Mike Duggan

In 2012, Duggan resigned his position at the DMC and moved from the suburb of Livonia to the city of Detroit, intending to run for the office of mayor the following year.[9] However, he failed to qualify for the ballot because he filed less than a year after establishing residency in the city; if he had waited two more weeks to file—which still would have met the filing deadline—he would have qualified.[10]

Instead, he mounted a write-in campaign, and received 52% of the vote in the August primary election.[11] Under Detroit's two-round system, the two highest vote-getters run against one another in the general election, which meant that Duggan ran against second-place finisher Benny Napoleon, who had won 29% of the vote.[12] Duggan ran with the campaign slogan, "Every neighborhood has a future", on a platform of financial turnaround, crime reduction, and economic development.[13] He received 55% of the vote in the general election in November, becoming the first white mayor of the now-majority-black city since Roman Gribbs, who served from 1970 to 1974.[2]

Duggan focused, during his first term, on improvements to emergency services response times and bus services.[14] He also saw a demolition program that was ambitious, but controversial.[15]

Duggan also focused on relighting the city's streetlights, a task in which he saw significant success and built upon efforts initiated by his mayor predecessor Dave Bing.[14][15]

Duggan had pledged to create a municipally-owned insurance company, dubbed "D Insurance".[15] He advocated hard in 2015 for a bill that would create such a program, but it failed to pass in the Michigan Legislature.[15]

Duggan drastically increased the number of parks that receive regular maintenance, which increased from 25 parks in 2013 to 275 by 2017 per reporting by the mayor's office.[15]

Detroit's unemployment rate by 2017 shrunk down to 7.5%, the lowest it had been since 2000.[15] Duggan worked to create Detroit at Work, an online portal launched in 2017 which connects job seekers with employers and with job training.[15] Duggan also created the "Grow Detroit’s Young Talent" program, a youth summer employment program that employed thousands of youth.[15]

In 2017, the city began issuing Detroit ID, a municipal identification card, which helps enable residents without a social security number to access city services and some banks.[15]

Despite his pledge to quickly reverse the trend, Detroit had continued to see overall depopulation.[15]

During his first term, Duggan developed a reputation as a capable technocrat.[15]

In October of 2017, conservative political commentator George Will wrote an article in the National Review, hailing Duggan as, "one of America's most successful politicians", and likening him to former New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia.[16]

During his first term, the municipal government's authority was limited by state oversight, with emergency manager Kevyn Orr overseeing the city's bankruptcy and finances.[14]

In the 2017 Detroit mayoral election, Duggan was re-elected in a landslide, taking 72% of the vote to challenger Coleman Young II's 27%.

In the spring of 2018, the city of Detroit was released from state oversight, giving its municipal government full control over its operations for the first time in four decades.[14]

Duggan encountered a controversy after, in December 2019, the Detroit Office of the Inspector found that three top municipal officials, including his chief of staff Alexis Wiley, had ordered public employees to erase emails having to do with to the nonprofit organization Make Your Date. Michigan Secretary of State Dana Nessel launched an investigation into this. In September 2020, Investigative Reporters and Editors awarded Duggan and the city the dubious honor of the "Golden Padlock Award", recognizing them as the most secretive United States agency or individual.[17]

Duggan is running for a third term in the 2021 Detroit mayoral election.