Election Preview Part 4: RVA Mayor's race

Stratford Library Association

Stratford Library Association

Welcome to the RVA Politics Election Preview! I’ll cover one big race (big for VA/Richmond at least) each day this week:

I wrote about the Mayor’s race back in mid-September; since then, nothing has happened to change the dynamics of the race. incumbent Levar Stoney is the front-runner, with his challengers fighting for a still-important second place.

First: Stoney is clearly in charge here. He’s more than doubled the fundraising total of either of his top two challengers, recently topping $1M in campaign contributions. He’s lined up endorsements from major state Democrats, from the Governor on down. He’s run a solid, professional campaign, and returned to the kind of small-win policy proposals he championed early in his term.

The argument against him is equally clear. The recent flurry of policy proposals are pretty late in the game, after he spent over a year -- and $1M in taxpayer dollars -- on the failed Navy Hill development project. This past year he essentially went AWOL during the #BLM protests, pissing off progressives who wanted him to reign in police and conservatives who wanted him to reign in protestors. What makes anyone think he won’t get distracted or lost again given another four years? Who remains in his constituency?

Still, Stoney doesn’t have to get even close to a majority of the city’s voters to win another term. Thanks to the city’s arcane election rules (explainer here), the mayoral election is actually 9 mini-elections, one in each of the city’s Council districts. Stoney just needs a plurality (more votes than anyone else) in 5 districts. He won his first election in 2016 with barely over one third of the votes city-wide, and a similar percentage could put him over the top again.

So the key question remains: can the other candidates win enough districts to deny Stoney a victory? Let’s run through the four challengers.

Tracey McLean remains on the ballot, but has barely run a campaign and even was left out of the last few fora/debates. She won some fans on the social meds, but is likely to get just a handful of votes.

Justin Griffin is a well-meaning reformer. He deserves credit for helping defeat Navy Hill and his candidacy might have more resonance in a race that hadn’t been reset by the quarantine and protests. But this is just not the year for a white business owner with an efficiency message. He’s lagged well behind the other candidates in fundraising and his support is not likely to go beyond the city’s more conservative West End folks, who might go for Kim Gray anyway.

And Council member Gray presents the toughest challenge for Stoney’s re-election hopes. As I have noted before, Gray is very hard to peg. She’s a critic of protests who drove the renaming of Arthur Ashe Boulevard; she sank the Navy Hill project while defending the interests of her district’s wealthy property owners. As the Cheats blog put it, she’s “mastered the art of saying no” – but what is she for? Gray has not performed well in the various debates and forums, but she’s a formidable retail politician. (Cheats also has an interview with Gray if you want a better sense of her candidacy.) As many people seem to hater her as love her.

Alexsis Rodgers stepped in the race after the police protests, clearly recognizing the need and opportunity to counter Gray’s conservative tendencies and offer a true progressive option to Stoney. She’s had strong support among the city’s growing, young, progressive political class. But as with the Council races, the question for this year is whether that support translates into enough votes to win an election – or even a district or two.

Both Gray and Rodgers can depend on a core of strong support, but from relatively small bases. I think it’s impossible for either challenger to win the race outright; together, do they gather enough votes to deny Stoney the 5 of 9 council districts he needs to win? Either challenger’s path to victory is to squeeze into 2nd place and force a December runoff, which offers a chance to reset the race.

The district math here is hard to figure out, and there’s no reliable polling available. The Richmond Free Press reported on a couple of polls taken by a private research group. I can't exactly call those polls garbage; but they’re anonymously funded (which is super shady) and the numbers give plenty of reason to be skeptical. (For example, there are way too few undecided voters, and it’s super unlikely that Rodgers convinced absolutely nobody to vote for her from July to September.) A more reliable CNU poll showed Stoney leading both his challengers by a significant margin, but with almost a third of the electorate undecided – plus no district-by-district numbers.

The best bet is four more years for Stoney. Still, a runoff is not impossible; the separate pockets of concentrated support for both Rodgers and Gray could make the math work. When will we know? Our expectations should probably be calibrated similar to the national election. If it’s going to be a big win for Stoney, we should have some idea on Election Night. If it’s a closer race, with strong showings by the challengers, then we’ll likely be counting late; and we may not know the outcome until Friday afternoon, when the final absentees are counted. While everyone’s worried about the national election ending up in limbo, we might need to worry more about a long election season in RVA.

Richard MeagherComment