Joshua Lopez is only 26 years old but he remembers the bad old days in the District when nothing worked and “elected officials didn’t consider the needs of the people a priority.” That was during the 1980s and 1990s, he said, when Marion Barry and Sharon Pratt Kelly were mayors.
“I’m fearful that special-interest folks and others who ran the city [then] will be at the table again,” Lopez told me during a conversation about the write-in campaign he and others, including John Hlinko and Ellie Anderson, have launched, hoping to get Mayor Adrian Fenty re-elected.
“[Vincent] Gray hasn’t said or done anything that would lead me to believe he’s going to keep moving the city forward,” continued Lopez. “He played the race card during the campaign. He played the class card.
“It was disheartening,” Lopez said.
Fenty lost his bid to become the Democratic nominee to Gray, current chairman of the D.C. Council. Blacks living in Wards 5, 7 and 8 overwhelmingly supported Gray. The majority of whites, including 80 percent of Ward 3 voters, supported Fenty.
Lopez said the write-in campaign is a citywide effort. Already, more than 5,000 people have signed onto the Facebook page runfentyrun and the group’s Web site writeinfenty.com, pledging support and offering financial contributions.
The group formally kicked off its campaign minutes before Gray held his so-called “One City” town hall meeting in Ward 3. As they stood at the corner of 42nd and Albemarle streets NW, holding signs that read “Write-in Fenty,” motorists blew their horns while some passersby asked how they could get involved.
“Mr. Gray won the Democratic primary. That’s all he won. It is our job to deliver this election to Adrian Fenty,” said Lawrence Guyot, a former civil rights activists who with Fannie Lou Hamer helped form the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; it successfully challenged the seating of that state’s official Democratic delegation at the 1964 national convention.
Historically in the District, winners of the Democratic primary are victorious in the November general election. Political observers told me it’s unlikely that a write-in campaign could upend that tradition.
Still, Anderson, a black Ward 4 resident who has backed Fenty throughout his political career, vowed, “We’re going to change that history. For the first time, every D.C. voter has a chance to weigh in on who becomes mayor.”
Deploying the motto “Progress has no party,” organizers hope to inspire a sufficient number of the city’s more than 100,000 independents and Republicans who didn’t vote in the Democratic primary. Gray won that election by more than 66,000 votes.
Hlinko, who began the push on the runfentyrun Facebook page, acknowledged the challenge that is facing the group. “It may be the bottom of the ninth,” he said, “but we’re still at bat.”
Growing interest in the write-in movement means Gray will have to do more than hold campaign-style town hall meetings, heavily attended by supporters, if he wants to heal the city, bringing disaffected citizens and Fenty backers into the fold.
Jonetta Rose Barras’s column appears on Monday and Wednesday. She can be reached at [email protected].
