Muriel Bowser
Mayor Muriel Bowser has managed to pick up a hefty sum from D.C. contractors in her bid for a third term in office. Credit: Darrow Montgomery

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Muriel Bowser won a landslide victory on Tuesday night, winning the mayoralty by nearly 20 points over her closest rival, David Catania. But her support varied sharply across D.C.’s geography. Just as Vince Gray‘s “One City” mantra rang hollow as he performed well in the 2010 and 2014 primaries in the city’s poorer, blacker, and easternmost areas, Bowser’s “All Eight Wards” motto doesn’t exactly encapsulate her voter base. Washington City Paper data wiz Zach Rausnitz plotted a few key demographic indicators against Bowser’s performance in every voting precinct. Below are the revealing interactive graphs that resulted:

By race:

Bowser did best relative to the trendline in precincts 2 (western downtown/Foggy Bottom) and 76 (Ivy City/Union Market), while she underperformed in several parts of Ward 6, including two precincts (86 and 91) in the Hill East area.

By poverty rate:

The big outlier here is Precinct 2, which encompasses George Washington University, whose students’ lack of incomes distort the poverty rate. The low-poverty areas where Bowser did very well were largely in her home ward (Ward 4), places like Shepherd Park, Colonial Village, and Brightwood. By contrast, she did worse than the trend line in moderate-poverty areas like eastern downtown and parts of Hill East.

By homeownership rate:

This graph might look like a random mess of dots, but there are a few patterns. Bowser fell short of a majority vote in nearly every precinct in wards 2 and 3, but did worse in areas there with higher homeownership. Likewise, she fared well across wards 7 and 8, but did best in the parts of these wards with the lowest homeownership.

By population change:

Again, there’s not a clear trend here, with most precincts clustered in the middle, but the outliers are telling. In the precincts whose populations grew the most between 2000 and 2010—-143 and 129 (eastern downtown, around Gallery Place and Massachusetts Avenue NW), 22 (U Street), 4 (West End), and 131 (Navy Yard)—-Bowser did not do very well. These are some of the fastest-gentrifying neighborhoods in the city, full of the young professionals who gravitated toward Catania. By contrast, in the precincts that lost more than 15 percent of their population over that period, Bowser captured a majority of the vote.