Michael D. Brown defeated Philip Pannell for the shadow U.S. Senate seat in the Democratic primary Tuesday, winning 73 percent of the vote.
Brown, 52, is president of Horizon Communications. Pannell, 55, is executive director of the Anacostia Coordinating Committee.
Brown will face Statehood Green party candidate Joyce Robinson-Paul, who was unopposed in her primary Tuesday.
The “shadow” senators are remnants of New Columbia, what the District would have been called had it been declared the 51st state in the 1980s.
They are non-voting representatives whose primary purpose is to lobby for voting rights for the District.
The volunteer positions are unpaid and come with few perks. Most shadow senators and representatives don’t even use the office the District provides them.
But that may change as the voting rights movement gathers steam. The D.C.Voting Rights Act, sponsored by Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton and Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., has gone further than any similar bill in the last decade.
It adds two members to the House of Representatives, one for historically Democratic D.C. and one for Utah, which usually votes Republican.