After what had been competitive race, O'Malley overtook both Stokes and Bell to win the Democratic nomination by a sizable margin, making him an overwhelming favorite in the general election.

[2] City leaders, including Howard P. Rawlings, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, and William Donald Schaefer, the Comptroller of Maryland and Schmoke's predecessor as mayor, feared that none of the potential candidates had the vision to continue the urban renewal that took place under Schmoke and Schaefer.

[2] They hoped that Baltimore-native Kweisi Mfume, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), would run.

However, Mfume lived in nearby Catonsville, Maryland,[2] and did not move into Baltimore until March, which would leave him short of the one-year residency requirement.

[10] The City Council, with Schmoke's support considered raising the salary of the mayor in April, to make the position more enticing to Mfume.

Bell announced his candidacy two days after Mfume passed on running, in May 1999, promising to tackle crime and improve public safety.

[20] Carl Adair, a public school teacher who had run unsuccessfully for the city council and the Maryland House of Delegates on numerous occasions, was also a candidate for the Republican nomination.

[6][24] Stokes ran on the issue of education, as he was a former member of the Baltimore school board, in addition to the city council.

[25] Stokes vowed to reduce class sizes and reverse the trend of citizens of Baltimore leaving the city to live in nearby suburbs.

[24] However, O'Malley received endorsements from prominent African American politicians in August, including Rawlings, fellow state Delegate Kenneth Montague, and Conway.

"[6] Stokes began to lose support after he was charged with lying about having a college degree, when it was discovered that he did not graduate from Loyola University Maryland, as his campaign literature stated.

[6] Bell's supporters rallied outside the offices of The Baltimore Sun, challenging that they were writing negative stories about African American candidates, and giving better treatment to O'Malley during the campaign.

[22] Seven candidates, including Democrats Bell, Stokes, O'Malley, and Conaway, and Republicans Adair, Tufaro, and Arthur Cuffie Jr., met for a debate on September 8.

The debate focused on crime, with Bell, Stokes, and O'Malley making their cases regarding "zero tolerance", while Adair and Tufaro declared their support for Frazier.

[28] Bell and Stokes split a significant portion of the city's black majority, but their combined total was less than O'Malley.

[6][30] Despite the odds he faced in the general election, Tufaro promised to campaign against O'Malley, not taking defeat as an inevitability.

O'Malley promised to enforce provisions of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which require banks to invest in poor neighborhoods.

[35] When discussing the problem of HIV/AIDS in Baltimore, which disproportionately affects African Americans, both O'Malley and Tufaro promised to continue the city's needle exchange program.

[36] Tufaro criticized O'Malley's zero tolerance policy, suggesting it would lead to increased police brutality towards minorities.

[36] Opponents of the zero tolerance policy tried to tie O'Malley to the Baltimore Police shooting of an African American car theft suspect.

[41] In his first year in office, O'Malley adopted a statistics-based crime tracking system called CitiStat, modeled after Compstat.

The Washington Post wrote in 2006 that Baltimore's "homicide rate remains stubbornly high and its public school test scores disappointingly low.

[43] The system garnered interest from Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty,[42] as well as crime officials from the United Kingdom.

"[46] The Washington Post criticized O'Malley for "not solv[ing] the problems of rampant crime and rough schools in Baltimore", but further said that "he put a dent in them.".

At a press conference at a National Governors Association meeting, O'Malley stated he was laying "the framework" for a presidential run.

[50][51][52][53] A fictionalized version of the events of this election were presented in third and fourth seasons of The Wire, a drama about crime and politics in Baltimore, which aired in 2004 and 2006, respectively.