We have new — and final — election numbers out of Lynchburg. They don’t change who won, but they do change the order of finish for the Republican runners-up to the city council, and that’s ignited a new round of the intraparty warfare that has raged for the past four years.
The final tally, which came out late Wednesday, adds in some ballots that previously hadn’t been counted — at least 133 mail ballots that came in after Election Day but before the Nov. 6 deadline and, more importantly, at least 1,778 provisional ballots.
These are largely from people who register to vote on Election Day and whose paperwork needed to be verified afterwards. In the case of Lynchburg, these are also almost entirely Liberty University students, who vote almost unanimously Republican. In that Liberty precinct — more properly known as Third Ward Second Precinct — 95.59% of the vote in the Senate race went to Republican Bert Mizusawa, 97.87% voted no on the reproductive health/abortion constitutional amendment and 97.05% voted no on the same-sex marriage amendment.
With those final votes now verified, counted and added in, Democrat Tom Perriello’s victory margin in Lynchburg was shaved and his vote share pulled under 50%. He wound up taking 49.47% to John McGuire’s 48.00% in a three-way race. That won’t change the districtwide outcome — which McGuire won — but it does change our understanding of how the two major parties fared in Lynchburg. Democrats can still say their congressional candidate carried the city; Republicans can point out that the Democrat failed to win a majority. Both framings are true. (Democrat Mark Warner still took Lynchburg in the Senate race, just with a smaller vote share but still a majority with 51.36% of the vote.)
Now we come to the city council race. For those who haven’t hung on this because you’ve been binge-watching “Game of Thrones,” you’ve missed the real game of thrones. I will try to make this uncharacteristically brief: Lynchburg Republicans swept the three at-large seats on the city council four years ago with a ticket of Stephanie Reed, Larry Taylor and Marty Misjuns. That gave Republicans a 5-2 majority on the council (more recently upped to 6-1), but those Republicans promptly fractured into two rival camps. Think of the past four years as seasons one through four of “Game of Thrones,” during which time two different kings die horrible deaths that weren’t exactly accidents. The politics don’t break down cleanly, although the one side says the other side isn’t good conservatives, so there’s that.
State law now all but requires a state-run primary for party nominations. Earlier this year, Lynchburg Republicans tried to find the daylight in that “all but” section and staged their own party-run nominating process. Two rival slates, plus some others, ran, and the event produced a split ticket of Misjuns, Veronica Bratton and Taylor. Misjuns and Bratton were aligned with one faction, Taylor with the other. The state Republican Party’s governing body threw out the results as flawed, which led to five Republican candidates on the fall ballot, each officially listed as an independent. On the one side, Bratton and Misjuns, who claimed to represent the “conservative majority.” On the other, Reed, Taylor and Chris Boswell, who styled themselves as Team Lynchburg.
Not surprisingly, if you split the Republican vote between two rival slates in a closely divided city, the Democrats win, which is what happened. Three Democrats won council seats, which, come January, will give Lynchburg a 4-3 Democratic council.
As for how the final ballots changed the Republican order, here’s a comparison. 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. The top three candidates won:
Candidate Tally before provisionals and mail ballots Candidate Final tally Nathaniel “Nat” Marshall (D) 12,623 Marshall 12,934 Christina Anne Delzingaro (D) 12,600 Delzingaro 12,927 Dave Henderson (D) 12,348 Henderson 12,633 Stephanie Reed (R-Team) 7,930 Bratton 8,455 Larry Taylor (R-Team) 7,800 Misjuns 8,432 Veronica Bratton (R-CM) 7,506 Reed 8,431 Marty Misjuns (R-CM) 7,435 Taylor 8,263 Chris Boswell (R-Team) 7,085 Boswell 7,478 Eli Rybinni (I) 1,780 Rybinni 1,844
What we saw before: The top three Republican finishers were Reed, Taylor, Bratton.
Now, with the final ballots added, it’s Bratton, Misjuns, Reed.
Why does this matter?
It matters because it changes our understanding of the state of the Republican electorate in Lynchburg, and it matters a lot to some Lynchburg Republicans who have now renewed their internecine arguments.
The question has always been which faction best represents Lynchburg Republicans. The firehouse primary voters back in May said one thing, but fewer people voted in that exercise than would have voted in a state-run primary. What results would a state-run primary have produced? We don’t know. However, the fall election results give us a clue. It’s not a perfect clue — a general electorate looks different from a primary electorate — but it’s the best data we have.
Would a state-run primary have produced a ticket of Bratton, Misjuns and Reed — another split decision? That’s hard to say because the Bratton-Misjuns faction had a third ticketmate in the firehouse primary who later decided not to run in the fall. He didn’t win in the firehouse primary and might not have won a state-run primary, either, but it’s a variable we can’t account for.
What is easier to say is that if Republicans hadn’t fractured, they could have retained all three seats on the council. I’m not saying they would have, but they could have — the potential was there. I reached that same conclusion in a previous column shortly after the election; I still reach it again with these new numbers. The math is slightly different, but it winds up in the same place.
The question for each side is how many votes were available.
In the U.S. Senate race, Lynchburg voters cast 16,016 votes for the Democratic candidate, 15,059 for the Republican candidate.
In the U.S. House race, they cast 15,451 votes for the Democratic candidate, 14,990 votes for the Republican candidate.
From this, we can see that there were at least 14,990 Republican votes available for the city council candidates.
We also know there’s always some ballot drop-off as voters work their way down. Democrats had at least 15,451 votes available — as measured by the Perriello tally — but the Democratic council candidates polled between 12,934 and 12,633 votes.
Had there been a single Republican ticket — and had Republicans actually united around it — the question is what kind of “ballot melt” we’d have seen from the 14,990 votes cast for McGuire in the House race.
We have no way of knowing, but we do know that Republicans had less ballot melt from the Senate race to the House race than Democrats did. Perriello ran 565 votes behind Warner; McGuire ran just 69 votes behind Mizusawa. I don’t feel comfortable saying that’s proof there’d have been less ballot melt in the council race, but it does make me wonder. Even with all the turmoil on the council over the past four years, the votes were there for Republicans to retain that majority — but with two different slates of Republicans, there was no way for either to win.
One potential flaw to my theory is that, given the intraparty fighting, maybe not all Republican voters would have stuck with whomever the party nominated. The main point is that the Democratic sweep would not have been automatic in a straight Democrat vs. Republican campaign. Of course, that would also have been a very different campaign, and we don’t know how those dynamics would have played out. Still, the votes were there for Republicans.
The Republicans most diametrically opposed in this race were Bratton and Misjuns on one side and Reed on the other. It’s hard to picture any Bratton-Misjuns voters casting a ballot for Reed or Reed voters casting a ballot for Bratton-Misjuns. If they had, though, then each would have had more than 16,000 votes — more than enough to win.
In the meantime, the two factions are now sniping back and forth over which side better represents the party. The fact that the votes that changed the order of finish came mostly from Liberty is a complicating factor. Misjuns led the voting in the Liberty precinct by a wide margin, with Bratton second and others much further back. The specific numbers in Third Ward Second Precinct verge on the amazing: Misjuns 2,074; Bratton 1,888; Reed 902; Taylor 823; Boswell 664, and then the Democrats down in the double digits. That’s what lifted Misjuns into second place among the Republican finishers and made Bratton the top Republican vote-getter. How you feel about this may depend on how you feel about Misjuns, who has been at the center of council drama (although not necessarily there by himself).
If you don’t like that Misjuns-Bratton side of the party, then the argument is that those Liberty voters really shouldn’t count; they don’t represent the views of permanent Lynchburg residents. If you do like that side of the party, then the argument is that voters are voters and the Liberty students are voters, too, and this is what the results showed.
The election may be over, but the fight among Lynchburg Republicans appears likely to continue.
Bratton sent out an email blast Wednesday night that noted: “I am happy to report the grassroots candidates, Councilman Misjuns and myself moved to the top of the Republicans.”
When the Republicans for Liberty group posted that Misjuns and Bratton “led” the Republicans, council member Chris Faraldi, who backed the Team Lynchburg slate, countered in a social media post: “By ‘led’ they mean ONE VOTE. This group is the antithesis of serious … How embarrassing.”
Speculation is rampant that Del. Wendell Walker, R-Lynchburg, will face a primary challenge next year. Some blame him for swaying the Republican State Central Committee to toss the results of the party-run nominating process; the process was more complicated than that, but Walker is where some are targeting their fire. One cautionary note: Walker’s district voted Democratic this year in the congressional elections, making it a district that Democrats will want to target next year. With any primary challenge in a swing district, the incumbent party (in this case, the Republican Party) runs the risk of endangering the seat. Some Lynchburg Republicans may be so furious that this is not high in their calculations. (See more on vulnerable Republican seats in my other column today.)
Curt Diemer is the Republican vice mayor; his Curt Diemer for Lynchburg City Council account posted: “It’s a sad commentary that our Republican Delegate Wendell Walker, handed this election to the Democrats when he voted to throw out the legal firehouse primary voters, destroy the winningest local Republican Party in any city in Virginia just to ‘burn it down’ … I fully believe that Bratton Misjuns and Taylor would have won this election hands down if it wasn’t for the election interference of Delegate Wendell Walker, Former Mayor and consistent 6th place finisher, Stephanie Reed, Ward IV Councilman Chris Faraldi, and a corrupt Republican Party of Virginia and yes, even Larry Taylor. These politicians handed our City Council over to the Democrats.”
After communists took over China in 1949, American politicians argued for years about “Who lost China?” It looks like Lynchburg Republicans may argue for years about “Who lost the city council?”
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