Over the past month, Vince Gray has held a series of town hall meetings in each of the city’s eight wards. His goal was to promote his vision of “One City” after a deeply divided Democratic electorate voted him into office in September.
But that “One City” message didn’t appear to be received well in upper Northwest’s Ward 3, where Mayor Adrian Fenty won nearly 80 percent of the vote in the primary. In Tuesday’s general election, Gray picked up 52 percent of the ward’s votes, but an insurgent Fenty write-in campaign that never received the mayor’s backing appears to have won 43 percent of the vote there.
Since the city-wide percentage of mayoral write-ins was about 23 percent, the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics won’t ever actually count how many were for Fenty.
The lingering dislike of Gray in the predominantly white ward was also reflected in a an apparent backlash against Councilwoman Mary Cheh, who won the lowest percentage of votes of any of the four ward councilmembers up for re-election.
Republican Dave Hedgepeth picked up 34 percent of the vote to Cheh’s 65 percent. Ward 1 Councilman Jim Graham had the next lowest percentage victory with 81 percent of the votes to Republican Marc Morgan’s 8 percent. Ward 5 Councilman Harry Thomas and Ward 6 Councilman Tommy Wells also won by wide margins.
