Want to see where the candidates stand? You can compare them side-by-side on our Voter Guide.
A communist may decide who gets to be the next mayors in Lynchburg and Roanoke.
A French communist, at that.
Now that you’ve spluttered your morning coffee over the table, I’ll give time to clean that up before I explain …
… you missed a spot …
… OK, we’re back. First, let’s set the lay of the land.
Roanoke is simple: Two-term Mayor Sherman Lea, a Democrat, is retiring, and there’s a three-way race to succeed him between Republican David Bowers, Democrat Joe Cobb and independent Stephanie Moon.
Lynchburg is not so simple: Lynchburg is a city where council members select one of their own to be mayor. Right now, there’s at-large council member Stephanie Reed, a Republican. If you know anything about Lynchburg City Council politics, you know there’s a brutal fight underway between two rival Republican factions, which seems to have little to do with policy and everything to do with personalities. Lynchburg this fall elects council members from the city’s four wards. Beyond whatever issues there might normally be, this year there’s a special one: Who will the winners support for the next mayor? While there are four wards, two draw special attention. Ward I has a three-way race. Ward IV has two candidates on the ballot, but a disgruntled Republican is running a write-in campaign so that ward also has three-way dynamics. Or even four-way dynamics, but a second write-in candidate seems to have made little impression.
The bottom line: The mayorship in both cities depends on the outcome of three-way races, and that’s where our French communist comes in.
Let’s meet Maurice Duverger. That’s him on the left. Some might say the far left. He was a French lawyer and political scientist who studied political systems (apparently he didn’t study them well enough or he wouldn’t have been a communist, but I digress). Out of those studies came what’s come to be known as Duverger’s Law. This holds that, in elections with multiple candidates but only one seat available, two main parties tend to emerge, generally one on the left and one on the right. This explains why it’s so hard for third parties to take hold: A voter who might prefer a third party, or an independent candidate, may fear that candidate isn’t going to win so instead casts a vote for their second choice — because their bigger fear is that the candidate on the other side of the ideological spectrum might win. Put more plainly, a liberal voter who might really like Jill Stein of the Green Party might wind up voting for Kamala Harris because they really don’t want Donald Trump to win. A conservative voter tempted by, say, the Constitution Party, might wind up voting Republican because that seems a better option than letting the Democrat win. Duverger’s Law is really the “lesser of two evils” theory but applied to multiple parties and multiple candidates.
That brings us to our local races that are three-way contests — Roanoke mayor and Lynchburg Ward I and Ward IV. Two-way races are easy: Who will get the most votes? Three-way races require voters to do some calculations: Will their vote be wasted if they vote for the independent? Who should they vote for if their main goal is to prevent a particular candidate from winning? Or, phrased another way: How will Duverger’s Law play out there?
When matched against party-endorsed candidates, independents have a hard time winning, and not just because of Duverger’s Law. There are structural reasons why an independent begins with a disadvantage: Any party nominee has a corps of party activists who stand ready to support a particular party’s nominee. An independent has to start from scratch. Donors are often the most practical of all: Is their money going to be wasted?
At the local level, though, these factors are less important because voters are more familiar with the candidates — these may be people you run into at the grocery store.
Two of the three-way races here also involve independents who are well-known.
In Roanoke, Moon is a sitting member of city council. Before that, she was the city clerk for 13 years. She is also well-funded. Going into the final month of the campaign, she had more money in the bank than either of the two major party candidates. I have no idea how she will fare in the vote totals, but she should be taken seriously as a candidate.
In Lynchburg, Cameron Craddock Howe is well-known in a different way. She comes from the Craddock family that founded the Craddock-Terry Shoe Company, once one of Lynchburg’s dominant industries.
Let’s look at the dynamics of both races and crunch some numbers.
Roanoke mayor
Roanoke is a Democratic city. Four years ago, Joe Biden took 61.8% of the vote. Hillary Clinton ran less well in 2016: She took 56.5%. Before that, Barack Obama took 60.1% in 2012 and 61.2% in 2008.
If this were a two-way mayor’s race, Cobb would be considered the favorite. He’s got Roanoke’s Democratic background in his favor; he’s also been popular in his own right, twice leading the ticket for city council to become vice mayor.
However, this isn’t a two-way race, and his Republican opponent isn’t a typical Republican. David Bowers previously served 16 years as mayor — as a Democrat. Over the years, as parties have realigned, he’s become less comfortable in the party he grew up in and last year became a Republican. It’s possible that Bowers is better known in Roanoke than Cobb. That raises the prospect that Bowers might pick up some votes that would not normally go to a Republican. Here’s where Moon becomes important: Will she peel off Black voters who might otherwise go to the Democratic nominee? It would also be wrong to pigeonhole Moon as simply a “Black candidate.”
It would be great if we could go back to the 2020 results and analyze how Moon fared across the city, but we can’t — not completely. That pandemic year saw a surge of early voting, and those early votes were counted as part of a “central absentee precinct,” not allocated to the precinct in which they originated. That means when we look at the precinct results reported that year, they reflect only the in-person voting, which skewed Republican. (This is a problem that’s been fixed, thanks to a bill by state Sen. David Suetterlein, R-Roanoke.) Among those voters, she ran pretty well outside the city’s Black-majority precincts: She finished third in Old Southwest-Wasena, for instance. All we can say for certain is that Moon ran well enough that year to take the third and last winning slot in the council race, finishing ahead of one of the Democratic nominees.
If this were a normal election year, we might expect the Democratic nominee to take about 60% in the city and the Republican 40%. If Moon were to reduce the Democratic vote to 40%, we’d have a race that’s 40%, 40%, 20%. The question is whether she can take more than that. Could she take 27% from Cobb and 7% from Bowers to wind up at 34%, 33%, 33%?
The closest example we have in Roanoke is the 2000 mayoral race. That was a four-way affair, with three of those being the strongest candidates — David Bowers (then a Democrat), Ralph Smith (a Republican) and Mac McCadden (like Moon, a member of city council, and, like Moon, a member of the Black community). Those three candidates ran nearly even: Smith 35.4%, McCadden 31.9%, Bowers 30.5%.
That was also the last year Roanoke elected a Republican to council. That also came during a May election, with a much lower turnout and less partisan environment than we have with a November election. We are now in uncharted territory.
Lynchburg Ward I
The current council elected Reed as mayor (and Chris Faraldi as vice mayor) on a 4-3 vote. The four: Reed, Faraldi and two council members generally considered Democrats: MaryJane Dolan and Sterling Wilder. Wilder is running this year with the Democratic nomination in Ward II. In Ward I, Dolan is retiring. If we work from that previous 4-3 vote for Reed, where would that fourth and decisive vote come from on the new council? The obvious place to look would be Dolan’s replacement: While neither Democrat Randy Smith nor independent Cameron Craddock Howe have said explicitly that they’d vote for Reed, both have had warm things to say about her leadership. In a campaign forum Monday on WLNI-FM, the candidates were asked to grade Reed as mayor. Howe gave her an A for her work in the community (but didn’t assign a grade for her interactions with fellow council members). Smith gave her a B while Timmer said she didn’t feel right grading a fellow Republican. Beyond that, Timmer has said only that she believes the mayor should be directly elected for the people. That would require approval by the General Assembly, so come January, if Timmer wins, she’ll have to cast a vote for mayor. Who will it be for? Reed has said she’s only had one conversation with Timmer, and that was back in January, but expects to work well with her if she’s elected.
(You can look up the candidates’ answers to this and other questions on our Voter Guide).
In the absence of polling, it’s unclear how much voters really care who the mayor is, and, if they do, where that ranks on their list of priorities. If Ward I voters care, and if they want to keep Reed as mayor, then it looks like they should vote for Howe or Smith. If they want to see a new mayor, then a vote for Timmer heightens the likelihood that the next council would pick someone else. Who might that be? The options then would be Timmer, the likely Ward III winner Curt Diemer (I’m basing this on historic voting trends) or at-large council members Marty Misjuns and Larry Taylor.
First, though, we need to elect that Ward I council member. How might this three-way race play out, Professor Duverger? (A rhetorical question; he died in 2014.) Because of the way absentee votes were reported in 2020, we can’t really say how Ward I voted in that year’s presidential race. We can, though, in other years:
2016:
Donald Trump 48.7%
Hillary Clinton 42.7%
Others: 8.6%
2012:
Mitt Romney 56.9%
Barack Obama 41.1%
Others: 2.0%
2008:
John McCain 54.8%
Barack Obama 43.9%
Others: 1.3%
I see two things here. First, this is a Republican ward. Second, I notice how Trump in 2016 ran significantly below previous Republican presidential nominees (and while we don’t know how he did here in 2020, we do know that four years ago Joe Biden became the first Democrat to carry Lynchburg since Harry Truman in 1948, so it seems likely that Trump did less well in this ward than he did in 2016). This fits the pattern we’ve seen elsewhere: Trump produces “extra” votes in rural areas, he loses some traditional Republican votes in more affluent areas such as Lynchburg’s Ward I.
If Trump weren’t on the ballot, history suggests that Timmer would win this ward. With Trump on the ballot, history suggests it will be more competitive. We also don’t know how much Lynchburg’s council dramas will play into things. Will voters cast a straight-party ticket? Or will some be inclined to mix and match? If so, how will they do that?
Just as we asked in Roanoke who the independent Moon would take her votes from, we must ask where the independent Howe will take her votes from. Timmer has been excoriated on social media as an “election denier” for her work as founder of the American Voters Alliance; she disputes that characterization and says the group is for “defending individual freedoms and fair elections.” Whatever the particulars, will Timmer seem too conservative for some Ward I voters (some of whom have clearly had reservations about Trump)? Will that create an opening for Howe, who might seem a safe harbor for some Republican voters who may not want Timmer but don’t want to vote for a Democrat, either?
Howe recently picked up the endorsement of the Forward Party, a centrist organization co-founded by Andrew Yang (who sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020) and Christine Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey back in a different political era. Are there enough moderate voters in Ward I for Howe to pull off a victory by taking voters from both sides? Or would she pull enough voters from Timmer that the election goes Smith’s way? Or will straight-ticket voting prevail for one side or another? These seem to be the dynamics that will play out in Lynchburg Ward I, and they will have implications citywide.
Lynchburg Ward IV
This is a ward that ought to be a Republican ward as GOP incumbent Faraldi seeks re-election against Democrat April Watson. Here’s the voting history in presidential years:
2016:
Donald Trump 55.2%
Hillary Clinton 36.2%
Others 8.6%
2012
Mitt Romney 59.3%
Barack Obama 38.7%
Others 2.0%
2008
John McCain 57.8%
Barack Obama: 40.8%
Others 1.4%
We see the same drop-off in Trump’s support here as we did in Ward I, just not as much. Different type of ward.
The wild card here is that Peter Alexander, the candidate that Faraldi defeated in the June primary (and who then went to court in a failed bid to overturn the results, which were close but outside the margin that allowed for a recount). Alexander has now launched a write-in campaign. Meanwhile, Republican council member Marty Misjuns has been regularly blasting Faraldi. From his social media posts and email blasts, you’d think that Misjuns was running against Faraldi. (Rachel Mahoney has more about this race.)
It’s hard enough to win as an independent, it’s even harder as a write-in (although Jackie Stump did it in a House of Delegates race in Southwest Virginia in 1989). However, in Alexander’s interview with Cardinal, he seemed to indicate he’d be just fine with Watson winning — he just wants Faraldi gone. It’s conceivable that Howe in Ward I will pull from both parties; it seems inconceivable here that any Democrats would go for Alexander. History suggests the basic Democratic vote in this ward is between 36.2% and 40.8%. Could Alexander pull enough votes away from Faraldi that he dips below that? These presidential runs suggest he’d need to take between 17% and almost 21% of the vote to do that. That’s a lot, but the dynamics among Lynchburg Republicans are … interesting, to say the least. We know what party insiders think. We don’t really know what casual Republican voters think. Those are the ones who will dominate at the polls.
To be more specific: In June, 2,051 people voted in the Ward IV Republican primary. In the 2016 presidential election, there were 8,719 voters in that ward — 4,813 of them Republican. By that measure there are more Republicans we haven’t heard from than Republicans we have heard from. Perhaps that’s why state Republican Party chair Rich Anderson took the unusual step Monday of issuing a statement emphasizing that Faraldi is “our only official candidate in Ward IV.” Would some pro-Alexander Republicans be willing to risk a Democratic victory in Ward IV on the theory that they’ll pick up a seat in Ward I to balance things out? The risk is that they misjudge and wind up expanding the number of Democrats on council.
We have not seen many visible signs of an Alexander campaign yet, but we don’t know what will happen on Election Day. Will he flood precincts with supporters handing out sample ballots that imply he’s the true Republican in the race? What would Comrade Duverger have to say about a contest over who is the better Republican?
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