Mayor Adrian Fenty is casting himself at the “underdog” in his re-election campaign, just four years after he won support of every precinct in the District.
The tides that have been turning against the mayor’s re-election became more evident Sunday with the release of a Washington Post poll that showed the incumbent with 36 percent of the vote against D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray’s 49 percent. Despite a message change in which Fenty has apologized for not listening well enough and promised to do better, the incumbent mayor has been unable to re-establish his base. The Post poll also continued to show a trend of black voters fleeing the mayor. The loss of their support threatens to sink Fenty’s re-election.
“It’s official, the mayor has called himself the underdog,” Fenty campaign spokesman Sean Madigan told The Washington Examiner. “We’ll have to double down our efforts. The mayor has an incredible record that we’re going to project in every single neighborhood in this city.”
Just two days before the poll results came out, Fenty was asked if he was the underdog during a meeting between the mayor and The Examiner‘s editorial board.
“I have no idea,” Fenty said. He then added, “But I never have at this juncture in all the campaigns I’ve ran, I’ve never known where the electorate was. … I don’t know how people know. In fact, they probably don’t because in all the races I’ve run, no one has ever had the number right 18 days out that it ends up being on Election Day, for better or worse.”
Not knowing where the electorate stood — not only during the last month of the campaign, but also during his four years as mayor — seems to be the cause of what is now starting to look like the biggest upset in the history of D.C. politics.
Fenty told The Examiner black voters seem to have taken that lack of involvement more personally. The Post poll and another released earlier this month by Clarus Research Group both showed that Fenty’s support among the city’s majority black population has fallen to well below 20 percent.
“We completely left out of the equation the involving of people,” Fenty said. “The only hypothesis you could have [on why he has lost the support of black voters] is that maybe there’s different segments of the community who feel more strongly about that.”
