Schools are supposed to be places of education.
Some in Lynchburg are getting an education right now, although they’re not very happy about it.
I refer to the controversy over why Lynchburg’s school board rejected a $10,000 grant to create a “quiet room” at E.C. Glass because the money would have come from the It Gets Better Project, a nonprofit that seeks to prevent suicide in the LGBTQ+ community. Last week, the board heard a parade of speakers criticize that decision — and then got tangled up in a policy discussion that led to it rejecting a $5,000 grant for middle school volleyball equipment, even though middle school volleyball doesn’t seem nearly as polarizing as LGBTQ+ issues.
Cardinal’s education reporter, Lisa Rowan, has written about this and Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak has now written not one but two columns that hold Lynchburg up in a bad light. Of course, viewpoints differ. At a recent Lynchburg City Council meeting, several speakers praised the school board’s action. One lauded the board for standing up to “the fruitless works of darkness” and another hailed it for its “courageous action” because accepting the grant “opens up the door to the continual sexual perversion introducing and indoctrinating children into a lifetime of sin — possibly.” (In the context of the speaker’s remarks, it seems the qualifier applied to the “lifetime” part, not the “sin” part.)
It would be easy to write about all that — I could even quote the speaker who referred to “sick evil perversion” — but I prefer math over morality. That leads me to look at the electoral math behind the Lynchburg School Board.
If people are unhappy with the Lynchburg School Board, what can they do? In most localities, the answer would be “elect new school board members.” Lynchburg, though, is one of 12 places in the state with an appointed school board. That means that those in Lynchburg unhappy with these decisions can ultimately trace their unhappiness to the city council that has appointed these school board members. So, how successful will they be? Right now, not very. Voters in November installed a 5-2 Republican majority on the Lynchburg City Council and I’d be surprised if that majority has much interest in a quiet room funded by an LGBTQ+ group. I’m reminded of a famous quote from then-President Barack Obama that even Republicans can agree with: “Elections have consequences.”
Now let’s peel back another layer of this onion. How did this Republican majority win? Well, obviously those candidates got the most votes, but elections are usually more complicated than just that.
Lynchburg has a hybrid council: Four members are elected from wards, three are elected at large. Those four wards had previously elected two Republicans and two Democrats. While upsets are always possible, given the differing political makeup of those districts, it seems likely there will always be a mix of parties from those four wards. A side note: That means there’s always a guarantee of some political diversity on the Lynchburg City Council, in a way that there is not in Roanoke, where all the council members are elected at-large, and there hasn’t been a Republican elected to the council in almost a quarter-century. However, decisions such as school board appointments are made by a majority on the council — which means the three at-large seats on the Lynchburg City Council are the majority-makers.
The election for those three seats last November was unusual, not simply in its results, but in its timing. Previous council elections were held in May. Now, pursuant to a new state law, municipal elections across Virginia have been moved to November. Ironically, it was Democrats who pushed this law, as a way to boost voter participation. In many places, such as Roanoke, that helps cement Democratic control by scheduling council elections at the same time as federal elections where the locality can be counted on to go Democratic by wide margins. In Lynchburg, a more conservative city, that November date resulted in a new Republican majority. In effect, a Democratic law has led, however indirectly, to Lynchburg’s school board rejecting these grants. Call this the law of unintended consequences.
Actually there are two such laws. College students now can use their dorm as their residence. In some places, such as Blacksburg, that probably adds a lot of Democratic voters to the rolls. That was the subject of concern among some Republican candidates in Montgomery County in November’s election. In a previous column, I documented that yes, Tech students did make the difference in a supervisor’s race and a school board race. In Lynchburg, though, that means a lot of conservative students from Liberty University, although it doesn’t look like their votes changed the outcome from what it would have been if none of them had voted.
Let’s look further.
In Lynchburg’s at-large council elections from 2002 to 2018, the top vote-getter polled between 3,521 votes (in 2018) and 5,886 votes (in 2014). The third-place winner needed only 2,667 votes (in 2018) or 4,965 (in 2002).
Once council elections were moved to November — coinciding with the congressional midterms — a lot more votes were required to win a seat on the Lynchburg City Council.
In 2022, the last-place candidate (of the seven running for three seats) polled 3,714 votes. In the previous cycle, that would have been enough to not just win, but lead the balloting. That’s how much the November election date has boosted participation in Lynchburg’s council races.
The top vote-getter last year was Stephanie Reed, who polled 12,287 votes, more votes than anyone had ever polled in a Lynchburg council race by several orders of magnitude. She received more than three times as many votes as the top vote-getter in the previous election cycle and more than twice as many votes as the top vote-getter in the high-turnout (comparatively) municipal election of 2014.
Following Reed in the balloting were ticketmates Larry Taylor with 11,658 votes and Marty Misjuns with 10,685.
The top candidate who lost a seat was incumbent Treeny Tweedy, who took 10,157 votes. She nearly tripled her vote totals from four years previously, but it wasn’t enough to win. Incumbent Beau Wright more than tripled his vote totals but the 8,031 votes he polled weren’t enough to win, either.
These elevated vote totals suggest to me that the current Republican majority took office with more moral authority to speak on behalf of Lynchburgers than any other council members before them. Whether they have retained that moral authority is a matter of dispute. I refer you to how even most Republicans on the Lynchburg City Council recently voted to censure Misjuns for the way he’s treated people. Still, the point is, more people voted for these three members of council — yes, even Misjuns — than anyone ever before in the history of the Hill City. In political terms, that has to count for something. That’s just a political fact of life for those who object to anything that the current city council has done, from its school board appointments to its tax cuts to, well, you name it.
See the Obama quote above: These are the consequences of that 2022 election. If people don’t like them, they have a recourse — the 2026 election. I realize that’s unsatisfying because it’s so far out, but that’s how American elections work: We effectively sign unbreakable long-term contracts with elected officials.
However, let’s dive a little deeper, because there’s some more context to that 2022 election that’s useful.
Lynchburg is conservative but not as conservative as some may think.
In 2020, Joe Biden carried Lynchburg, becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to do so since Harry Truman in 1948. He didn’t win a majority but he did take a plurality — he won with 49.6% to 47.0% for Donald Trump. In raw vote totals (pay attention to these!), Biden took 18,048 votes in Lynchburg while Trump took 17,097.
If you consider these vote totals the high-water mark for each party in Lynchburg, and compare them to the 2022 council race, you’ll see two things:
First, neither party in 2022 matched its 2020 vote totals. That’s to be expected; turnout in midterms is always lower than in a presidential race.
Second, Republicans retained more of their vote than Democrats did. Whether that means Republicans overperformed in the 2022 council races or Democrats underperformed is not something I can readily determine and perhaps doesn’t matter. The point is Democrats left more votes on the table in Lynchburg in 2022 than Republicans did. If more of those Biden voters had bothered to vote in the council elections, those elections might have turned out differently and there might today be a school board that would have accepted those funds for the quiet room.
Now, looking at the presidential race may not be the best place to look. Presidential turnout is always the highest of any election cycle — and given the dynamic of that election, it’s safe to say that not every Biden voter was a Democrat. Some were Republicans or independents who just couldn’t stomach Trump.
It might be better to look at the 2021 governor’s race. Republican Glenn Youngkin took 54.9% of the vote in Lynchburg, winning the city with 13,668 votes to 11,000 for Democrat Terry McAuliffe.
Now what do we see? The Republican candidates for the council last year took between 10,685 and 12,287 votes. The Democratic candidates took between 6,989 and 10,157 votes. Viewed that way, top Democratic vote-getter Tweedy did quite well — she came within 843 votes of matching McAuliffe’s total the year before. Reed wasn’t far off the pace on the Republican side — she came within 1,381 votes of matching Youngkin’s vote total. What’s really noticeable to me is how far back the other Democratic candidates were from McAuliffe’s numbers — that sure does look like underperformance on their part to me.
On the other hand, even if Democrats had matched McAuliffe’s numbers, only one of them would have won — because Reed and Taylor might not have polled what Youngkin did but they did still poll more than what McAuliffe did. That would have left Lynchburg with a 4-3 Republican council, and while it’s impossible to predict exactly, it seems fair to say there’d still be a conservative school board.
Nonetheless, here’s the brutal math for critics of the Lynchburg school board: There were 18,048 people in Lynchburg who voted for the Democratic candidate for president, 11,000 who voted for the Democratic candidate for governor, but only 6,989 who voted for the lowest-ranked Democratic candidate for the council. That means about 11,000 people who voted for the Democratic candidate for president passed on electing an all-Democratic slate to the city council. I wonder how those people feel about the Lynchburg City Council and the Lynchburg School Board now — or if they are even paying attention.
More brutal math: As long as council elections are in November, it’s always going to be hard for anyone other than Republicans to win those at-large seats on the Lynchburg City Council. Lynchburg’s elections will always coincide with the 5th Congressional District election. Lynchburg hasn’t voted for a Democratic candidate for the U.S. House since 1990 when Democrat Jim Olin of Roanoke was the incumbent and his only opponent was an independent. Democrat Jennifer Lewis did come close in 2018, taking 49.2% against Republican Ben Cline, but that was an unusual year when anti-Trump feelings were running high. It’s not impossible for Democrats to elect candidates to the Lynchburg City Council, but they will always be at an electoral disadvantage. Of note: In 2022, Republican Bob Good took 12,508 votes in Lynchburg, meaning that Reed ran nearly even with him, with other Republican candidates just a little ways back. Democrat Josh Throneburg took 10,840 votes in Lynchburg. Even if Democratic council candidates had run even with him, they’d have won just one council seat — the one that went to Misjuns. For Democrats to have won all three seats, they’d have had to first run better than their party’s candidate for Congress — and then run better than the Republican candidate for Congress. That’s a challenge.
Still, I come back to this: Not just the 18,048 people in Lynchburg who voted for Biden in 2020, but the 14,792 in Lynchburg who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 or the 15,948 there who voted for Obama in 2012 or the 16,269 who voted for Obama in 2008 or even the 11,727 who voted for John Kerry in 2004. Any of those would have been enough to elect a Democratic majority to the council last year.
So what’s all this mean? Notice that Obama’s quote is that “elections have consequences.” It’s not simply that voting has consequences; not voting does, too.
