It took Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White all of 30 seconds during a rare appearance on WAMU 88.5’s The Politics Hour last month to completely scramble the state of play in D.C. politics.
After months of radio silence about his political future (and a resulting surge in speculation among politicos that he might opt against running for a third term next year), White sent shock waves through the ward on Aug. 11 by stating that he’s “preparing to launch my campaign” for reelection. When political analyst (and City Paper contributor) Tom Sherwood asked directly whether he was going to run, White didn’t equivocate: “Yes,” he responded simply.
White has yet to file papers to make his reelection campaign official, and he didn’t respond to Loose Lips’ request for comment, but this proclamation has forced a reset of sorts for just about everyone eyeing the race. White’s announcement hasn’t totally scared off other candidates—witness former Ward 8 State Board of Education Rep. Markus Batchelor launching his long-rumored bid last week—but the presence of a two-term incumbent completely changes the political landscape in the ward next year.
A sudden retirement still isn’t entirely out of the question, of course, considering White’s mercurial nature. It wasn’t all that long ago that White launched a bid for mayor while replying to an Instagram commenter. But local pols are gradually coming to terms with the reality that White enters the contest as a heavy favorite, particularly if the field continues to grow and divide anti-incumbent sentiment among several challengers.
“If I’ve learned anything about Councilmember Trayon White, from early on to this day, it’s this: Who knows what he’ll do tomorrow?” says Stuart Anderson, who ran White’s first successful Council campaign in 2016 and ran against him in 2020. “And I still think in the next 20 to 30 days we’ll see if others get in this race. In fact, one of the things I think Councilmember White may be banking on is flooding the field.”
Anderson says he’s spoken directly to both former advisory neighborhood commissioner Olivia Henderson and At-Large State Board of Education Rep. Jacque Patterson about the race, though other ward insiders to speak with LL are less certain about their interest. Henderson, a former secretary for LIUNA laborers’ union, asked for Anderson’s advice on running and believes she could potentially get union support, Anderson says. Patterson tells LL he has no interest in running, while Henderson did not respond to a request for comment. But many observers agree that more people will choose to run even with White in the race, if for no other reason than to build a base for the future.
“There’s plenty of incentive to run right now, because the city will fund most of your campaign [via the public financing program],” says Ward 8 Democrats President Troy Prestwood. “And we’ve seen before that you don’t need a lot of money to be successful in the ward, you just need enough people to say they’re unhappy with the current flow of things.”
The problem for White’s challengers is that there doesn’t seem to be enough of that dissatisfaction with White’s performance that would allow another candidate to break through. Just look at the results of the 2020 primary, where Anderson, Mike Austin, and Yaida Ford combined for just over 3,400 votes, while White racked up more than 5,000. Plainly, he has attracted some opposition in his tenure (as pretty much any politician will after two terms in office), but have things changed enough in four years to erode his support in a multi-candidate field?
“He really has the Marion Barry effect where people are going to vote for him no matter what,” says Patterson, who knows a thing or two about Barry’s political gifts after losing a Ward 8 Council primary to him back in 2012. “I just don’t know if other people start out with a base like that.”
Anderson cautions that White’s turn to the right on public safety issues has rubbed at least some of his original supporters the wrong way. His calls for the National Guard’s intervention in the ward to drive down violence are quite the far cry from the campaign platform Anderson helped him draft seven years ago, which centered pledges for police accountability and additional resources for young people. And Anderson expects some voters will take notice. Longtime activist Philip Pannell, however, argues that this is just evidence that White is “more in tune with the sentiments of the people as far as responding to the violence” and has adjusted his focus accordingly.
“People I talk with are living in fear, and they want to see more police on the street,” Pannell says, noting that these sentiments are most prevalent among the ward’s older residents (who have historically decided these crucial Democratic primaries).
Batchelor is hoping that this conventional wisdom about the power of incumbency and the ward’s political landscape is outdated. He is running as an unabashedly left-leaning candidate, and his ideas on public safety could draw a very clear contrast with the law-and-order rhetoric White has embraced in recent months.
“While there’s a lot of talk about putting more police on our street, we also have to talk about a police department that just here in the Seventh District this year dropped dozens of cases that could have taken violent criminals off of our streets because of misconduct,” Batchelor says, citing the ongoing investigation into 19 cops in Southeast recently revealed by City Paper. “I want to give the police department the resources they need to do their jobs. But we also know that we’ve got to invest in lasting solutions to our violence and crime issue. It is not a coincidence that crime is going out of control, when inequality is out of control.”
The old guard in the ward dismisses the idea that such an approach is viable, particularly as violence in the city only seems to be getting worse. But Batchelor is staking his campaign on the idea that “Ward 8 is in a different moment” these days as it gradually sees new development, and its boundaries have expanded across the Anacostia River into Navy Yard via redistricting. “We require different things of our leadership,” Batchelor says, though he won’t criticize White too sharply just yet.
It’s not impossible for some observers to imagine this approach bearing fruit. Batchelor has an usual mix of youth and experience, considering he’s been engaged in local politics since he was a teenager, which could play well both east and west of the river. (He once served as D.C.’s “youth mayor,” briefly led the Ward 8 Democrats, and ran Nate Bennett–Fleming’s campaign for shadow representative, all while he was in high school.) Some of this can come off a bit try-hardish, but he has real electoral accomplishments too, including his wins for both SBOE and an advisory neighborhood commission seat. Batchelor’s status as a Ward 8 native, which he highlights prominently in his well-produced launch video, doesn’t hurt either.
“Markus is really going for the younger people…and I would think that would do well in Navy Yard, because Trayon did not do well there at all last year [in the mayoral race],” Pannell says. At-Large Councilmember Robert White, another mayoral contender last year, narrowly won the precinct covering most of Navy Yard; Trayon White only picked up 30 votes there en route to losing the whole ward to Mayor Muriel Bowser.
Anderson, who says he has not decided which candidate he’ll back in the race, suspects that the 6,700 new potential voters that Navy Yard added to the ward will be pretty consequential. The Council’s redistricting subcommittee estimated in 2021 that the neighborhood will represent “about 10 percent of Democratic primary votes for the new Ward 8” based on past turnout data.
But Prestwood, the Ward 8 Dems leader, cautions that it’s a “fool’s errand” to believe that the new section of the ward west of the river will hold more sway than its historical power centers. Consider that roughly 1,300 people voted in the Anacostia High School precinct in the 2022 primary, about double the number of voters in Navy Yard’s Arthur Capper Community Center precinct.
And it’s not as if any challenger, Batchelor or otherwise, can count on receiving the entirety of any anti-incumbent vote if the field of candidates stays so large. Salim Adofo, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Congress Heights, has been aggressively campaigning since he launched his bid last fall, and his omnipresence in the community has not gone unnoticed by the Ward 8 politicos to speak with LL. Rahman Branch is also making his first entry into electoral politics, hoping to lean on local connections cultivated in his time as principal at Ballou High School and in Bowser’s administration. His campaign tells LL that they began knocking doors over Labor Day weekend, some of Branch’s first visible campaign activities since he officially filed earlier this year.
“I’m sure if [Trayon White is] running again, he’s really pleased about a multi-candidate race,” Pannell says, stressing that he plans to stay “neutral” in the race. “It may end up being another example of why we need ranked-choice voting,” Pannell adds, promoting the ballot initiative he’s backing that would institute such a change in local elections if it passes next fall.
As the incumbent, White has the ability to wait all the way up until the filing deadline next spring if he wants to keep everyone else guessing about his intentions. Anderson believes anyone else thinking about trying for a big upset shouldn’t wait on White, no matter how daunting the odds might seem, to start building the necessary connections now.
“I would say to anybody interested in running that they should be in the race yesterday,” Anderson says.
This story has been updated with comment from Jacque Patterson.