Field Notes: From ‘Levar who?’ to Mayor-elect

Inside the campaign that delivered Levar Stoney’s surprising victory

by

Back in May, the response was the same every time Kevin Zeithaml climbed porch steps, knocked on a front door and readied his pitch for Levar Stoney’s fledgling mayoral campaign. Few who answered were tuned into the local election at that point. Fewer still knew of the candidate who would ultimately win the race.  

“They’d say ‘Levar who?’ ” Zeithaml says.

The reaction came as no surprise to Stoney or his newly minted staff, built around a core of young, but experienced, out-of-town campaign hands that included Zeithaml, 23, spokesman Matt Corridoni, 27, and campaign manager Hannah Burke, 26. The trio were a few months removed from the end of their previous gigs when they signed on. All had worked for Maryland Democrat Martin O’Malley’s short-lived presidential bid.

In six and a half months, Stoney's campaign transformed him from a virtual unknown into Richmond's mayor-elect, delivering an improbable outright win that few, if any, outside of his team predicted. How did they do it?

“Our biggest challenge was that nobody knew who he was,” Burke says. “We had to do two things: The first thing was just introduce him in a favorable way. The second piece of it was making the sell that this person that they like should be their mayor.”

Fewer than one in 10 voters recognized Stoney's name when he announced his candidacy in the spring, Burke says. Put simply, winning or losing would hinge on whether the campaign could sell Stoney to a city that has always harbored suspicion of come-heres and, historically, has prized longevity above all else.

Knowing his opponents would seize on his inexperience, Stoney’s campaign cast the candidate as a fresh face with no mud on his hands (“More of the same, or something new?”). His personal story formed the foundation of the candidate's message. He was the product of teenage parents. His grandmother raised him. He stood in the free and reduced lunch line at school. He was the first in his family to graduate from high school and college. Stoney recited the stump speech across the city’s nine districts. The refrain reinforced that he rose from circumstances that many in the city have experienced and segued neatly to his top priority: improving public education for the city’s children, the No. 1 issue among voters, polls showed.

The message would stick only if the field team, headed by Zeithaml, put in the legwork. They canvassed early and often. The ground game, paired with Stoney’s “earned media” — campaign-speak for being in the news – produced a quick shift, Zeithaml says. After securing a spot on the ballot in June, the most common response went from “Levar who?” to “Oh, yeah, he seems interesting. Tell me more,” Zeithaml says.

Summer vacations and blistering heat stymied any semblance of progress in the dog days of July and August, but Stoney’s camp says it was ready for the slog. “It’s delayed gratification,” Zeithaml says. “Basically, you spend 60 days banging your head against a wall, and it’s not until October that you actually see the cracks.”

Late August brought the first public poll of the campaign. It showed Stoney running fifth in the field of eight candidates, behind Joe Morrissey, Jack Berry, Michelle Mosby and Jon Baliles. The numbers mirrored Stoney’s internal polling at the time, and did not come as a surprise, Burke says. Publicly, though, the poll hurt perception of Stoney’s chances. It was a difficult end to a trying month, but they were about to round a corner.

The post-Labor Day television ad blitz was planned from the outset of the campaign. What was a record-breaking fundraising haul to that point ensured Stoney’s camp would be able to execute it. They rolled out three commercials in the final nine weeks. Some mocked their largely biographical approach, a deliberate choice that Corridoni says was intended to cast Stoney as the candidate with whom viewers could empathize. “When you do political communications, one of the first things they say is voting is emotional. It’s not rational,” he says.

Stoney’s field team swelled in the fall as people tuned in. Scores of volunteers and interns contacted some 75,000 people before all was said and done, either by door-knocking or phone-banking. McAuliffe and his wife, Dorothy, each led door-to-door canvasses for Stoney. Other ranking state Democrats threw their weight behind him, too, as did several local interest groups. Crucially, he earned the endorsement from the Richmond City Democratic Committee, ensuring his name would appear on the official sample ballot that poll workers would hand out on Election Day.

A mid-October poll showed 2 out of 5 voters were undecided. Stoney had made gains citywide, but still trailed Morrissey and Berry. The former Venture Richmond executive courted voters, in part, by casting himself as the candidate most capable of defeating Morrissey. His was the only campaign to exceed Stoney’s spending and rival his organization. In spite of this, Burke says it was Morrissey whom they always viewed as their most formidable adversary.

“[Morrissey] is good at campaigns. He’s good at politics … and you don’t always know what to expect,” she says. “You knew what to expect from everyone else in the race, pretty much.”  

In the final stretch, canvassers flooded the 3rd and 5th districts, where jockeying among the three leading candidates was intense. Burke says they were all in on winning the so-called battlegrounds, but had reason to be confident of their chances in other wards as well. Months before Election Day, Zeithaml says he predicted the East End 7th District would break Stoney’s way based on what he heard on the ground. The 6th District was trickier to call, but not out of their reach, he adds. Each of the three publicly released polls showed Morrissey winning both the 6th and the 7th, but if enough undecided voters came aboard, it could swing each back in Stoney’s favor.

Then there’s the 2nd District, comprising the Fan, Carver and Jackson Ward, as well as a chunk of Virginia Commonwealth University’s student body. Again, the polls showed the district as firmly Berry territory, but Burke and Zeithaml bet on a win. The majority of VCU students were eager to vote in the presidential race, but unfamiliar with the down-ticket candidates, making it a matter of retail politics: Who could shake the most hands and make the best impression? Stoney reigned.

“Gaggles of students would, like, squeal when they’d see him,” Burke said. “They’d say ‘Oh my god, that’s the guy I met!’ They’d get a selfie. They were Snapchatting all over the place. That was when I was like, ‘We might do this tonight.’ ”

By midnight, Stoney had claimed five districts. A tally of absentee ballots the next day confirmed his victory.

How had the polls been so wrong? Burke attributes it to variables that couldn’t be accounted for – Stoney’s get-out-the-vote effort, his name appearing on the sample ballot, and yes, the Baliles bump in the final weekend. Although tough to quantify, she hypothesizes that the West End councilman’s decision to drop out and endorse Stoney swayed undecided voters in his favor.

In the aftermath, the candidate admitted the outright win surprised even him. His staffers privately held out hope he would win outright, but were mentally prepared for six more weeks of campaigning. “I had several speeches written, because it’s my job … I was prepared for a runoff, but I never thought [winning outright] wasn’t possible,” Corridoni says.

The win was an affirmation of the team and strategy Stoney put in place in the spring, Burke says.

“We took a lot of heat for the way we did things,” Burke says. “A lot of people wanted to be campaign manager in the weeks leading up to the election. That’s difficult sometimes, especially when polling is not going in in your favor. Ultimately, we stuck with what we knew would work.”