Two of the five candidates in the Democratic primary for Roanoke City Council have found themselves the subject of some bad publicity due to actions of their own making.
This raises the obvious political question: What impact will this news have on the candidacies of Harvey Brookins and Peter Volosin?
Let’s recap the news and then see if history offers us any guide.
With Brookins, the issue is the news that in 2017 he was charged with a misdemeanor count of assault and battery against his then-wife. A judge found sufficient reason to find him guilty, but sent him to a counseling program; the charge was dismissed in 2019.
Where they stand
The Democratic primary for city council is Aug. 4. Early voting is now underway. To see where the candidates stand, see the Roanoke page on our Voter Guide.
With Volosin, the issue is that fellow council member Phazhon Nash says Volosin approached him after a close vote where they were on different sides of the 4-3 tally, slapped the back of his chair and told Nash he was “owned” by a fellow council member. Nash, who is Black, took this as both an insult and one with racial overtones. On Monday, Volosin apologized and said his remarks “landed differently than intended.”
The news in both these situations comes as early voting is already underway for the Aug. 4 primary. Five candidates are seeking three nominations on the ballot: incumbents Volosin and Vivian Sanchez-Jones, along with three newcomers, Brookins, Danny Clawson and Raekwon Moore. Roanoke typically votes about 60% or so Democratic, so a Democratic nomination is a valuable thing to have. It’s often — but not always — tantamount to election. This fall’s council race will come against the backdrop of a congressional midterm election, which may serve to drive partisanship. It will also feature four other candidates, some of them well-known: Former mayor David Bowers, former council member Stephanie Moon Reynolds and community activist Kathy Cohen, all running as independents, plus Republican Amanda Marko.
The news about both these candidates broke after 1,138 people had already voted early in the Aug. 4 primary — this is one of the risks of voting early; there might be things that happen afterwards. Roanoke doesn’t have much history with party primaries for city council. Democrats have only held two, in 2022 and 2024. Two years ago, 3,590 people voted in the Democratic council primary. In 2022, there were 4,350 voters.
If this year’s turnout tracks two years ago, then 31.6% of the votes have already been cast — and won’t be changed by these developments. If we go by four years ago, then 26.1% of the votes have been cast. Either way, roughly one-quarter to one-third of the votes are already locked in, so we’re talking about what impact the news about Brookins and Volosin will have on the rest of the electorate.
The impact of Brookins’ 2017 charge is hard to gauge. The five-way contest includes two incumbents and three first-time candidates. Brookins is one of the latter, so if he loses, is it because of this news or because he just didn’t have the support to win anyway? I know of no way to determine that in any mathematical way.
With Volosin, it’s perhaps easier. He’s an incumbent, so if he loses, well, maybe the reason will be this, or maybe it will be something else, but we will certainly be able to say that something caused him to lose this time when he won before.
Conversely, if either or both of these candidates win, we can certainly say they won despite these revelations.
So far I haven’t done much more than state what seems obvious. With Volosin, though, we do have another way to measure the impact. Nash alleges a racial dimension — intended or otherwise — to Volosin’s comments. Because many of Roanoke’s Black voters live in specific precincts, that gives us a way to start measuring things. Nash said that he did not vote for Volosin when he cast his ballot early (although he didn’t say who he voted for). If other Black voters take their cue from the only Black member on the council, what would be the impact? Let’s try to find out.
In 2022, when Volosin won the nomination, there were four candidates seeking three seats. Volosin finished third behind Joe Cobb (who is now mayor and not on the ballot this year) and Sanchez-Jones. We quickly run into difficulty, though: The 2022 election was before a new law (sponsored by state Sen. David Suetterlein, R-Roanoke County) took effect that requires early votes be attributed to that voter’s precinct. That’s a law cheered by every election analyst in the state. Here’s why: When we look at the 2022 primary results, we know Volosin got 2,626 votes — and that 630 of them were attributed to the “central absentee precinct,” meaning we don’t know where they came from in the city. If we’re trying to determine how much he owed his election to one particular neighborhood, we can’t because nearly a quarter of his vote can’t be described geographically.
That means when we do look at certain precincts, we’re only looking at part of the vote there — if early voting was uniform (and it probably wasn’t), then we only see three-fourths of the picture in any given precinct. That will have to do.
Roanoke’s Black voters are concentrated in four precincts. In Lincoln Terrace and Eureka Park, the three winning candidates in that primary — Cobb, Sanchez-Jones and Volosin — all ran about the same in those two precincts, but Volosin did get the most votes in each (three votes more than Cobb in Lincoln Terrace, two votes more than Cobb in Eureka Park).
In Forest Park, Volosin finished fourth — out of the money.
In Grandview, he finished third — 27 votes behind Sanchez-Jones but only two votes behind Cobb.
The big picture in that race: Of the votes we can attribute to specific precincts, Volosin finished first in three (Eastgate plus Eureka Park and Lincoln Terrace), second in five (all in the southwest part of the city) and third in eight others. If Volosin were to suffer any political damage with Black voters, that could deprive him of two of his best precincts, although it’s unclear what the impact of that would be overall.
There is another way to look at this, though.
When Volosin ran in the 2022 Democratic primary, there were no Black candidates in the race. This year, two of the five candidates are Black — Brookins and Moore.
We don’t know precisely what percentage of voters in a Democratic primary in Roanoke are Black, but we know that overall, about 28% of Roanoke’s population is Black. That gives any Black candidate the potential of a sturdy base in any citywide campaign for a Democratic nomination.
We also know that two years ago, Nash led the balloting in the Democratic primary, so presumably has a strong following citywide. The other Black candidate two years ago dropped out after voting started — but could have won if he’d stayed in. If voting had stopped after the early voting, Jamaal Jackson would have finished third and secured the last spot available.
While we have no idea how individual people are voting, if we surmise that the two Black candidates in the race are well-positioned to run well with Black voters, then we’re in a situation where those voters would have just one vote left in the primary: Who would they use that for? Both Volosin and Sanchez-Jones ran well in Black precincts four years ago. Under this scenario, one of them would get squeezed out this time. Is this incident enough to make the difference?
We also need to consider the possibility that some voters, Black or white, won’t use all three of their votes. This is a practice called “single-shotting” (if voters only mark one of three possible candidates) or “double-shotting” (if they mark two of the possible three). The rationale for not using a vote is to give an advantage to someone’s favorite candidates by denying a vote to a third choice; those voters wouldn’t want to see their favorite candidates lose by a single vote to their third-choice pick, so maybe better not to make one. If Black voters were to double-shot Brookins and Moore, then no other candidate would be taking votes out of precincts that Volosin won four years ago.
Even if we discount this incident, we have the only Black member on the council making it known that he doesn’t support Volosin for reelection. What kind of signal does that send to voters, Black or white?
We won’t know until Aug. 4.
All we know for certain is that two years ago, Nash won 17,737 votes in the general election while two years prior, Volosin won 9,672 votes in the general election.
That comparison may be somewhat misleading since a) those are general election numbers and right now we’re in a primary and b) Nash ran during a high-turnout presidential election while Volosin ran during a lower-turnout congressional midterm. Still, the point is there are nearly twice as many people in Roanoke who have voted for Nash than have voted for Volosin. If some of those take their cues from Nash for this primary, that could make a difference in an election that likely will have about 4,000 or so voters — and where the difference between winning and losing in a Democratic primary was 488 votes two years ago and 263 votes four years ago.
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