Open Thread: Who gets your vote for Atlanta mayor—and why?

The world isn’t lacking in sources of political debate, and these pages have never been the province of politics, but the City of Atlanta’s 2017 mayoral race is too crucial to ignore.

Plus, there are too many dang candidates to keep it all straight.

Like the sheer mass of mayoral hopefuls themselves (more than 10), the amount of news coverage, campaign rhetoric, and social media ranting about them can be overwhelming.

For anyone on the fence, might we suggest two fair, comprehensive resources compiled by local media:

1. The AJC provides this unbiased primer for all viable candidates. (Note: Candidate Michael Sterling dropped out of the race this week).
2. And Atlanta magazine posed the same 11 questions—including pressing topics such as transportation tax spending, homelessness, income inequality, and Confederate monuments—to all candidates who responded in time.

Some things to consider:

The City of Atlanta—that little 1/10th sliver of the metro’s metastasizing sea—packed on nearly 10,000 new people last year alone.

That’s a lot of change to mitigate. Especially when traffic and affordability problems are already too real.

In the broader scheme, the U.S. Conference of Mayors has predicted that Atlanta will climb to the nation’s sixth largest metro in the next three decades, trailing only New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, and Chicago.

So the city needs long-range vision right now.

And there’s a reasonably good possibility that Atlanta could win the largest corporate lottery of our lifetimes with Amazon’s second North American headquarters—in the new mayor’s first year in office, no less.

Early voting has begun, but the city’s general election for mayor (and key city council seats) is Nov. 7.

For any race in which a candidate doesn’t bag 50 percent (plus one) of the general vote, a runoff election will be held Dec. 5. The mayor’s race is widely expected to advance to the runoff stage.

But before all of that, feel free to speak your mind about the mayor’s race in the comments section for this week’s installment of Open Threads.

We ask, simply, “Who gets your vote for Atlanta mayor—and why?”

Please, keep it civil.

• Gambling site says Atlanta has best odds to land Amazon’s HQ2 [Curbed]
• Projection: Atlanta will boast country’s sixth largest metro by 2040s [Curbed]