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Democrats won all three seats available on the Lynchburg City Council on Tuesday, although in many ways they won those seats on June 13 — that’s the date when the governing body for Virginia Republicans voided the results of a party-run nominating process as procedurally flawed.
That set in motion a scenario that had two rival slates of Republicans running as independents. What happened this week was that the Republican vote predictably split between those two slates, opening the way for a Democratic sweep that now gives Democrats control of the council.
For some, that’s maybe all they need to know. For those who want a deeper understanding of the situation, here’s what an analysis of the election results shows.
A unified Republican slate could have won up to three council seats
That doesn’t necessarily mean any three Republicans could have won (more on that to come), but the numbers suggest that the Democratic sweep was not inevitable. As always, let’s see what the math tells us.
In the U.S. Senate race, Democrat Mark Warner carried Lynchburg by a vote of 15,589 to 13,604 over Republican Bert Mizusawa.
In the U.S. House race, Democrat Tom Perriello carried Lynchburg by a vote of 15,034 to 13,576 over Republican John McGuire.
That means there were 15,000-plus Democratic voters in the city.
Now let’s look at the results of the council race. For the sake of clarity, I’ll label the Republicans as Republicans even though they legally had to run as independents. I’ll further label them by their two slates. One group ran as Team Lynchburg; the other slate did not appear to have a name but much of their literature pushed a “Conservative Majority” so that’s how I’ll label them here so we can keep track of who’s on whose side.
Keep in mind that these are unofficial numbers and don’t include about 1,700 provisional ballots, mostly from Liberty University students. Those are likely to be overwhelmingly Republican ballots.
Nathaniel “Nat” Marshall (D) 12,623
Christina Anne Delzingaro (D) 12,600
Dave Henderson (D) 12,348
Stephanie Reed (R-Team) 7,930
Larry Taylor (R-Team) 7,800
Veronica Bratton (R-CM) 7,506
Marty Misjuns (R-CM) 7,435
Chris Boswell (R-Team) 7,085
Eli Rybinni (I) 1,780
Write-ins 471
What we see is the ballot drop-off — the Democratic congressional candidates drew 15,000 votes, the Democratic council candidates in the 12,000 range. The specific drop-off for the Democratic council candidates ran 2,966 to 3,241 votes from Warner’s numbers and 2,411 to 2,686 from Perriello’s numbers.
It’s normal to see some ballot drop-off as voters work their way down the ballot. These numbers quantify what the ballot drop-off was for Democratic voters, but what about for Republican voters?
This gets trickier, and takes us into more speculative realms. Given how split Lynchburg Republicans have been, would Republican votes have stuck together for a single slate?
That voided party-run nomination had produced a ticket of Bratton, Misjuns and Taylor — a split ticket from two different factions. Let’s assume that in this election each faction only voted for its own candidates, so that no Bratton-Misjuns voters cast ballots this fall for Taylor since he was on the Team Lynchburg slate. There’s always some ticket-splitting but for figuring purposes, this seems a reasonable assumption to me. The literature for Bratton and Misjuns encouraged voters to just double-shot those two candidates and not cast a third vote.
What if that original slate of Bratton, Misjuns and Taylor hadn’t been tossed? How many of the voters for Reed and Boswell would have supported Bratton and Misjuns? We have no way of knowing. However, it seems likely that those Bratton-Misjuns voters then would have stuck with Taylor if he was their running mate. In that case, if we add either the Bratton or Misjuns votes to Taylor, then he’d have polled 15,306 or 15,235 votes — and led the balloting. That seems high; that’s more votes than either of the Republican congressional candidates received. However, as we’ve seen, there were 13,576 to 13,604 Republican voters casting ballots this year. If Republicans had been able to minimize ballot drop, the votes were there for them to win all three council seats. They just fumbled the opportunity.
What if Lynchburg Republicans had held a state-run primary to nominate their candidates?
While I’m tracing the trouble back to June when the state party tossed the results of that party-run nomination, we really need to go back to the party’s original decision to find some daylight in the state law that comes very close to requiring a state-run primary but does leave some room for exceptions. Lynchburg Republicans tried to find that exception and make it work — their own state party said they failed.
What if Lynchburg Republicans hadn’t tried to set up a party-run nominating process and instead had simply gone with a state-run primary? We have no way of knowing who would have won. Can the election results give us some clues? Maybe, but not enough.
In this election, the top three Republican finishers so far are Reed, Taylor and Bratton — two from one slate, one from the other. (The final provisionals from the Liberty precinct might change that order.) Would a Republican primary have mirrored the general election? We don’t know. A primary turnout would have been smaller, so the composition would have been different.
There was a Republican primary in Lynchburg this year — for U.S. Senate and U.S. House. That primary drew 2,965 Republican voters. A city council primary added to that would have likely boosted the turnout higher, but it’s unreasonable to think it would have reached general election levels, so we can’t predict who would have won. Based on this math, though, it seems likely that if Taylor had been one of those primary winners, he’d have won the general election, too.
The only thing I think we can say for certain is that the Republicans in the general election clearly did not mirror the voters in the party-run “firehouse primary” in the spring. Should Lynchburg Republican leaders conclude from this that they are out of touch with the general election voters they need? Even if the yet-to-be-counted Liberty ballots move Bratton and Misjuns up (which seems likely, given how other Liberty ballots have gone), it’s clear that the general populace outside of the Liberty precinct has a slight preference for Reed and Taylor.
What if there had never been a Republican split?
This is the mother of hypotheticals. It’s like asking: What if there were no moon? What if the Vikings hadn’t abandoned their settlements in North America? What if pigs could fly?
Still, just for the fun of it, let’s look at the math.
In the 2022 election, in which Republicans swept three council seats, their top finishers were:
Reed: 12,287
Taylor: 11,658
Misjuns: 10,685
The next nearest candidate polled 10,157 votes.
Lynchburg this year appears to have had 26.8% more voters than it did four years ago — 23,419 voted then, 29,708 voted this year. That makes a difference. If the three Republican incumbents got the same votes this year that they got four years ago, they’d have still lost, although Reed would have come very close. Most of those new voters appear to have cast Democratic ballots, but not all. Support for the Republican candidate for Congress grew by 1,068 votes. If the Republican council incumbents had been able to do the same, then Reed would have had 13,355 votes and Taylor would have had 12,726 — and would have finished one and two, with the Democrat Marshall third.
Instead, the things that happened over the past four years happened, and on Tuesday this happened: Democrats swept all three seats and now have a 4-3 council majority. Lynchburg Republicans will now have four years to think about ways to avoid this next time.
We’ll have even more politics and more numbers in this week’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that comes out on Friday afternoons. Sign up here:
