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.