Baraka wins Newark mayoral race

Ras Baraka, the son of the late poet and activist Amiri Baraka, has declared victory in the race to succeed Democratic Sen. Cory Booker as mayor of New Jersey's largest city.

Baraka served on Newark's City Council and was a staunch critic of Booker, who stepped down last year to run for the Senate. Baraka declared victory Tuesday with nearly all districts counted and with a 54 to 46 percent lead over former state assistant attorney general Shavar Jeffries.

Baraka and Jeffries are Democrats, but the election was nonpartisan.

Booker, who served for seven years as mayor and used his national profile to help draw billions of dollars in investment to Newark, is now a U.S. senator. He won a special election last October to succeed Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who died in office. Former City Council President Luis Quintana served as interim mayor.

The mayoral candidates touted their Newark roots in an election seen as a referendum on the staying power of gains made by Booker, including large-scale investment from Wall Street and Silicon Valley, most visibly a $100 million matching grant for school reform from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Baraka inherits a fiscal crisis as well an unemployment rate of 13 percent among its 277,000 residents and the highest murder rate in more than two decades.

Baraka has backed a plan known as Operation Ceasefire that compels gang members to sever such ties and receive job training and education.

Jeffries and Baraka both put education reforms at the center of their campaigns, voicing careful support for the controversial "One Newark" school reorganization plan to consolidate, close or relocate a quarter of the city's schools.

Newark's fiscal crisis is severe enough that the city faces the threat of a state takeover of its finances after showing an "extraordinary level of fiscal distress," state financial officer Tom Neff told city officials in a letter.

A shortfall in tax revenue could leave a gap of about $93 million in the city's operational budget for 2014. Some $30 million of that deficit was racked up in Booker's last year in office.

Wire services