While the mayoral race in New York City and gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia may have dominated headlines, several other positions were up for election across the country, including the mayor of Cincinnati.
Cory Bowman (Republican), the younger half-brother of Vice President James David “JD” Vance, was running against incumbent Aftab Pureval (Democrat), a former prosecutor. According to early polling estimates from the Hamilton County Board of Elections, who oversaw the election, Pureval won with over 78% of the vote, with Bowman receiving about 22%. This was a slight improvement for Bowman over the primary, in which Pureval won more than 80% of the vote.
While Vance was not formally involved in Bowman’s campaign, the former did endorse his brother, and made a Twitter/X post encouraging people to vote in the primary. Despite this, voting records show Vance himself did not vote in the primary, nor did he donate to his brother’s campaign. Bowman has said that he and his brother rarely talked politics, and that their conversations were more likely to center around “Star Wars” or their children. Bowman has said that he did not want his brother involved in his campaign.
The Cincinnati mayoral election is formally non-partisan, though Bowman’s connections to Vance (and, by extension, Donald Trump) were a major talking point during the election, with Pureval calling Bowman and his base “MAGA extremists” during a summer debate. Bowman, for his part, was trying to paint Pureval as soft on crime, after a series of high-profile violent crimes across the city during the summer.
Bowman was considered a long shot for election, particularly following Pureval’s strong primary showing and Cincinnati’s recent blue trend. However, local news stations such as WCPO have noted that Cincinnati local elections often have extremely low turnout, and can be swung unexpectedly based on a relatively small number of angry voters.
Despite Bowman saying he wanted to have a somewhat independent campaign, mid-term and off-cycle elections (such as this one) are often seen as a referendum on the party in power – a factor which was particularly prominent in Bowman’s race, where his connections to Vance made some commentators see this as a referendum on Vance in particular. While it’s hard to know how much of this determined the election result, if true, it does show that the city has not changed substantially recently; Kamala Harris won Cincinnati with 77% of the vote in 2024, to Pureval’s 78%.