Wendell Felder entered the Ward 7 Council primary as the prohibitive favorite, grabbed the most coveted endorsement available, and appears to have come away with a narrow victory in the race. The campaign had its twists and turns, but the result was ultimately just as predictable as those in the rest of the big contests on the ballot Tuesday.

The 10-candidate race to replace retiring political mainstay Councilmember Vince Gray provided District politicos with a few months of drama, but Felder’s elevation seems broadly in line with the mood of the (fairly small number of) primary voters throughout the city. He’s promised some change for the ward, but his deep ties to the political establishment via his lengthy experience with the Ward 7 Democrats, the Parkside advisory neighborhood commission, and Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration signal that he’s no outsider. Bowser herself came to his Hill East victory party to praise his “varied experience” and snap a few photos not long after it became clear that Felder’s roughly 300-vote lead over Kingman Park Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Ebony Payne would be enough to make his victory all but certain. 

“I have a lot of work ahead of me and I definitely look forward to building on [Gray’s] legacy,” Felder said Tuesday night, in a nod to Gray’s backing of his campaign. The Board of Elections finished counting votes for the night around 11 p.m. There are still some ballots left to tabulate, but it seems unlikely any result around the city will change.

For all the city’s problems, particularly with violent crime over the past few years, voters didn’t seem particularly interested in shaking things up. All of the incumbent councilmembers up for reelection won handily: Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George, Ward 8 Councilmember Trayon White, and At-Large Councilmember Robert White easily fended off challengers. (Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto failed to draw a primary opponent and won 92 percent of the vote while running unopposed.) Even shadow Rep. Oye Owolewa looks to have held off a second challenge from Linda Gray. And Ankit Jain’s likely win over Eugene Kinlow in the shadow senator race looks like the closest thing to an upset, considering Kinlow’s history working for Bowser and his ties to the rest of the political establishment. 

The incumbents likely have the dismally low turnout for the Democratic primary to thank. Without major citywide races on the ballot and an uncompetitive presidential primary, just under 74,000 of the District’s roughly 378,000 registered voters cast ballots as of Tuesday night. (By contrast, more than 132,000 people participated in the 2022 primary and more than 114,000 voted in the pandemic-disrupted 2020 primary.) In an environment like this, incumbents or others with lots of name recognition from past runs are likely to succeed.

But some observers also see the results as proof that voters weren’t as ready to punish lawmakers over rising crime rates or increased taxes as moderates like Bowser have warned for years now. Lewis George, in particular, dominated two opponents running to her right on crime—Lisa Gore and Paul Johnson—even as she has consistently defended police reform measures while her colleagues have retreated.

“Tonight, we proved that D.C. residents will reject fearmongering and lies at every turn,” Lewis George said at her Takoma victory party. “Tonight, we proved that a movement is strong enough to defeat a political machine.” 

That has got to rankle Bowser, whose aforementioned machine was not able to generate anywhere close to a serious challenge to one of her least favorite councilmembers. Lewis George was up on Gore by more than 4,600 votes as of Tuesday night, giving her roughly 66 percent of the vote, a margin even better than some of her most fervent supporters hoped for.

“The margins speak for themselves,” says Dieter Morales, a socialist activist and leader in the Washington Teachers’ Union. “They go to show the staying power of a campaign that’s fueled by people.”

That’s not to say that it was a banner evening for progressives, however, as their favored candidate in Ward 7, State Board of Education Rep. Eboni-Rose Thompson, fell short. Both Lewis George and At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson tried to boost Thompson with late endorsements—Lewis George said she felt Thompson “wasn’t getting a fair shot” and decided to weigh in. But Thompson’s 1,869 votes put her just a smidge behind Payne’s 1,938 for third place. 

If anything, the results reflect an electorate that wasn’t exactly hungry for big, seismic change. Payne probably ran the brashest, most outsidery campaign of anyone in the primary field, and she couldn’t get over the hump, despite jumping out to a small lead when early votes were first counted. (Her fiance and political strategist, Chuck Rocha, posted late Tuesday that she wouldn’t be conceding just yet, as two key precincts that should be favorable to Payne had yet to show any results on the city’s website.)

Felder, however, was much less critical of the status quo, as evidenced by his endorsement from Gray (and four other sitting councilmembers) and his behind-the-scenes support from Bowser and her allies. Loose Lips spotted several top Green Teamers, including ex-City Administrator Rashad Young, ex-Ward 4 Councilmember Brandon Todd, and current Bowser aide Phil Thomas soaking up the scene at Felder’s party. 

Felder generally bristled at any implication that he was too close to Bowser and her Green Team, despite facing frequent accusations of such ties, and there are some indications that he’d seek to break from her on some criminal justice issues—for instance, he was one of just a few candidates in the field to tell the Washington Post that he opposed the prosecution of parents of chronically truant students and he told the ACLU that he supports ending solitary confinement in the DC Jail. 

“He’s not going to be a LaRuby May or a Brandon Todd,” predicts Ambrose Lane, an activist in the ward who backed Felder, referring to two staunch mayoral allies on the Council. “At least, he better not be. We’re going to push him not to be.”

But Felder has staunchly supported mayoral control of the school system and signaled an openness (if not outright commitment) to a new RFK football stadium, both top issues for the mayor. Add in his years of work in Bowser’s government—he spent time with Bowser’s community relations office, the office of the deputy mayor for planning and economic development, and the city administrator’s office before moving to a job at Howard University—and there is every reason to believe he will generally support her agenda and not vote all that dissimilarly from Gray. If a vote for Payne (or to a lesser extent, Thompson) represented a break from the ward’s old way of doing business, a vote for Felder amounts to an endorsement of the status quo.

The biggest change with Felder’s ascension is a generational shift, rather than a major ideological one. At 33, Felder was the youngest candidate in the field (along with Payne), and he’ll become the second-youngest member of the Council once he wins November’s perfunctory general election. (Pinto remains the youngest councilmember at 31.) Gray, meanwhile, has been virtually absent from the Council these past few years due to his assorted health issues and only rarely makes public appearances anymore.

“It’s a new level of energy, it’s something for our young people to look forward to and aspire to,” says Tyrell Holcomb, an advisory neighborhood commissioner who briefly considered a run for the seat before endorsing Felder. “He’ll be a councilmember who you know personally, you’ll be able to call on and count on and he’ll show up and be there.”

Felder might’ve only won by a few hundred votes in a divided field (and you can thank D.C.’s lack of runoff elections or ranked choice voting for that outcome) but he has both the youth and experience to do this job as long as he likes, if he plays his cards right. What will he make of it?

“We, the older, active members of the Ward 7 community have raised him and groomed him,” says Matthew Shannon, a former chair of the Ward 7 Dems and an early supporter of Felder. “When he told me his platform, he ticked off all the things that are important to the ward’s future. He wants to support the oldest, the youngest, and everyone in between.”

Mitch Ryals contributed reporting.