ATLANTA (AP) – City Council member Andre Dickens won a runoff election Tuesday to become Atlanta’s next mayor, riding a surge of support that powered him past the council’s current president, Felicia Moore, after finishing second to her in November.
Dickens won a campaign dominated by concern over rising violent crime in the city, arguing he would be more effective than Moore, who had often been a sometimes-lonely critic of previous mayors in her 20 years on the City Council. Moore had been the leading candidate by a wide margin in the first round of voting on Nov. 2 among 14 candidates in a nonpartisan race.
Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms created a wide-open succession race when she announced in May that she wouldn’t seek a second term.
The 47-year-old Dickens, an Atlanta native and engineer by training, joined the council in 2013. He argued that his broad range of experience would allow him to address crime and other city issues including affordable housing and improving opportunity for poorer residents. Other issues in the race included bolstering struggling city services and keeping the wealthy Buckhead neighborhood from seceding.
“We voted for progress and a problem solver, for a bridge builder, for transformation,” Dickens told a crowd of hundreds during his victory speech Tuesday night. “And this work will start right now. We can’t wait any longer to address these issues.”