At the entrance to the city council chamber at Greensboro’s Melvin Municipal Office Building, a wall of smiling portrait photographs introduces the nine council members—most of them well-known faces with long political histories in the city.
Next year’s election will dramatically change that wall, as some of the city’s longest-serving leaders retire and both new candidates and familiar names vie for open seats.
In May, Nancy Vaughan, who first served on the council in 1997 and has been mayor since 2013, announced she will not run for re-election next year.
Fellow long-time council members Nancy Hoffman (District 4), Goldie Wells (District 2), and Mayor Pro Tem Yvonne Johnson (at large) are also not running again, ensuring four of nine council seats will have no incumbent in next year’s election.
Two more council members, Marikay Abuzuaiter (at large) and Hugh Holston (at large), are contemplating runs for mayor. There’s a strong possibility former councilman Justin Outling, who lost to Vaughan by fewer than 500 votes in the 2022 election, will run again. The Assembly couldn’t reach Outling this week, but sources close to his potential campaign say he’s already organizing.
Should Outling best Holston and Abuzuaiter in a mayoral race, they would also be leaving the council. That would bring the number of departing council veterans to six.
Sharon Hightower (District 1), Tammi Thurm (District 5), and Zack Matheny (District 3) all confirmed to The Thread this week that they will be running again. But there’s a possibility Thurm may choose to run at-large rather than in her district. Should she fall short, Matheny and Hightower could be the only returning council members.
That would constitute the greatest single-election shift on the city council in living memory.
While new blood can be good, Vaughan said, a sea change can lead to a loss of institutional knowledge and chaos as new leaders get up to speed and jockey for position
“I would be concerned if sitting council members challenge each other for mayor, because I think it’s going to be important that we have history,” Vaughan said.
A council with deep institutional knowledge and established working relationships is at an advantage, Vaughan said. She points to great strides made in the last decade: the revitalization of the city’s downtown, the opening of the Tanger Center for the Performing Arts, expansions at the coliseum complex, and new manufacturing in the form of Boom Supersonic, HondaJet, and the nearby Toyota battery plant megasite.
“We are in a great position,” Vaughan said. “A better position than we have been in for decades. You need that historical knowledge. I think it’s important that there is a significant carryover.”
The Past as Prelude
The last comparable period of transition came in 2009, when five new council members and a new mayor were elected at once—all of them Republicans.
Greensboro’s city council is officially non-partisan, and candidates’ political parties do not appear next to their names on the ballot. But as that election proved, partisan politics at the state and national level can still have an enormous impact on local elections. The 2009 city council races came in the wake of former President Barack Obama’s election the year before. Obama did well in Guilford County, besting Republican John McCain 142,101 to 97,718.
But even in left-leaning Greensboro, the conservative backlash to his election activated the political right, giving birth to an area Tea Party movement that not only overwhelmed Democrats at the polls but even saw far-right candidates challenging and ousting sitting Republicans they considered insufficiently conservative.
The Republican supermajority on the council didn’t last long. Mayor Bill Knight, a first-time candidate, lasted just one term before losing to Robbie Perkins, a more moderate Republican. In-fighting among GOP members and community outrage over a proposal to re-open the White Street Landfill in heavily Black East Greensboro swept Democrats back into office as Obama won a second term.
How high-profile elections this year may impact next year’s election remains to be seen. But Vaughan points to the post-Obama backlash period on council as a lesson in what can happen when the political center of gravity and experience level of council shift all at once.
Hightower agreed.
“I’m scared,” she said. “Without the historical knowledge and experience on this council, I’m afraid it may impede the progress that we’ve been making. Learning curves and people understanding how things work, all that comes into play … We’re essentially almost starting over.”
New Faces, Familiar Names
Not every council hopeful now eyeing next year’s race is completely new.
Tony Wilkins, a former District 5 council member, says he’ll likely throw his hat back for that district race if Thurm decides to run at large instead.
Wilkins, a former executive director of the Guilford County Republican Party, was initially appointed to the council in 2012 to complete the unexpired term of Trudy Wade, who had been elected to the state Senate. As the council’s only Republican during his last stretch in office, Wilkins said he was used to providing the lone “no” vote on a variety of issues—but he also represented the will and viewpoint of the city’s conservative minority.
Wilkins lost to Thurm in the 2017 election. Though he’s run unsuccessfully in every subsequent election, he said he wouldn’t launch a bid in District 5 if Thurm were running again.
“She beat me the last two times, and she really put an exclamation point on it that last time,” Wilkins said, referring to 2022, when Thurm beat him by more than 600 votes.
Should he be re-elected next year, Wilkins said, he would push to go back to two-year terms rather than the current four years.
“I just think that works better, that the council has to be more responsive to the voters,” Wilkins said. “That’s what I’ve heard from some of my supporters, people who have been talking to me about running again.”
Potential for a Historic Election
Greensboro is a majority-minority city, the birthplace of the sit-in movement for desegregation in 1960, and home to N.C. A&T, the largest historically Black college or university (HBCU) in the nation. Still, the city has had just one Black mayor in its history, Yvonne Johnson, who served just one term before the post-Obama red wave swept her off council.
She returned as an at-large council member and now serves as mayor pro tem, but isn’t running again next year.
“I do think we should have had more than one Black mayor in our history,” Johnson said. “I think the way we have seen the city change over the years, it is something we’ll see more. But it depends on the person.”
Next year’s race could see two candidates—Outling and Holston—vying to become the first Black man ever to become Greensboro’s mayor.
Holston hasn’t committed to a run for mayor yet, but isn’t ruling it out. He does plan to return to council as an at large councilman at a minimum, he said.
Holston and Outling are both registered Democrats, though Outling has been seen as more conservative-leaning. He was appointed with significant GOP support as a replacement for Republican Zack Matheny in 2015, and won re-election later that year and again in 2017.
Two prominent Black men, both Democrats with council experience, could make for a historic election. It could also mean they split both Democratic and Black votes in the city to the advantage of other candidates—possibly a Republican candidate who hasn’t yet surfaced.
Two years ago, Chris Meadows, now chairman of the Guilford County Republican Party, mounted a write-in campaign for mayor as Vaughan and Outling faced off in the general election. Though Vaughan beat Outling by nearly 4,000 votes in the primary, her margin of victory in the general election was fewer than 500, leading some to conclude the 4,650 votes Meadows garnered shaved off centrist-to-right-leaning voters that might otherwise have gone for Outling.
“He just handed Nancy Vaughan that race,” Wilkins said. “I told him that’s what would happen if he ran a write-in campaign.”
Holston said he agrees continuity on council is important, but said it’s too early yet to be sure who will be running next year or for what office—no matter how they may feel at the moment.
“Right now, everyone is thinking about this year’s election,” Holston said. “It might be you and me and maybe 30 other people who are thinking about next year already.”
With November looming and potential major political shifts at the state and national levels, Vaughan said she doesn’t believe it’s too soon to think about 2025.
“We have seen what happens when you get a council with a lot of new members,” Vaughan said. “Sometimes they decide to plot a different course. And you know, the most recent example that we have of that was awful. Nothing got done.”
“We are giving this new council a gift,” Vaughan said. “The city is in a great place right now. We have lots of challenges, we’ve got a lot of things we have to work on. But we have to capitalize on these successes and not squander them.”
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