The District’s Primary Election Day is four long, hot months away, but up here in Mount Pleasant, yard sign skirmishing has already been engaged. In the race for mayor, along this neighborhood’s long tree-lined blocks, D.C. Council Chair Vince Gray and Mayor Adrian Fenty are waging a surprisingly pitched house-to-house battle.
(The yard pictured below, on Mount Pleasant’s Ingleside Terr., NW betrays the conflicting allegiances of the people living inside.)
Fenty’s trademark green and white signs have been planted in District yards for months. But just days after Gray formally launched his challenge to Fenty’s re-nomination, “Vince Gray for Mayor” signs started sprouting up in Mount Pleasant yards, marking an unexpected foothold for the Gray campaign in a neighborhood that could reasonably have been assumed to be solid Fenty terrain. After all, Fenty grew up on Mount Pleasant, in the row house that his parents – longtime proprietors of Adams Morgan’s Fleet Feet sports specialty shop – still call home.
The Fentys’ home sits in Precinct 39, which stretches from Mount Pleasant’s edge along Rock Creek Park into rapidly-gentrifying Columbia Heights. Precinct 39 is notable for being the only precinct in the city that straddles 16th St., NW. Before the late 90s’ wave of gentrification, that long thoroughfare into suburban Maryland – south of Rock Creek Park – delineated the stark geographic divide between white and black Washington. In 1994’s racially divided mayoral contest, Precinct 39 registered an even split, returning a tie vote between Marion Barry and Carol Schwartz, an electoral anomaly fitting for D.C.’s only precinct approaching parity between white and black voters, mixed with a healthy dose of Latinos.
Mount Pleasant remains diverse. The influx of white professionals, who have scooped up the neighborhood’s roomy three-storied houses, reclaiming group homes of grad students for their original use as single family dwellings, have injected yet another element into this ever-evolving enclave nestled just off of Rock Creek Park, in the heart of the District. Fenty’s poll numbers have faltered in black Washington, but these white professionals – a fast-growing electoral bloc – remain firmly behind the mayor. They identify with his ambition and applaud his technocratic tinkering with D.C.’s public schools.
That reputation may not sit so well with some of Mount Pleasant’s more established residents. Some of those Gray signs may be out front of the middle class black households sprinkled in Mount Pleasant’s mix. White pony tails and Volvos plastered with green and anti-war stickers are vestiges of the artists and activists, the urban pioneers who gravitated here in the 60s and 70s. Gray signs complement art installations in a few yards.
But unlike Gray, Fenty himself shares those roots, and grew up learning their lingo. “Remember, my parents were former hippies,” the then-mayoral hopeful felt the need to remind a WaPo profiler before the 2006 primary as he recounted his upbringing in a racially-mixed Mount Pleasant household in the 1970s.
So, perhaps to counter Gray’s encroaching, Team Fenty kicked into gear to reinforce the mayor’s political presence in his native neighborhood. Stepping out on a front porch on the 1800 block of Park Rd., NW one morning last week, a leaflet was discovered wedged into the door handle. It was signed by the Mayor himself! A barely legible personal message was scrawled next to his signature: “Sorry we missed you!”
Fenty canvassers hadn’t missed folks in next the four houses. Each one had agreed to host a Fenty re-elect sign in their yard. None had been there the night before. Around the neighborhood, more green and white signs were staked in more yards than the day before.
Although upon closer inspection, the message was scribbled on his behalf by campaign workers – the mayor must have only had time to ink his signature – the gesture indicates that Fenty may be set to revive his famously indefatigable door knocking marathons that helped him gain renown for energy, attention to detail and getting things done. On a voter’s doorstep, Fenty, his Blackberry in hand, would take notes or make underlings jump. The next day, with that eyesore removed or that issue with the DMV resolved and Adrian Fenty had won over another vote.
This was the tactic that Fenty, then not yet 30, harnessed to dislodge veteran Ward 4 D.C. Council Member Charlene Drew Jarvis in 2000, and six years later, propel him past another Ward 4-based D.C. Council Grand Dame, Linda Cropp, to capture the Democratic nomination for mayor.
Four months before primary day, this localized skirmish indicate early three things: Vince Gray’s support reaches beyond his assumed base. Adrian Fenty is ready to harness his formidable organization and tireless campaigning to win re-election and the District is in for an electoral battle that will make the most of its democratic process.
