ST. LOUIS - Early voting in the St. Louis mayoral primary is now less than six weeks away, and the field of candidates is now set. 

This is not a two-way race or a rematch from four years ago. 

True, Mayor Tishaura Jones and her chief challenger in 2021, Alderwoman Cara Spencer, are running again, but judging from campaign signs popping up around town, there are people who “like Mike.”

Michael Butler is the Recorder of Deeds for the City of St. Louis. His campaign signs feature the catchy slogan, “I like Mike."

“I really feel like the race before I got in was really like a Joe Biden-Donald Trump race,” he told FOX 2 Thursday.

The Recorder of Deeds is essentially the elected keeper of records from land deeds to birth certificates for the City of St. Louis.

Butler is also a former Missouri State Representative from south St. Louis, as well as the former chairman of the Missouri Democratic Party. 

He’s running against Mayor Jones and Alderwoman Spencer, along with frequent St. Louis congressional and mayoral candidate, businessman Andrew Jones. 

City voters can vote for as many candidates as they wish in the non-partisan primary. The top two finishers then square off in the general election in April.

In 2021, Jones and Spencer emerged from the primary, with Jones winning the general election a month later by fewer than 2,400 votes. Turnout was just 29 percent in the general election and only 22 percent in the primary.

Butler says the candidates who’ve repeatedly run before may cancel each other out to some extent in a low-turnout primary, as some voters may be looking for someone new. 

“Quite frankly, I was a supporter of the mayor’s four years ago, and I represent thousands of people who’ve changed their minds,” he said. “Our city has to get back to the basics. We’ve got to do the basic things right in order to maintain our population and to increase our population.”

His top issues are stepping up city services, from adding police to combat reckless driving to his new pledge to plow snow on residential side streets. 

He also has a plan to use more than a quarter of a billion dollars the City of St. Louis received from the legal settlement with the NFL over the Rams relocation to Los Angeles.

He plans to focus on rebuilding neighborhood housing stock to erase perceived racial divides north and south of Delmar Boulevard and east and west of Gravois Road, eventually pushing those divides north and east out of the city.

“After the first four years of myself being mayor, it should be the Page divide, and then north of that should be the Dr. Martin Luther King (Drive) divide, and then Natural Bridge Road divide. We can do that by giving the best incentive to (one) zone first (then another, then another),” Butler added.

FOX 2 is reaching out to all four candidates for interviews as we approach the March primary.