Got a question about the election results? Let us know here.
In 1910, The Roanoke Times used a beacon atop Mill Mountain to signal that year’s election results. If the light moved sideways, that indicated a Democratic victory. If it moved up and down, that meant a Republican win. In between, there was a complicated series of flashes that — if you’d followed the instructions printed in the paper — you could use to figure out which race was about to be announced.
Today we have other technologies — you’re using one of them right now — but if Roanoke officials wanted to honor the city’s legacy, they could simply change the color of the Mill Mountain Star to match whoever won. In this year’s case, that would be blue. A very bright blue.
Democrats swept all three council seats on the ballot in Roanoke on Tuesday. Not surprising, since Roanoke these days is a very reliably Democratic city.
However, a decision back in 1997 prevented Republican Amanda Marko from winning a seat on the council.
That was the year that Roanoke voters, by a margin of 54% to 46%, rejected a ward system. To this day, Roanoke elects all seven members of the city council — well, six council members plus a mayor — on an at-large basis. For a city of almost 100,000, that’s unusual but not unheard-of. Chesapeake is 2.5 times as large and also has a completely at-large council.
There are good arguments for and against a ward system, and I’m not here to litigate those. Instead, I’m just here to look at the electoral implications: In a Democratic city such as Roanoke, the at-large system makes it difficult for one particular political minority to win representation on the council. That political minority? Republicans.
If we look into where the candidates this year got their votes, we get a better sense of how there is not one Roanoke but many Roanokes — but some of them aren’t able to elect candidates to the council.
Here are the unofficial results (with provisional ballots and some post-election mail ballots yet to be added):
Raekwon Moore (D): 16,408
Danny Clawson (D): 12,867
Vivian Sanchez-Jones (D): 12,577
David Bowers (I): 10,283
Stephanie Moon Reynolds (I): 10,251
Amanda Marko (R): 8,835
Kathy Cohen (I): 8,403
Write-ins: 491
An at-large system rewards candidates who run consistently strong across the city. Moore finished first because he was consistent. He finished first in 15 of the city’s 20 precincts. In two of the other five, he finished second, so he finished in the top three in 17 of 20 precincts. That explains not just why he won, but why he won with so many more votes than his two ticketmates, whose performances weren’t quite as consistent as his.
Moore was also just darned popular. In many precincts where the Democrats finished one, two, three, he ran well ahead. Take the Highland precinct. That was Moore 1,053, Clawson 880, Sanchez-Jones 771, with the other candidates far behind. And then there were the thunderous numbers he pulled out of the city’s predominantly Black precincts. In Eureka Park, it was Moore 1,041, Sanchez-Jones 764, Moon Reynolds 756, Clawson 542 and the others further back.
In the other places where he didn’t finish in a winning position, he finished fourth, just out of the money. This is a textbook performance for an at-large winner: Do well everywhere and, if possible, do really well in a few places.
Clawson and Sanchez-Jones turned in textbook performances in other ways: Don’t get blown out anywhere. They didn’t always finish in the top three, but they were reasonably competitive everywhere. Clawson didn’t finish first in any precincts but steadily accumulated enough votes to finish second.
Of the others, two stand out: Bowers and Marko. Both ran tantalizingly well in some places — taking first place in multiple precincts — but then cratered elsewhere. In the end, both of them had electoral performances that were too erratic to finish in a winning spot.
Bowers finished first in three precincts: Preston Park, East Gate and Deyerle. He placed second in Hollins Road and Garden City, third in Southeast and South Roanoke. A ward system would not help Bowers: Those places are too geographically distant.
Marko, though, would have benefited from a ward system, depending on how the wards were drawn. She finished first in three adjacent precincts: Crystal Spring, Garden City and South Roanoke. She also lives in the Garden City precinct.
In a ward system that had those three precincts in the same ward (which would be logical), she’d have been a strong contender.
Since we’re talking about a hypothetical ward system, we don’t know what it would look like. Would Roanoke have six wards and an at-large mayor or would it have a system like Lynchburg, where there are some council members elected by ward and some elected at large? Once we start going down this speculative road, we get swallowed up by “what if’s” that look like potholes in the road but are really portals to another dimension. In a ward system, we wouldn’t necessarily have the same set of candidates that we just did. Who would run in a ward system that didn’t run this week in an at-large system?
Still, the point of this exercise is to show how an at-large system works. In those three precincts, voters made their preference clear: Their first choice was Marko, but the rest of the city’s voters vetoed that choice.
It’s not impossible for a Republican to win citywide in Roanoke, just difficult. Republican Nick Hagen, who won a council seat two years ago, showed it’s possible. He was also the first Republican to win a council seat since 2000.
Hagen benefited from something Marko couldn’t on Tuesday: Two years ago there was a weak Democratic candidate, who finished sixth out of seven candidates. That created an opening. There was no such weak Democratic candidate this year. Hagen also turned in a more consistent performance that Marko did this year. He took first in the Williamson Road precinct; she finished last. He took first in Hollins Road; she finished next to last. Hagen also had the benefit of having run unsuccessfully two years before, so he had name recognition that Marko didn’t.
This was a different year, with different candidates, different circumstances. Nonetheless, the numbers point to this: If Roanoke had a ward system, its city council would be more politically diverse.
We’ll have even more math and more politics in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that comes out on Friday afternoons. Sign up here:
