Laverne Gore is attempting a difficult feat in Cleveland politics: unseating an incumbent mayor.
Mayor Justin Bibb has the name recognition, the campaign money and the daily presence in news headlines that come with the job of leading City Hall.
Gore has 20,000 business cards, which she hands out to people she meets on the campaign trail. She also has unsparing criticisms of her opponent. In one interview with Signal Cleveland, she referred to the 38-year-old mayor as “the toddler.”
A former West Point recruiter, Gore has her own health consulting company, according to her LinkedIn. She lives near Shaker Square.
It’s not her first go at elected office. She ran against Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora in 2002 and Mayor Frank Jackson in 2009, losing to both. She ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican against Marcia Fudge and Shontel Brown.
Now she is running as an independent in this heavily Democratic city against Bibb, the president of the Democratic Mayors Association. (Officially, the race is nonpartisan.) Besides write-in candidate Ricky L. Pittman, Gore is the only opposition Bibb faces this year.
“When we heard they were running unopposed, we didn’t feel good about that,” she said. “Because that seemed almost un-American to me.”
Gore wants to debate Bibb, but no debate has been scheduled and time has nearly run out. So she is finding other ways to spread her message.
Earlier this month, she walked the halls of Tower City, the mall and transit hub, passing out her business cards. She gave them to customers in Suzy’s Soups, dropped in at a hat store and stopped passers-by to chat. She toured Tower City’s haunted house.
“When you don’t get the attention from the media, right, you’ve got to get the attention from the people,” she said.
A schools and safety campaign
Gore is running such issues as on education and crime. She said that people should be angry about the state rating of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, which is under mayoral control. (CMSD’s rating slipped from 3 stars to 2.5 this year, which school leadership chalked up to the introduction of college and career readiness statistics into the state data.)
The number of homicides in Cleveland has fallen over the last few years, and Bibb isn’t shy about talking up his hike in police pay. But there’s been a recent rash of car break-ins. Police have made arrests.
Someone swiped tennis shoes from Gore’s own car this year, she said.
“I know a lot of people have different opinions about the crime statistics, right?” she said. “Well, if you live in the neighborhoods, you know what they are. You don’t need a statistician to tell you that your car’s getting busted in.”
What’s Gore’s safety plan? Acknowledge that there’s a problem, she said.
“If you don’t think you have a problem, then you’re not going to address the problem,” she said.
She continued: “We’re going to have to hire some police forces, but we’re going to have to make the communities aware of the problems and quit sugarcoating it as we have in our current administration.”
What else goes into the safety plan? Gore declined to go into specifics. She didn’t want to give her plans away to her opponent, she said.
“If I gave you my full-blown plan, then in fact, the toddler that’s sitting in the daycare minding it, he doesn’t have any plan,” she said. “He’d read it in the paper, and the next day he’d be saying it’s his plan.”
Rallying the anti-Bibb vote
Gore found a receptive voter at a meeting of the East 63rd Street Block Club in the basement cafeteria of the St. Stanislaus school building in October. She called the mayor a “bad hire” and talked about crime and homelessness.
“I agree with everything you say,” Noreen Malecki said. But she had a question for Gore: What are you going to do about it?
Gore talked about bringing in federal money. She criticized the CMSD CEO’s salary, which is now near $300,000. She suggested that the city needs to cut its expenses.
“We have to have money, and we have to have a reinvestment,” she said. “And we have to downsize. We cannot keep hiring. Hiring is not all the answer.”
Afterward, Malecki said that Gore had her vote. She has lived in Slavic Village for most of her 78 years and doesn’t feel safe walking down the street, she said.
“I know what she doesn’t like, I know what I don’t like, which is pretty much the same thing,” Malecki said. “But what are we going to do?”
Gore answered the question “for the most part,” although Malecki wanted some more details, she said.
Malecki voted four years ago, but not for Bibb. Nor did Polly Karr, a CMSD parent and Substack writer who is critical of the mayor and school district leadership. She supports Gore in this race.
Karr said she met with Gore and a group of teachers for two hours. The candidate didn’t make promises, but she listened, Karr said. (The Cleveland Teachers Union made a $5,000 contribution to Bibb’s campaign earlier this year.)
“She was taking notes and she wasn’t dismissing, you know, ‘Oh you teachers always complain about your pay’ or anything like that,’” Karr said.
Anyone looking to defeat Bibb will need more than the voters who backed his opponent four years ago. In 2021, Bibb defeated his more experienced adversary, then-Council President Kevin Kelley, by 25 percentage points.
It is rare for a challenger to topple a Cleveland mayor. In the last half century, there have been only three elections in which an incumbent mayor lost his or her seat (Ralph Perk in 1977, Dennis Kucinich in 1979 and Jane Campbell in 2005).
Nevertheless, Gore said she sees an opportunity if she can bring in new voters in what will probably be a low-turnout race. She just has to keep handing out her business cards.
“I was just at an apartment building last week, and the lady said, ‘I already have one of those cards.’ OK?” she said. “That means we’ve penetrated.”
An earlier version of this story said that Gore met with the block club in the basement of the St. Stanislaus parish hall. In fact it was the school building.
