Jun 26
2025
Buffalo’s mayoral election has been settled
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by Jim Heaney, editor of Investigative Post
The fat lady has sung.
Sean Ryan will become mayor come January 1. The November election is simply a formality, barring any drastic unforeseen circumstance.
Prior to the primary, Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon stated his intention to run on a third-party line if he didn’t win the Democratic nomination, although in his concession speech Tuesday night he said he had some “soul searching” to do.
The cold, hard fact is that he was only able to garner 35 percent of the vote Tuesday. His strategy, should he continue his campaign into November, is to pull a Jimmy Griffin — supplement his South Buffalo base with endorsements from the Conservative or Republican parties, or both.
Good luck with that.
For starters, Christopher Porter, chairman of the city’s Republican Party, emailed me the other day to say there’s no way Scanlon will get the GOP endorsement.
“James Gardner is now and will be the Republican Mayoral Candidate for Mayor in November as long as I am GOP Chair of the City of Buffalo,” Porter wrote.
He continued, in all caps: “UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WILL I PERSONALLY WITHDRAW JAMES GARDNER FROM THE REPUBLICAN LINE AND UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WILL I PERSONALLY SUPPORT MOVING JAMES GARDNER TO ANYPLACE OTHER THAN THE REPUBLICAN LINE FOR MAYOR.”
More all caps: “AT NO TIME HAS CHRIS SCANLON ASKED ME AT ANY TIME FOR THE REPUBLICAN LINE.”
Keep in mind, Republicans are desperately outnumbered in the city. There are 151,ooo registered voters in Buffalo and 97,000 of them are Democrats. There are 15,000 Republicans. The rest are registered to minor parties or no party at all.
Read our other primary coverage
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Geoff Kelly’s takeaways on Ryan’s victory: Turnout and messaging were key.
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Most Democratic voters say they want change.
There’s also a question as to how large of a base Scanlon actually has.
Despite an impressive effort to motivate South Buffalonians, turnout for Scanlon in the South Council District was lower than it was for Mickey Kearns when he challenged Brown in 2009. Scanlon didn’t do appreciably better in that regard than Mark Schroeder, another favorite son who challenged Brown in 2017 and lost in a landslide.
Scanlon needed more out of South Buffalo because he found little traction elsewhere in the city. Ryan won six of nine Council districts and by substantial margins in Delaware, Niagara and Ellicott.
It’s noteworthy that Ryan won three Council districts that are majority Black. At least two of the three Black candidates who ran in the primary — University District Council Member Rasheed Wyatt and former Assembly staffer Anthony Tyson-Thompson — are now out of the race.
The third, Garnell Whitfield, insisted Tuesday night that he’s going to run in November on an independent line. The Erie County Board of Elections removed him from the ballot Wednesday, however, invalidating a number of his petition signatures. His attorney says Whitfield will challenge the board’s ruling in court.
As it was, Whitfield captured only 8.1 percent of the vote Tuesday and would be lucky to garner 5 percent in November if he manages to stay on the ballot.
Likewise, Michael Gainer has secured an independent line for November. He’s likely to attract fewer votes than Whitfield.
Come November, Black voters will continue to gravitate to Ryan. Certainly not to Scanlon.
Citywide, I envision the de facto mayor-elect gobbling up at least two-thirds of the vote in November. We’re talking landslide.
Does Scanlon want to subject himself to that humiliation?
Exiting the race with some class would help his future political prospects.
Scanlon’s lackluster performance as acting mayor since he succeeded Byron Brown in October didn’t help his cause.
To me, he failed a critical test by proposing a budget that repeated Brown’s past failures: underestimating expenses and overestimating revenue. He stumbled several other times along the way and his alignment with the Brown crowd — developers like Carl Paladino — city vendors and many city employees, including cops and their union, left many voters ill at ease.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomVoters want change and Scanlon is a vestige of the politics that have dragged this city down.
His father was Jimmy Griffin’s patronage chief. Every one of his siblings works for the city. His wife, too.
Sorry, but there’s more to public service than jobs.
His choice of Brian Gould, a public relations professional and son of another Griffin crony, as deputy mayor served to further underscore ties to the past way of doing things. And it’s not just Griffin legacies. A lot of the Byron Brown crowd got on the Scanlon bandwagon, as well.
In this campaign, Scanlon’s allies and proxies closely resembled Brown’s: Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes, former Masten District Council Member Demone Smith, current North District Council Member Joe Golombek.
One of his campaign managers is Brown’s former deputy mayor, Betsey Ball, who managed Brown’s 2021 re-election campaign. We all know how that went.
And Brown’s former parking commissioner and consigliere, Kevin Helfer, recently dropped $30,000 into a shadowy independent expenditure committee that paid for a text campaign dragging Ryan and encouraging voters to pick Scanlon. (The Paladinos kicked in serious money, as well.)
Voters on Tuesday told J. Dale Shoemaker and I’Jaz Ja’ciel that they want change. That’s understandable given 19 years of Byron Brown. It’s clear they don’t see Scanlon as a change agent, and they’re right, given that during his years on the Council he was in lock step with the mayor.
So far as I’m concerned, a Scanlon candidacy continuing through to November is DOA. And no one else has a ghost of a chance. The election is Ryan’s to lose.
