Mayor Alvin Brown and Lenny Curry are locked into a May 19 head-to-head battle to decide Jacksonville’s next mayor.
The Democratic incumbent finished first for the evening with almost 43 percent of the vote.
Curry, his closest Republican competitor, scored just over 38 percent. With neither reaching the coveted 50 percent-plus on threshold for an outright win, it’s eight more weeks of campaigning.
The margin between the front runners and Bill Bishop, the two-term City Council member, was wide from the start of votes being counted just after 7 p.m.
Bishop, also a Republican, finished a distant third with almost 17 percent of the vote. He announced his concession in the race at about 8:30 p.m. from his watch party in Riverside.
Now, he and Omega Allen, a no-party affiliate who scored 2 percent of the vote, are on the outside looking into the race between the two front runners that’s become increasingly negative in the past several months.
In all, 179,393 votes were cast in the race, according to unofficial results from the Supervisor of Elections.