Press Reset on the RVA Mayor’s Race

Projection by Dustin Klein, Photo by Alexis Delilah; https://rvamag.com/photo/peaceful-protest-movement-in-richmond-continues-to-grow.html

Throw out everything you thought you knew about how this fall’s Mayoral election would go.

It might seem cavalier, even a little obscene, to write about a political horse race after such a historic week, especially considering how many citizens of Richmond risked so much in the streets.

But the city’s protests, still ongoing, are directly affecting the upcoming election in dramatic fashion. It’s actually rare for what scholars call the “politics of contention” to so quickly and clearly translate into electoral activity.

We’ll see where the dust settles after this month’s filing deadline, extended to June 23 due to quarantine. But we might see at least three new challengers to incumbent city council members, plus a couple of school board candidates as well. All of these folks are would-be reformers clearly energized by this past week’s protests.

The most significant change to the electoral landscape is a new candidate for Mayor: Alexsis Rodgers.

Rodgers might be a rookie campaigner, but she’s no political neophyte; she’s a former President of the Virginia Young Democrats, and was Ralph Northam’s policy director when he was Lt. Governor. She’s no joke.

It’s not clear how much support Rodgers will draw from her connections to Virginia’s political establishment. But she’s already been embraced by the city’s young, progressive political class, with the multiracial organizing collective Richmond For All helping drive already impressive fundraising numbers and gathering signatures to get Rodgers on the ballot.

Rodgers’ entry into the race may still result in what had looked to be a referendum on incumbent Mayor Levar Stoney’s tenure. But it is also a rebuke of sorts to the Mayor’s main challenger.

City Councilmember Kim Gray had positioned herself in the past year as the chief alternative to Stoney. She was a key figure in defeating his Navy Hill arena boondoggle, and earned much of the credit for renaming Arthur Ashe Boulevard last year. But her response to the protests has been mixed at best, including a revealing appearance on the conservative radio station WRVA in which she seemed to align herself with property owners against protestors. She has since issued more sympathetic statements, but seemed to hedge somewhat on immediate removal of Confederate monuments, saying she would support removal but only through a “thoughtful and deliberative process.” She’s not exactly grasping the zeitgeist here.

As for Stoney? He remains a formidable campaigner, and he still has friends in high places. But after the Navy Hill debacle and his less-than-stellar response to the recent protests, his path to re-election is murkier than ever. He won the 2016 election with only a third of the city’s voters. Many of his supporters were the very young progressives out in the streets getting tear gassed by the police officers critics say he is unable to control or reform. It’s unclear if he even has a constituency any more.

Still, Rodgers has her work cut out for her. As we saw nationally with the Bernie Sanders campaign, young progressives are not always a reliable voting bloc. Richmond remains insular; powerful corporate players and old political hands still command enormous resources and power. Plenty of RVA residents do not support or even understand the protests.

But the electoral landscape, at least, is being reshaped by movement politics in real time. Such transformative moments hold out the possibility for lasting reform, to policy, institutions, and even political culture. The city’s next Mayor will have the opportunity to seize that moment, or let it slip away. We’ll find out this fall.