Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto won her first election in 2020 by less than 400 votes, coming pretty much out of nowhere to beat a large field in a primary upended by the pandemic. A win’s a win, but it wasn’t exactly a show of electoral dominance to scare away future competitors.

Nevertheless, contenders aren’t exactly lining up to challenge Pinto, who announced her first re-election bid last week. Loose Lips spent the past few days asking around Ward 2 in hopes of sniffing out potential challengers, but local politicos say there hasn’t been much chatter at all about someone willing to take a shot at the incumbent.

To the extent that there’s been any speculation about another candidate, it’s centered on a very familiar name: Jack Evans, the ward’s longtime representative before he resigned in scandal in 2020. Evans has stayed active in District affairs since then, if his well-maintained Instagram account is any indication, fueling speculation that he’s gearing up for another comeback bid. But Evans performed so poorly when he ran against Pinto and others four years ago that most ward Democrats don’t see much reason to expect he’d have a viable path to victory.

“There’s just not a whole lot there to grasp onto for somebody to really challenge her,” says Patrick Kennedy, the former advisory neighborhood commissioner that finished a close second to Pinto four years ago. (Kennedy adds that he won’t be making another try at political office for the foreseeable future, as he prepares to head to grad school in Italy.)

Juan Ulloa, chair of the Ward 2 Democrats, says he’s “working on the assumption that someone else will jump into the race,” because the ward is stocked with plenty of politically engaged people. The city’s public financing system makes it easier than ever for candidates of all different backgrounds to run, even if they don’t have the combination of deep-pocketed friends and political connections traditionally required for a Council bid. But, like others in the ward, Ulloa says he hasn’t heard anyone talking seriously about taking the plunge, largely because he doesn’t “sense any broad dissatisfaction” with Pinto so far.

Local politicos agree that Pinto has deftly managed the job of pleasing the ward’s various constituencies. She’s certainly made the downtown business crowd happy with her advocacy on behalf of office-to-residential conversion incentives (not to mention her unsuccessful push alongside Mayor Muriel Bowser to preserve funding for the K Street Transitway). And she’s generally struck a more moderate tone on economic issues, echoing Evans’ storied fiscal conservatism.

But Pinto has taken enough leftward turns on key issues to avoid angering the ward’s more progressive elements too. Several lefties have observed to LL that Pinto pleasantly surprised them by backing former At-Large Councilmember Elissa Silverman’s short-lived attempts at reforming the D.C. Housing Authority (and Pinto subsequently opposed the push by Bowser, Council Chair Phil Mendelson and At-Large Councilmember Robert White to restructure its governing board and remove vocal DCHA critics).

Pinto has still pissed off the left on occasion—her role in the debate over how high to cap rent increases at rent-controlled units did not win her any friends among that crowd—but the ward has historically been pretty moderate. Electoral observers will recall that the most unabashed lefty in the 2020 race, Jordan Grossman, finished roughly 800 votes behind Pinto in the primary.

“I didn’t support her when she was running the first time,” says Mike Silverstein, who preferred Kennedy last time around and served as an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Dupont Circle for roughly two decades before retiring last year. “But I’ve been so pleased that she and her staff listen,” he says. “They’re not dogmatic. They’re pragmatic rather than being ideologues.”

Perhaps Pinto’s biggest challenge is on the matter of public safety, where she’s assumed new prominence after taking over as chair of the Council’s judiciary committee in January. The ward is still one of the safest in the city, but even a modest uptick in crime (particularly downtown) is enough to make wealthy residents nervous about the issue. Pinto tells LL that public safety is the “number one issue” she plans to focus on if she’s re-elected.

She’s taken a more moderate approach on these matters than her predecessor, Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, siding frequently with Bowser in her calls for more police officers and harsher criminal punishments. She spoke a bit more like a reformer in the 2020 race, when she was relying on then-Attorney General Karl Racine’s backing, and all the talk was about police accountability in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. But as violent crime has ticked up, politicians have started talking tougher in response to rising anxiety among residents, and Pinto’s no exception.

Her stance generally matches the sentiments of many ward politicos, but it also helps Pinto’s image when the TV cameras come calling, looking for a lawmaker to grill following some particularly violent crime.

“Talk to Charles Allen about how that committee can go,” Kennedy says, recalling the uproar Allen faced around the criminal code revision, among other controversies. “It can come with a lot of grief, but from what I’ve seen so far, she’s handled it deftly.”

Pinto, for her part, says she’s not focused on the politics here, and notes that “the crime and violence that we’re seeing in the city right now is not an issue because of my reelection,” as it’s “an issue that affects residents of this city every single day.” But Silverstein suggests there could be some opportunity for her to take the lead on the issues: “She’s going to take a lot of heat, but she also can be a huge part of the solution of making things better,” he says.

Should Evans enter the race, he would almost certainly make crime and public safety the centerpiece of his campaign. LL remembers well Evans’ infamous Facebook post nearly two years ago where he wrote he was “discussing future plans” with an old friend, and posted a photo where someone had written “crime, crime, crime” and “Jack Evans 2024” on a nearby receipt. He also rushed to remind City Paper last spring that he was the first councilmember to propose legislation requiring MPD to maintain a force of 4,000 officers back when Bowser started making a big stink about hitting that target.

This has all encouraged whispers that Evans is interested in running again, as has his frequent attendance at local civic events and assorted photo ops with Bowser, with whom he remains close even after he was forced out of office.

LL hears Evans was spotted knocking on doors in Shaw earlier this spring alongside Leroy Thorpe, Jr., a controversial character in his own right who has mounted a comeback bid in a special election for an open ANC seat in the neighborhood. (Despite Thorpe once calling Evans a “a pale-skinned, blond-haired cracker,” the pair have long been political allies.) Evans also has been involved in the work of the Tax Revision Commission, the panel of experts preparing a report for the Council on potential tax changes. His participation outrages progressives watching the group but shows that he remains in close contact with big names in D.C. government.

Evans didn’t respond to LL’s calls and texts; his Instagram suggests he recently returned from a family trip to Wales, so maybe he’s still recovering. But most people LL spoke with assume that Evans is at least interested in the race, even if he ultimately decides against it. He is just shy of his 70th birthday, but that still makes him younger than several sitting councilmembers. And he would not be far from the first D.C. politician to rise from the grave following an ethics scandal.

“I think that voters in Ward 2 in 2020 made very clear that they were not interested in re-electing Jack, someone who left office in disgrace after being expelled,” Pinto says, in what qualifies as a pretty sharp jab from the generally reserved councilmember. “He got very little support in that election. And I don’t think anything has changed over the last several years.”

Pinto’s probably right about that, considering she’s won over many of the same constituencies that supported Evans in his nearly 30 years in office. Evans could make a nostalgia play for some of the old-timers in the ward, promising that he alone has the experience and financial know-how to revive downtown and manage the city’s uncertain fiscal future, but Pinto’s youth presents a pretty stark contrast. “There’s a reason your windshield is big and your rearview mirror is small,” Silverstein jokes. “And Jack’s definitely in the rearview mirror.”

“I think that anybody, whether they’re a newbie or a seasoned politician, might be a little bit foolish to try to run against her,” says Mark Lee, a longtime Logan Circle resident and Washington Blade columnist who was one of Evans’ few prominent supporters during his doomed 2020 bid. In a sign of just how much things have changed in the past few years, Lee says he donated to Pinto’s re-election campaign the same day she launched it.

“In many ways, she’s been the pleasant surprise of politics in D.C. over the last five years,” Lee says. “If you’ve got somebody doing a great job, you don’t switch horses.”

It looks as if Pinto is still preparing to run a real race, whether she gets one from Evans or not. She’s taking public financing this time around, blunting a key criticism from the left during her first bid. And she’s gotten herself a proper campaign treasurer in longtime Shaw activist Gretchen Wharton after trying to do the job on her own last time around, with iffy results; she managed to run afoul of campaign finance law by holding a fundraiser to retire campaign debts several months later than she was allowed. Pinto also drew some flak for using a Logan Circle home that her parents rented as her campaign headquarters, but failing to report it on her finance forms; now, Pinto’s back to using her home address on Q Street NW as her committee’s HQ.

Evans probably wouldn’t be able to make much hay out of those past controversies if he ran, considering his own missteps, but the message to would-be challengers seems clear: Pinto doesn’t expect any of the drama that defined her last race.

“She doesn’t strike me as the kind of individual to rest on her laurels and not run a robust, solid campaign,” Ulloa says.