Last updated: 19:507:32

Andy Dance won his second term on the Flagler County Commission by decisively defeating Fernando Melendez, the only clear victory of the evening when the election official announced the results of the primary election.

David Alfin will no longer be mayor of Palm Coast starting in November. That role will be taken over by either Mike Norris or Cornelia Manfre.

After all votes were counted, Lauren Ramirez won the 5th District School Board seat against Vincent Sullivan by 20 points, while Janie Ruddy defeated Derek Barrs in the 3rd District by a handful of votes. “She definitely ran a good campaign and I’m proud of both of us for staying clean,” Sullivan said of Ramirez this afternoon. “There was no mudslinging. I thank her for that.”

Kim Carney easily defeated Palm Coast City Council member Nick Klufas by nearly 10 percentage points, Bill Clark by even more, while Pam Richardson beat Ed Danko by nearly 40 votes. However, Danko is likely to request a recount since the difference is less than 1 percent.

In Palm Coast, Norris was the leading candidate by a comfortable margin, receiving 32 percent of the vote in a five-way race, with Cornelia Manfre receiving 22 percent. Alfin received just 19 percent, with Peter Johnson and Alan Lowe almost tied at just under 14 percent each. That sets up a runoff election between Manfre and Norris to end Alfin’s term. Equally surprising: The Palm Coast City Council will have four new members when they are sworn in in the first week of December. Theresa Pontieri is the only one still in office – if not surviving – and has only been on the council for two years.

The race for the Palm Coast City Council seat in the Third District between Dana Stancel, Ray Stevens and Andrew Werner was very close for all three, but in the end Werner led by nearly 35 percent, with Stevens in second place with 34 percent, setting up a runoff in November. In the race for the First District seat, Ty Miller was the clear frontrunner, but did not have the 50 percent lead needed to avoid a runoff. He will face Jeff Seib in the November runoff, who narrowly beat Austrino by 449 votes.

In the race for the state House of Representatives seat, Sam Greco beat Darryl Boyer by well over 20 points even in Flagler, Boyer’s domain, and Tom Leek beat David Shoar and Gerry James: Leek easily beat Shoar even in St. Johns County, Shoar’s domain.

Only two incumbents ran for county, school board or Palm Coast Houses of Representatives, or even the state legislature, where Senator Travis Hutson and Assemblyman Paul Renner are term-limited. But this was not a freshman election. All five of Flagler County’s constitutional officers were re-elected unopposed, and several of the candidates have either held office before or run for local office, some of them multiple times. Still, there will be two new members on the school board, two new members on the county commission and at least two new members on the city council.

Dance, a Republican, is the only incumbent unopposed in power. It is his sixth consecutive election victory. He first ran for school board in 2008, in a special election to fill the seat vacated by the resignation of Jim Guines. He won by 16 points. When he ran again two years later, he was unopposed, winning by 20 points in 2014, running unopposed again in 2018, and winning his first county commission election by 25 points in 2020.

The race between Dance and Melendez is over. If the other two races for County Commission are indeed over, it won’t be official until November, because today’s winners of those two races each have one candidate left who is not in the primary. None of the candidates who were not in the primary were seen during the primary. Neither candidate is expected to appear before the general election. The candidates who were not in the primary were strategic ploys to close those two primaries to independents and Democrats, in the hope that the hard-right Republicans who vote in the primary will skew the outcome away from moderate candidates.

Although early voting turnout seemed a little muted, there was a surge of over 7,500 voters on Election Day, nearly as high as the 7,740 voters who cast ballots during the eight days of early voting. Combined with more than 12,000 absentee ballots, turnout was nearly 30 percent — better than 2016 and nearly as high as 2020. Turnout in the 2016 primary, which featured a six-candidate Republican primary for sheriff, which Rick Staly won, and the race for supervisor of elections, which Kaiti Lenhart won, was 27.1 percent. Turnout in 2020 was 30.5 percent.

Just over 16,000 registered Republicans participated in this election, compared to barely 8,000 Democrats and just over 3,000 independents.

Correction: In a previous update, Derek Barrs and Ed Danko were briefly ahead of Janie Ruddy and Pam Richardson because we incorrectly interpreted the results as final results.

2024 Primary Election Results: Local and State Elections in Flagler County

Note: For state and county level results, such as in elections for Congress or the state legislature, the total score is shown first, followed by the raw Flagler number in parentheses.