Gallup voters seek change in competitive mayoral race

Water outages and broken trust in Gallup’s infrastructure helped turn the city’s mayoral race into a referendum on basic competence, with voters outside the McKinley County Courthouse weighing who could deliver the fastest relief on the ground.

A Vote Here banner stood outside the courthouse as residents lined up to cast ballots in Gallup, the McKinley County seat. The contest mattered because Gallup runs under a council-manager system with five elected positions, the mayor and four city councilors, and the mayor works alongside the city manager rather than serving as the city’s chief executive.

Marc DePauli emerged from that race with 2,453 votes, ahead of Lyndon B. Tsosie’s 893 and Timaris A. Montaño’s 823, according to state election results. The City of Gallup says voters elected DePauli on Nov. 4, 2025. Gallup’s charter schedules regular municipal elections for mayor, municipal judge and council on the second Tuesday in March of each odd-numbered year, a calendar that keeps local politics on a tight, recurring cycle.

In a city of about 21,023 residents in the latest Census profile, after 21,899 in the 2020 Census, even small shifts in turnout can reshape how Gallup handles its most visible problems. That was clear in the conversations around the courthouse and other polling places, where voters kept returning to the same issues: water, public safety, jobs and whether City Hall could work better with McKinley County and tribal governments.

The pressure on basic services is not abstract. The city posted notice that the Gallup Water System failed to correct significant deficiencies within the required time frame, and city officials issued multiple water outage notices in early April 2026. Those outages gave infrastructure a sharper edge in the campaign, especially for voters who said the next mayor had to focus on repairs, maintenance and steadier service in the Gallup Water System service area.

Other voters said the race was about how Gallup responds to homelessness and substance-use problems, and whether compassion can coexist with enforcement. For them, leadership meant more than speeches. It meant a mayor who could help coordinate police, public works, service providers and neighboring governments when problems spill across jurisdictional lines.

The 2025 election also brought Sierra Yazzie Asamoa-Tutu onto the Gallup City Council as the first Diné member to serve there, a reminder that representation and service delivery are now tied closely together in local politics. In Gallup, voters were not choosing a ceremonial figure. They were choosing who gets to set priorities, build alliances and push for the fixes that shape daily life.