Mayor Adrian Fenty got his fedora handed to him at the straw poll at the D.C. Democratic Party convention Saturday, with Vincent Gray crushing him 703 to 190. Hard-charging Leo Alexander took 75 votes.
A straw poll is all about organization. The Gray Team swamped Fenty’s fans, arriving early and seizing all the best spots for signage. But organization can only get a candidate so far. Gray’s win by a nearly 4-to-1 margin is a big, flashing warning light for Fenty, who so far has seemed intermittently oblivious to his peril, and on the defensive about his record.
The bad news for Fenty came just as Gray announced that he had outraised the incumbent, $561,000 to $475,000, over the past three months. Still, Fenty has $3.2 million to spend, while Gray has just $371,000. The cash advantage, and Alexander’s cutting into the anti-Fenty vote, could prove decisive. The primary is just three months from today.
The straw poll results in the race to succeed Gray as Council chair reflected the conventional wisdom -- that Kwame Brown, who received 585 votes, has the advantage over Vincent Orange, 329, but that Brown’s lead is hardly overwhelming.
Orange, who was pummeled in his run for mayor four years ago, has yet to make the case for why voters should choose him over the popular Brown, but he’s getting there. The chairmanship may pass from one Vincent to another.
Phil Mendelson, as invisible on the campaign trail as he has been on the Council, bested energetic rival Clark Ray by a surprising margin of 512 to 243. This doesn’t bode well for Ray, who has dominated their at-large race for months.
Popular shadow representative Mike Panetta got a bit of a shock, taking just 235 votes to 170 for Nathan Leon Bennett-Fleming, a 25-year-old who just finished graduate school at Harvard this year.
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After the straw poll, Bennett-Fleming declared on his Facebook page: “I won't lose this election. I'll bet my life on it!”
Unbowed and upbeat, Panetta tweeted: “Fun fact of the day: I got more votes than Fenty.”
