Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman easily won a second term Tuesday, holding off a ferocious challenge from Stavros Anthony, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports.
In other races, too, it was an Election Night with no surprises and little suspense: Incumbent city council members in Las Vegas, as well as North Las Vegas and Henderson, won decisively.
In Las Vegas, Goodman beat Anthony, the mayor pro tem, by more than 4,600 votes, 55 percent to 42 percent. Two other candidates, Phil Cory and Abdul Shabazz, trailed far behind at 3 percent and less than 1 percent, respectively.
Goodman gave a brief speech at her campaign headquarters on Meadows Lane, the same place where she celebrated her 21-point win at a raucous party in 2011.
“Everybody here has believed in what we want for this city,” the mayor told several dozen supporters and campaign staff. “This support we had … that’s what turned around and made this happen for us.
“We have a lot of work to do, and I’m so grateful to all of you.”
Her husband was a little more pointed: “He’s a piece of crap, this guy,” former Mayor Oscar Goodman said of his wife’s vanquished chief opponent.
Anthony, first elected in 2009, will keep his Ward 2 City Council seat, one awkwardly positioned to Goodman’s immediate right on the City Hall dais.
In council races, incumbents won in all three cities: Ricki Barlow, Bob Coffin and Lois Tarkanian in Las Vegas; Gerri Schroder, Debra March and Sam Bateman in Henderson; and Pamela Goynes-Brown in North Las Vegas.
The trend was clear early in the evening, since the majority of voters in all three cities cast votes either by mail or at early-voting sites.
County elections officials posted the early and mail-in results right after polls closed at 7 p.m. All the winners held leads then, and Goodman’s lead only increased as the night went on.
The closest council race of the night was Bateman’s. With 50.97 percent of the votes, he barely achieved the majority needed to avert a general election runoff. Derek Uehara got 43 percent of the votes, and a second challenger, Tristan Galicia, got 6 percent.
In North Las Vegas, Goynes-Brown had 63 percent of the vote against three challengers, the closest of whom was Laura Perkins at 25 percent.
Richard Cherchio, who served two years on the North Las Vegas council after being appointed in 2009, easily won the seat back with 72 percent of the vote to Matthew Anderson’s 28 percent.
Had there been any contest where no one got a majority of votes, the top two finishers would have faced off June 2 in a general election. That’s now unnecessary.