones, are more complex than they appear from the outside.

Walk ten blocks in any direction and you can move through several completely different neighborhoods — different demographics, different languages spoken, different problems, different needs. Large cities are often where immigrants arrive first, because cities have the infrastructure and services to support new arrivals. That diversity is one of the greatest things about urban life, and it’s also one of the most important things a mayoral candidate needs to understand before crafting a message. Even in small towns, candidates often find that neighborhoods have a unique demographic mix or problem. 

The best way to know your city is simple: go look at it. Drive every neighborhood. Walk the streets. Note what you see with your own eyes. Are there areas where buildings are deteriorating? Where small businesses are struggling or disappearing? Where safety issues are visible? Where flooding, crime, or infrastructure failures are evident?

Then talk to the people who serve those communities — the leaders of civic organizations, nonprofits, and community groups who are in the daily business of helping residents. And talk to the ministers and faith leaders in your city. They’re often the first to know when something is going wrong in a neighborhood, because people come to them when they need help.

One candidate I worked with — running in a city with 100,000 registered voters and a highly diverse, multilingual district — was struggling to connect his campaign message to the real concerns of his community. I suggested he spend a weekend in the car, with someone else driving, going up and down every street in the city, observing and taking notes.

He called back Monday morning, energized. He’d found 50 new things to put on his list: a high school building in visible disrepair, a dangerous intersection, streets with inadequate lighting, a park with overflowing trash bins. All of it he discovered by simply driving around and paying attention. That list became the foundation of his campaign message — specific, local, real.

Build a Network of Opinion Leaders and Stakeholders

Every city — even a large one — has a group of people who pay close attention to what’s happening and carry disproportionate influence over how others vote. You need some of these people in your corner.

Who are they? In cities, land is valuable, which means property owners and developers have a significant stake in the direction of the city. Business owners and employers care about economic conditions and the city’s trajectory. Civic organizations that depend on city resources or contracts are stakeholders. Political party leaders and elected officials — city council members, the vice mayor — all have influence over various voter networks.

You don’t need all of them. A candidate once told me he didn’t have the support of the sitting mayor — his opponent did. But the vice mayor had endorsed him. My response: checkmate. You have the vice mayor. It’s enough to establish credibility and move forward.

The point isn’t to collect every endorsement in the city. It’s to make sure you have a least a few credible people or groups willing to vouch for you publicly. Without at least a handful of those, a mayoral campaign struggles to build the legitimacy it needs.

Check the Rules Before You Do Anything Else

All cities have a unique set of rules. A unique set of requirements for getting on the ballot, how to set up a campaign committee, where you have to deposit campaign funds, what you’re allowed to spend money on, and how contributions must be disclosed, how much you can accept from individual donors.

Find out what those rules are at the very start — not mid-campaign. The rules about ballot qualification are especially unforgiving. If you don’t comply with the requirements for getting your name on the ballot, the campaign is over before it begins. There’s no recovering from that.

Know how many petition signatures you need and from whom. Know the contribution limits and disclosure requirements. Know the deadlines. Then build your timeline around them.

Building Your Mayoral Campaign Message

Once you know your city and have started building your network, your attention turns to the two most important pieces of the campaign: your message and how you advertise it.

A mayoral message is built around quality of life — but it still needs to answer the same five questions that voters bring to every race.

1. What makes you qualified?
   Voters need to know you have the background, the judgment, and the capacity to run a city. What in your life demonstrates that?
2. What are you going to do for the city?
   This is the core of a mayoral campaign. What initiatives will you take? Which neighborhoods will you prioritize? Which problems — flooding, crime, blight, crumbling schools, dangerous streets — will you finally address? Be specific. Voters in a mayoral race live close enough to the problems to know whether your answers are real.
3. What’s your moral code?
   Do you care about the neighborhoods that have been left behind? About residents who need help? About small business owners who are struggling? Voters need to feel that your values and priorities reflect their own.
4. Why should they trust you?
   City voters have often been disappointed before. Is there something in your story — something authentic and personal — that lets them see where your motivation comes from? What, when they look closely, tells them you’ll follow through?
5. What makes you better than the other candidates?
   Whether it’s a one-on-one race or a multi-candidate field, voters are making a choice. Give them a clear reason to choose you.

Advertising Your Message to City Voters

Once you have a compelling message, you need to get it in front of the voters who need to hear it. The good news is that mayoral candidates have a full menu of tools available.

Video and a well-designed website are table stakes. Facebook and YouTube advertising allow you to target specific neighborhoods and demographics within your city at relatively low cost. Direct mail is a strong tool for reaching older voters and households that don’t engage primarily online. Radio can be effective in many urban markets. Connected TV, cable, and OTT provide additional reach into households that have cut the cord.

The key is having a strategy — knowing which tools you’re using, why, and what each one is intended to accomplish. Spending without a plan wastes money on things that don’t matter at the expense of things that do. And in a mayoral race, running out of budget in the final weeks is one of the most avoidable and most costly mistakes a candidate can make.

For a deeper dive into how to build a complete campaign strategy around these tools, I have a free video — How to Create a Political Campaign Strategy — linked in the description.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is it a disadvantage to run as a partisan candidate in a nonpartisan mayoral race?
A: In most cases, leading with your party affiliation in a nonpartisan mayoral race is a mistake. Voters in local races are primarily evaluating you on quality-of-life issues, not ideology. Candidates who make the race partisan often alienate the independent and crossover voters they need. Lead with what you’ll do for the city, and let your values speak for themselves without a party label doing the talking.

Q: How many signatures do I need to get on the ballot for mayor?
A: This varies entirely by city. Some cities require a small number of signatures from registered voters within the city; others require thousands, along with specific geographic distribution requirements. Check with your city or county board of elections early — this is not information to look up at the last minute. Missing the ballot deadline means the campaign is over.

Q: How do I identify the opinion leaders and influencers in my city?
A: Start by paying attention to who shows up in local news coverage, who gets quoted when something important happens in the city, and who the other elected officials seem to consult or defer to. Attend city council meetings, civic organization events, and business association gatherings. The people who are consistently present and vocal at local institutions are usually your opinion leaders. Ask local party officials and community organizers who carries influence in different parts of the city.

Q: How do I run an effective mayoral campaign in a multilingual city?
A: Acknowledge the diversity of your community in both your outreach and your materials. Translate key campaign materials into the primary languages spoken in your district. Recruit bilingual volunteers for voter contact in those neighborhoods. Show up at community events in every part of your city — not just the areas where you’re already comfortable. The candidates who win in diverse cities are the ones who make every neighborhood feel seen.

Q: What’s the biggest mistake mayoral candidates make with their campaign message?
A: Being too vague. Mayoral voters live in the city. They know whether the park is maintained, whether the streets flood, whether the school buildings are in good shape. A message full of general promises about “improving quality of life” without specific, credible commitments to the actual problems people can see from their windows will be dismissed as just another politician’s rhetoric. The candidates who win are the ones who name the intersection, name the neighborhood, name the problem — and tell voters exactly what they’re going to do about it.

Want to Go Deeper?

Jay Townsend has spent 45 years helping candidates win at every level of American politics. A free video — How to Create a Political Campaign Strategy — is linked in the description and walks through exactly how to put these tools together into a winning plan. Browse the full resource library at JayTownsend.com or subscribe to Jay’s YouTube channel for new campaign strategy videos every week.