With results in hand, Stephanie Lynch talks at Penny Lane Pub about her successful campaign. (Photo by David Streever)
In a hard-fought race between seven contenders, first-time candidate Stephanie Lynch prevailed Tuesday night, winning the 5th District City Council special election.
Lynch will serve a one-year term, filling the seat Parker Agelasto vacated early, after winning 1,982 votes, or 27.56%. Former School Board member Mamie Taylor came in second at 1,119 votes, trailed closely by Thad Williamson, a University of Richmond professor and the first director of the Office of Community Wealth Building, who took 1,092 votes.
In small numbers, voters were waiting in lines at 6 a.m. for polling stations to open all across the Fifth District. It led to high turnout for a special election, but lower than the 2016 council race won by Agelasto, who announced he’d step down this past April in response to legal challenges after he admitted he no longer lived in his district.
At Penny Lane Pub shortly after the results were announced, Lynch said she’d felt sure she’d lose earlier today. “Supporters would walk by me and not even make eye contact,” she said. “It was never a question of passion, I knew I could do the job, but as a woman, I just thought they’d decided to vote for a guy,” she said.
Despite the jitters, her win was dead-on with a projection she’d made at John B. Cary, a high turnout polling site in the district, at 7 a.m. that morning. “I can tell you this,” she said, sharing some internal strategy. “It’s hard to know with seven candidates, eight on the ballot, but we’re looking at 27% to 32% of the vote with a 4% margin of error. I think I’ll get 28%.”
At the polls, voters on both sides of the James River-bisected district repeated the same priorities Lynch articulated throughout the campaign: increased funding for education and safer streets and communities.
At John B. Cary, former candidate and Armstrong High School teacher Graham Sturm was stumping for Lynch. “She took the time to talk to me as a teacher,” he said. He enjoyed running for office, but found himself “yearning to be back in the classroom.” The more he spoke with Lynch, the more he leaned in her direction. “There’s money in the General Assembly for schools that we’re not even trying to get,” he said. “With her experience, she can do it.”
All over the district, candidates had big volunteer teams. A Jer’Mykeal McCoy supporter, Jimmie Lee Jarvis, said they had at least two volunteers per polling station. “Not every campaign could do that,” he added. With the balance of power in the General Assembly possibly shifting after years of Republican control, he said, “It’s hard to not be out there for [Ghazala] Hashmi or [Debra] Rodman,” instead of for a half-term special election for a City Council member.
Nicholas Da Silva, the Democratic Socialists of America-endorsed candidate, had a strong presence across the district, too. One of his boosters, Ben Himmelfarb, has volunteered for national campaigns before but never a local one. Canvassing has been exciting, he said. “It’s nuts and bolts. People were like, ‘See all the leaves in the gutter? That’s what I care about.’ ” He described Da Silva as the working-class candidate, a message his volunteers echoed throughout the district. For a campaign that seemed like a long shot to many, Da Silva did almost as well as Taylor and Williamson, earning 1,014 votes, or 14.10%.
At Randolph Community Center, bike commuter John Cox said he was voting for Lynch for safer streets and better schools. “She seems to really get what needs to happen,” he said. He was feeling more vulnerable than usual after being hit by a person driving a car last Thursday while riding in the protected bike lane on Franklin Street. “They turned left and hit me,” he said. “They didn’t even look.”
Over at Baymont Preschool Center, another high turnout polling spot, Chuck Richardson was fielding a call about a ballot controversy involving Williamson’s campaign. “It’s something shady,” he said, referring to a sample ballot distributed by Williamson’s volunteers resembling the Richmond City Democratic Committee sample ballot, which Mark Robinson reported in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Eric Payne, Williamson’s campaign manager, is quoted in the report as saying he used a template to make the ballot in question, which was intended to “highlight that [Williamson] is a Democrat.”
About the race, Richardson saw his own chances fading. “Heavier turnout than I expected. It’s a special election, off-season, not national, non-partisan,” he said. “That’s always good news, people are voting, but it doesn’t bode well for me. I used to sweep these elections, but today, the young crowd doesn’t know me.”
At Swansboro Elementary, Victoria Carll was with her daughter Lillian Schnettler to vote for Lynch. “I’ve been a high school teacher for 10 years. Education is my main concern,” she said. Like Sturm, she was persuaded by Lynch’s promise to lobby General Assembly for more school funding.
Above all, Lynch voters repeated something the candidate herself would later share at Penny Lane Pub. “I did a lot of listening,” she said, when asked what tipped the scales in her favor. “I’m a policy wonk and a social worker, so I heard what people said to me, and I was able to relate to them.” Lynch is director of government affairs at Good Neighbor, a mental health and disabilities services counseling program.
One of her strategies was targeted campaign mailers, tailored to the concerns she’d heard in individual neighborhoods.
It all tied back to her views on community service and representation, she said. “That’s why you run, because you care about what the community wants, and you want to represent their needs. I think my opponents were just a little more top-down; ‘These are my ideas,’” she said, miming a deep bass voice and pushing out her arms to look bigger. Laughing, she added, “That’s just not me.”
