For more on the June 18 primaries, see our voter guide.
Roanoke’s Democratic primary for the city council didn’t exactly come to a screeching halt this week — it will still go on because the law says it must go on — but it was essentially rendered moot.
There had been four candidates seeking three slots (Roanoke elects all its council members at large). One of those four candidates, Jamaal Jackson, dropped out under mysterious circumstances.
Or maybe not so mysterious. The Roanoke Rambler reports a variety of alleged problems with the petitions that Jackson filed to qualify for the ballot, including an allegation that “Jackson’s campaign improperly copied voter signatures obtained during his unsuccessful 2022 bid for Council onto 2024 paperwork for the June 18 Democratic primary.” (Jackson has declined to discuss the matter.)
In the end, the city registrar told the Rambler that Jackson had only 97 qualified signatures when he needed 125 to make the ballot.
This isn’t the first time Jackson has had trouble with petitions: He didn’t make the Democratic primary ballot two years ago because of paperwork problems. He wound up running as an independent.
This also isn’t the first time candidates in general have had trouble collecting enough signatures: Republicans this year started out with nine candidates for their U.S. Senate nomination but wound up with only five on the ballot — one dropped out, and the others didn’t collect enough signatures. Two years ago, Andy Parker of Henry County didn’t make the ballot for the Democratic primary for the 5th District congressional nomination because his campaign didn’t have enough signatures.
Getting 125 signatures of registered voters doesn’t sound that hard for someone who is organized. But there is some labor involved, and anyone who has done it will tell you they encounter a lot of types of people: those who don’t want to sign, those who do sign but turn out not to be registered to vote, or those who sign and wind up living outside the jurisdiction. I’m generally not sympathetic toward candidates with petition problems. Gathering the required amount seems a minimal test of organizational ability; the candidate who can’t meet that test probably isn’t likely to do very well in the more complicated environment of a campaign — or governing, for that matter.
That’s not what catches my eye about Jackson’s departure from the race, however. It’s this: The odds have now increased that Roanoke’s next council will be the first since 1970 without a single Black member.
Mind you, this isn’t likely, but the odds are not zero.
Here are the basic facts:
- Roanoke elects all its council members at large.
- At-large elections would seem to disadvantage minority candidates. This is the same principle that governs redistricting, where there are often lawsuits over whether certain maps have the effect of making it difficult for minority candidates to win.
- However, Roanoke — a city with a Black population of 29.4% — has always had at least one Black member on its seven-member council since 1970, when Noel Taylor was first elected. (The minority that winds up being disadvantaged under Roanoke’s at-large system these days are Republicans, who could likely elect one or two members under a ward system but haven’t been able to win a council seat since 2000; see my previous analysis).
- Over the past 49 years, Roanoke has had a Black mayor for 25 of those years — 17 years under Taylor, then eight under current Mayor Sherman Lea. This seems a remarkable run for a majority-white city on the edge of Appalachia.
- Roanoke has often had multiple Black members on the council, and in 2020 Roanokers elected a Black majority council — counting the mayor, four of the seven members were Black.
- At present, there are three Black members on the council (and one Latina member). However, barring some electoral surprise, that number will drop to no more than two on the next council and, conceivably, to none.
Here’s why: Two of the Black members on the council — Lea and Trish White-Boyd — are retiring. The third, Stephanie Moon Reynolds, is forgoing a reelection bid for the council to run instead for mayor.
That mayor’s race is a three-way affair between Democrat Joe Cobb, Republican David Bowers and Moon Reynolds. If Moon Reynolds loses that race — and, by definition, independents are always underdogs — that means none of the current Black members of the council will return.
Unless any independents emerge before the June 18 deadline, Roanoke will have five candidates running for three open council seats — the seats being vacated by Moon, White-Boyd and Luke Priddy, whose term would be up this year anyway but who has since resigned to take a job out of town.
Running for those three seats will be three Democrats (Terry McGuire, Phazhon Nash and Benjamin Wood) and two Republicans (Jim Garrett and Nick Hagen). Of those candidates, all are white except for Nash, who is Black.
If Moon Reynolds is unsuccessful in her mayoral bid, then the only way there will be a Black member on the next council is if Nash wins.
Let’s look at how likely or unlikely that will be.
Some basic political facts: Democrats always have the advantage in Roanoke. In 2020, Joe Biden took 61.8% of the vote in Roanoke. In the 2021 governor’s race, the 2022 congressional race and the 2023 state Senate race, Democratic candidates polled between 57.7% and 60.9% in the city.
That means Democratic candidates will be favored to win in November’s council races — and since Republicans aren’t putting up a full slate, that means one of the Democrats is guaranteed to win. However, voters will have three votes to cast for three council seats, which means Democratic-leaning voters who may not be entirely sold on the party’s ticket could cast most of their votes for Democrats but still cast one for a Republican candidate. If there are enough such voters — and if they agree on who the weakest Democrat is, and who the strongest Republican is — then there’s an opening for one of the Republicans to win. (Obviously if the Democratic vote is weaker than usual, all bets are off, but I’m working on the most likely scenarios based on Roanoke’s recent electoral history.)
A variation of this scenario happened in 2020, when two of the three Democratic candidates won but the third Democrat finished fifth (behind Moon Reynolds, who was running as an independent), and a Republican candidate.
Hagen is likely the stronger of the two Republican candidates. He ran two years ago and finished just 440 votes behind the third Democrat, 960 votes ahead of the second-best Republican, and 1,342 votes ahead of the third-best Republican. Garrett ran a decade ago, finishing fifth in a field of 10.
If Hagen can run strong enough to win, the question becomes who is the weakest Democrat? If both Republicans can run strong to win, the question becomes who are the two weakest Democrats?
Since none of the three Democratic council candidates have run in a general election before, we have no electoral history to fall back on for analysis, so I’m not inclined to speculate without math to guide me. However, here’s the math that matters: If Moon Reynolds falls short in her mayoral bid (and, as I noted, independents are rarely favorites), and Nash proves to be a weak candidate for the council, then we’d have a situation in which a city where nearly three of every 10 people are Black would have no Black members on the council for the first time in 54 years.
In this week’s West of the Capital:
I write a free weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital, that goes out every Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. You can sign up here:
Here’s what I’ll have in this week’s edition:
- Why the protesters who disrupted a John McGuire rally with Marjorie Taylor Greene in Albemarle County might help him in the June 18 primary.
- An update on the early voting numbers across the state.
- The price of Interstate 81 improvements is going up — and taking longer.
- North Carolina legislature considers a curious bill about college football that Virginia may (or may not) want to emulate.
- More information on who’s speaking at the cannabis conference that Cardinal News is hosting Oct. 15 at Roanoke College. The conference is expected to attract participants from across Virginia, but space is limited. More information about the program, sponsorships and early bird registrations are available now. To take advantage of a $25 discount off the $150 ticket, use the promo code “early bird” before Aug. 1.
