Thirteen Democrats appeared on the ballot Tuesday in Baltimore’s mayoral primary elections. When the smoke cleared, Catherine Pugh, a 66-year-old state senator, had emerged as the winner, with 36.8 percent of the vote. Given the overwhelming Democratic vote in Baltimore, she’s all but guaranteed to be the city’s next mayor.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a story for the magazine about the race, a pivotal moment for the future of Baltimore. In a city already suffering from rampant poverty, failing schools, hypersegregation and insufficient transportation, the past year has been particularly bad. Last April, a 25-year-old black man named Freddie Gray died of spinal injuries sustained while in police custody. His death sparked outrage, property-damaging protests and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s decision not to stand for re-election. With 344 murders, 2015 was also the deadliest year per capita in the city’s history. The city is in such need of radical change that each mayoral candidate campaigned on being the only leader who could provide it. It’s worth stating here then that Pugh is almost certainly not that agent of change.

Pugh edged out her nearest competitor, the former Mayor Sheila Dixon, by 2.3 points. This happened, in part, because Pugh is not the former Mayor Sheila Dixon — who began her mayorship in 2007, as the first woman to hold the office, and ended it in 2010, after being convicted of embezzling funds intended for the city’s poor. Pugh lost the election that ensued, to Rawlings-Blake. This year, she spent $1.1 million over the course of her campaign, picking up votes from those who had resolved not to give Dixon a second chance. (She most likely picked up more over the past month, as Nick Mosby dropped out of the race and endorsed her, and a dozen Baltimore lawmakers later endorsed her en masse.) And although Pugh has been installed in the city’s political class since 1999, many of Baltimore’s young grass-roots activists cast votes for her instead of for DeRay Mckesson, a 30-year-old civil rights activist who has reached national fame over the last two years protesting police brutality. Mckesson has been the de facto face of the Black Lives Matter movement, but he has lived in the city only sporadically since leaving for nearby Catonsville, Md., in sixth grade, and boasts no legislative experience. He garnered 2.5 percent of the vote.

Pugh is firmly of the Baltimore establishment, and her platform was among the race’s least surprising. But Dixon already had her turn, and so this was Pugh’s. In this election, as in many local elections, that was enough.