Lynchburg voters elected council members but didn’t resolve council politics

Elections are supposed to provide answers.

Tuesday’s election certainly gave us answers nationally. In Lynchburg, though, it only left us with more questions. Here are four of them.

1. Will the Lynchburg council elections resolve the political drama there?

This one is easy to answer. That answer is “no.” The practical reason is that some of the main combatants remain on council (whether they are willing or unwilling combatants in the ongoing Republican family feud is a point of contention). The twice-censured Marty Misjuns wasn’t up for re-election; neither was Mayor Stephanie Reed, one of his frequent foils. Vice Mayor Chris Faraldi appears to have been re-elected, although we can’t say for certain until provisional ballots and late-arriving mail ballots are counted.

Misjuns put out a statement congratulating three of the council winners (even Democrat Sterling Wilder) but pointedly left out Faraldi, calling that race “too close to call” and saying that “Faraldi is so unpopular he didn’t even get 50% of the vote.” Curiously, he didn’t say the same thing about Republican Jacqueline Timmer, who won her Ward I race with less than 50% of the vote.

The election did certainly change the dynamics on council, in ways we can’t fully predict yet. During the campaign, Timmer steadfastly declined to say how she’d vote in January when Lynchburg council members have to pick one of their own to be mayor. Of the four votes that installed Reed, one is gone, so she needs to pick up another to keep the post. It doesn’t sound as if Timmer is likely to back her, so the question is what Republican Larry Taylor does; he’s generally tried to avoid controversy. If he doesn’t back Reed, then the mayor will be one of these: Misjuns, Reed, Taylor and likely Ward III winner Curt Diemer. 

Changing the mayor, though, won’t change the essential conflict. Practically speaking, the only thing that will resolve Lynchburg’s political drama is another election cycle or so, to see if voters want to take matters into their own hands in the next at-large elections in 2026. 

A nerd note: Lynchburg’s council situation is an argument for a parliamentary form of government. Imagine if the mayor could simply dissolve council and call new elections for every seat to get a fresh perspective from voters.

Back in the real world, though, we can only ask this:

2. What did the election tell us about how Lynchburg voters feel? Ward I, first.

Let’s do the math. 

We’re still waiting on provisional ballots and any late-arriving mail ballots, but those seem unlikely to change the basic numbers anywhere except potentially Ward III, which had about a lot of provisional ballots cast by Liberty University students. 

In Ward I, these are the current numbers:

If Timmer had gotten a majority, we could draw certain lessons. Can we draw any from a plurality? 

Perhaps so. Kamala Harris carried Ward I over Donald Trump, 5,197 to 5,067.

That immediately suggests that if Howe weren’t on the ballot, then Smith would have won Ward I and the balance on the next Lynchburg City Council would be exactly what it is now. 

Here’s another way to look at this: How much did each candidate’s vote differ from their party’s presidential candidate? 

Based on this, a lot of Democratic voters checked off Harris but then checked off Howe instead of Smith. 

We also see no ballot drop-off from the presidential race to the Senate one. In Ward I, Democrat Tim Kaine took 5,293 votes, Republican Hung Cao 5,100, which means in Ward I both Senate candidates outpolled their presidential ticketmates. Kaine ran ahead of Harris statewide, but Cao ran behind Trump, so these Ward I results on the Republican side are unusual. In any case, this helps clarify the ballot drop-off in the Ward I council race. 

Between the two major party candidates, we see a total drop-off of 1,897 votes. Howe took 1,683. It sure looks to me as if Howe may have drawn some votes from both sides, but drew twice as many away from Smith as from Timmer (and then some just didn’t vote).

None of this changes the fact that Timmer won, but it seems likely that most Ward I voters were voting against the current Republican majority on council. Who they blame most for the dysfunction, we can’t say.

3. What about Ward IV?

Let’s do the same math in Ward IV, where Peter Alexander, who lost his primary challenge against Faraldi, then mounted a write-in campaign where he pretty openly hoped to peel off enough Republican votes to throw the election to Democrat April Watson. That hasn’t happened, but Alexander has held Faraldi under 50%. 

The current numbers:

The other wards had between 60 and 79 write-ins. If that’s the standard number, it seems safe to assume all the rest here are for Alexander. For the sake of argument, I’m going to assume that all 730 are for Alexander, although they probably aren’t.

So what kind of ballot drop-off did we see here?

With Watson, we see no ballot drop-off whatsoever. She ran 65 votes ahead of Harris in Ward IV, while 1,041 people who voted for Trump did not vote for Faraldi (who spent part of the fall working for the Trump campaign).

If we assume all 730 of those write-ins are disgruntled Republicans who backed Alexander, that means there were 5,177 Republican council votes in this ward (Faraldi plus write-ins). That’s still 311 Trump voters who didn’t vote in the Ward IV race. Were they Republicans who didn’t want to vote for either Faraldi or Alexander? Or was this just the typical ballot dropoff?

It’s hard to say. All I say is to point out that both Timmer in Ward I and Faraldi in Ward IV got almost exactly the same number of votes and both saw some Trump votes they should have gotten go somewhere else.

It’s easier to say, though, that Watson made a strong showing by slightly outpacing her party’s presidential candidate. It may have been unrealistic to think a Democrat could win Ward IV, given its Republican propensities, but if Lynchburg Democrats are looking for a candidate in the 2026 at-large elections, Watson could be a strong contender. 

4. Could provisional ballots make the difference in Ward IV?

But wait, we’re not done yet!

Faraldi has a 167-vote lead. There are 334 provisional ballots yet to be counted in that ward, plus whatever late-arriving mail ballots arrive before Friday at noon. We know that, city-wide, most of the provisional ballots in Lynchburg are same-day registrants. In other communities, we could expect that those would skew Democratic; Democrats have pushed same-day registration harder than Republicans. Republicans generally don’t like same-day registration. Lynchburg may or may not be different. Liberty University students vote in Ward III; University of Lynchburg students would vote in Ward IV, though. We also know that mail voting almost always skews Democratic, even in Republican areas.

To overcome that 167-vote deficit, Watson would need to win 75.15% of the provisional ballots — that would be 251-83, a margin of 168 votes. Of course, that’s also assuming no provisional voters cast write-in ballots for Alexander.

The 5th District fizzle

In this week’s West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter, I review some of the numbers coming out of this week’s election. Among them: Just how badly the write-in campaign for Bob Good fizzled.

I also look at:

• How Democrat Eugene Vindman won the 7th District.
• The best and worst localities in Virginia for both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
• How badly the Democratic vote has shrunk in parts of Southwest Virginia.
• A surprise appearance by pop star Chappell Roan.

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