PHOENIX - Democrat Greg Stanton defeated Republican Wes Gullett on Tuesday to become the new mayor of Phoenix after a campaign that focused heavily on pulling the nation's sixth-largest city out of its economic and foreclosure slump.
The 41-year-old former City Council member replaces Mayor Phil Gordon, a Democrat who has been the city's top leader since 2004 but is ineligible to run again because of a two-term limit.
Stanton captured 56 percent of the vote in Tuesday's runoff election, while Gullett had nearly 44 percent.
Stanton served nine years on the City Council before resigning in February 2009 to accept a job as a top official in the state Attorney General's Office. Stanton, who is a lawyer, has since left the Attorney General's Office.
Stanton has vowed to be Phoenix's "education mayor" and to diversify the city's economy, with a focus on technology and health-care jobs, so that it isn't so vulnerable to volatile swings like it experienced during the boom and bust of the housing market.
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As a council member, he was an advocate for getting the Translational Genomics Research Institute, which is devoted to studying the genetic makeup of disease-causing pathogens, to locate in Phoenix. He pushed for getting Arizona State University to open a downtown campus and locating a new University of Arizona medical school there. He also proposed the city's 2007 ban on text-messaging while driving.
The city's mayoral elections are traditionally nonpartisan, but party politics were under the surface as a field of seven primary candidates was narrowed to Stanton and Gullett. The race was more vigorous this year because no incumbent was seeking the office and because people's financial pain upped the stakes. Phoenix is hit hard by the housing crisis.
The election broke a city record for voter turnout with 27 percent of Phoenix's registered voters casting ballots. The 160,000 votes cast Tuesday broke the record of 143,000 set in 1989.
Gullett, a former aide to Sen. John McCain and now a partner in a political consulting firm that does lobbying work, ran on a platform of job creation, repealing a sales tax on groceries, lowering water rates and overhauling compensation for city employees.
Stanton criticized Gullet as a lobbyist who cannot be trusted to look out for the people's interests. Gullett accused Stanton of being a status-quo career politician who's out of touch with people's need to make ends meet.
