How Roanoke elected its first Republican to city council in 24 years

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Roanoke, VA (Cardinal News)

Nick Hagen will be the first Republican on council since Ralph Smith and Bill Carder were elected in 2000.

Roanoke has done something it hasn't done in nearly a quarter-century: It's elected a Republican to the city council.

It came close to electing two.

Nick Hagen became the first Republican elected to the council since 2000 when Roanokers elected Ralph Smith as mayor and Bill Carder to the council. David Bowers came within 59 votes of being returned to the mayor's office.

The closeness of the Roanoke mayor's race is easily explained: Independent Stephanie Moon pulled away many votes that would have normally gone to Democrat Joe Cobb. This is best seen in the city's predominantly Black precincts, which Moon won: She carried Forest Park, Grandview and Peters Creek with pluralities, she won Eureka Park and Lincoln Terrace with outright majorities.

Citywide, Bowers, running as a Republican after switching parties last year, took 37.11% of the vote. That's almost exactly what Donald Trump took in Roanoke: 37.31%. It looks to me as if Bowers won the basic Republican vote and nothing more. Without Moon in the race, it seems likely that Cobb would have won the mayor's race in a landslide.

The city council results are more complicated, and therefore more interesting, because voters had three votes to cast and seven candidates to choose from. Here are some observations:

Kamala Harris took 60.82% in the presidential race in Roanoke. Tim Kaine took 63.76% in the Senate race. Ken Mitchell, the Democratic candidate for the 6th District House seat, took 57.22% in Roanoke. As noted above, in a two-person race, Cobb might well have polled about 62%.

Based on those numbers, you might think the three Democratic council candidates should have taken about the same share of the vote. They did not. Not even close. This reflects how common it was for otherwise Democratic voters to cast a ballot for someone else in the council race.

The percentages you see on the State Board of Elections site aren't accurate. Its software can't handle races where people have more than one vote to cast. Here are the actual percentages, based on the the total number of people who cast ballots in the council race, which was 42,517:

Terry McGuire (D) 42.5%

Phazhon Nash (D) 41.7%

Nick Hagen (R) 35.2%

Evelyn Powers (I) 32.2%

Jim Garrett (R) 29.3%

Benjamin Woods (D) 27.6%

Cathy Reynolds (I) 13.7%

This means none of the candidates Roanoke just elected -- Cobb and the three new council members, Hagen, McGuire and Nash -- won a majority.

The opening for Hagen was created by Democratic disunity. For reasons I have yet to ferret out, Democrats were not fully supportive of Benjamin Woods. During the campaign, Democratic council member Peter Volosin endorsed McGuire and Nash but also independent Evelyn Powers and never said why he was backing Powers over Woods. Powers had been elected to five terms as treasurer as a Democrat so certainly had Democratic credentials. Woods was also poorly funded, relative to the other candidates, so had a hard time getting his name out.

We can see this most clearly in the most Democratic precincts.

Eureka Park went 88.67% for Harris and 90.46% for Kaine. In that precinct, here's how the council candidates ran in terms of actual votes cast:

Nash (D) 1,298

McGuire (D) 797

Powers (I) 647

Woods (D) 467

Hagen (R ) 429

Reynolds (I) 290

Garrett (R ) 187

Lincoln Terrace went 86.73% for Harris and 89.53% for Kaine. In that precinct, here's how the council candidates ran:

Nash (D) 847

McGuire (D) 585

Powers (I) 451

Woods (D) 350

Reynolds (I) 274

Hagen (R ) 262

Garrett (R ) 178

In both cases, two of the Democratic council candidates placed first and second, with Powers third. In looking at these and other precincts, it seems clear to me that Powers took votes away from Woods and blocked him from winning. That alone doesn't explain Hagen's victory, though.

Hagen ran 2,520 votes ahead of his Republican ticket mate. Those "extra" 2,520 votes made all the difference. Without them, he wouldn't have won and Evelyn Powers would have. So where did those votes come from? Let's dig deeper.

Hagen ran ahead of Garrett in all but one precinct -- South Roanoke -- and there he trailed Garrett by just eight votes. Their biggest gap was in the Williamson Road precinct, where Hagen finished first and Garrett finished fifth.

The more useful comparison may be between Hagen and Powers, his nearest competitor for the third and final council slot. He finished ahead of her by 1,258 votes, so where did he manage to get those votes? More than 80% of that margin came from just three precincts, all blue-collar precincts in parts of Roanoke that once voted Democratic but now vote Republican: East Gate, Garden City and Williamson Road.

Hagen finished first in all three precincts (he won six precincts in all), and it was there that he built up his biggest margins over Powers -- a difference of 485 votes in Garden City, 286 in East Gate, 263 in Williamson Road. That adds up to 1,034 votes from his ultimate 1,258-vote margin over Powers.

The realignment of working-class voters is one of the national stories coming out of this year's election; this didn't happen suddenly but many have just noticed it for the first time. In Roanoke, Hagen seemed to fit these voters more comfortably than did fellow Republican Garrett.

In Garden City, Hagen ran 376 votes ahead of the top Democratic vote-getter (McGuire) and 485 votes ahead of Powers, his nearest rival. In East Gate, he ran 213 votes ahead of the top Democratic voter-getter and 286 votes ahead of Powers. That helped him build up margins to offset the parts of town where he didn't run so well. Whether this speaks to Hagens' prowess in winning those voters, the weakness of Democrats in those precincts or some combination of the two, is hard to say. All we know is that's where Hagen rolled up a lot of votes.

Harris won the Crystal Spring precinct with 59.71% of the vote, so we shouldn't be surprised that a Democrat, McGuire, led the balloting for council there. But Hagen came in second. Harris took 60.75% in Grandin Court, so we shouldn't be surprised that McGuire and Nash led the balloting for council there -- but Hagen came in third.

McGuire placed first or second in all but four precincts. He finished third, still good enough to win, in Deyerle and Garden City. Only in Preston Park and South Roanoke, where he finished fourth, did he finish out of the money.

The key to winning an at-large election in Roanoke is usually to perform consistently citywide, and McGuire did that.

Nash was less consistent. He finished first in six precincts (Eureka Park, Forest Park, Grandview, Lincoln Terrace, Peters Creek, Summit Hills), second or third in seven, but finished out of the top three in seven others. However, in the places he won, he tended to win by a lot. In Eureka Park, he ran 501 votes ahead of the second-place finisher, fellow Democrat McGuire. In Forest Park, he ran 282 votes ahead of McGuire. In Lincoln Terrace, he ran 262 votes ahead of McGuire. That suggests that many voters in those predominantly Black precincts may have simply cast a single vote -- for Nash. Such "single-shotting" is a time-honored way to make sure a favored candidate doesn't accidentally get crowded by a ticketmate.

Hagen's performance was almost the mirror image of Nash's: He finished first in six precincts, second or third in four others, but out of the top three in 10 others. Powers didn't finish first anywhere, and while she was consistent citywide, she didn't build up the margins that Nash and Hagen did.

All this explains how Hagen and the other candidates won, but not why. Why did so many Democrats desert one of their nominees? The election results can't speak to that. Did Hagen simply get the Trump vote? That's possible but doesn't explain why Hagen ran ahead of other Democratic candidates in places such as Crystal Spring. The fact that there was so much ticket-splitting in the council races suggests voters weren't just blindly going down a party list; they were putting some thought into their choices. We just don't know exactly what those thoughts were, but it seems fair to surmise that anyone voting for Hagen was not satisfied with the current direction of the council.

We can say this, though:

Four years ago, the third-place finisher for council received 12,857 votes. Hagen this year topped that by 16.5%.

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