Friday evening, a Fenty-festooned van with Ward 9 plates pulled into the 1600 block of S St., NW in Ward 2’s precinct 15. A crew of crisply dressed Fenty canvassers popped out and, clutching clipboards and campaign literature, set out down the block.
A quick stop to snap a photo was brief enough to spot only one sign in the front yard of one of the block’s brownstones: for Vince Gray; but none in the limited view sported a Fenty yard sign.
Precinct 15 runs along Dupont Circle’s 17th St., NW corridor, and may be the District’s most densely packed precinct: roughly five blocks from north to south, and a mere two blocks long between 18th and 16th Sts., NW (albeit along the 1700 blocks that are uncharacteristically elongated for Lafayette’s grid), and home to a whopping 2,900 registered voters. Fenty’s canvassers seemed to be aiming for the brownstones that line the east-west lettered streets, but most of this precinct’s voters live in large apartment building that don’t allow for door to door campaigning.
What’s going here? Why did Fenty folks park in this spot to hit the pavement for the mayor?
On election eve, campaign canvassers traditionally fan out across the District, often in highly contested areas. Sometimes, candidates spend what resources they have left in the countdown to voting day by focusing on re-touching their base.
Considering Fenty’s behemoth of a war chest, Team Fenty certainly may be hitting both those targets. The voters in those brownstones (the Vince Gray yard sign planter, obviously excepted) fit the profile of the Fenty base that polling data has revealed. The older apartment buildings in precinct 15 house voters of more modest incomes whose long tenure entitles them to discounted rents per D.C.’s tough rent control law. Some of these voters may be taking cues from TENAC, the D.C. Tenants’ Advocacy Coalition, whose outspoken honcho Jim McGrath is vigorously backing Vince Gray.
Worth noting is the Maryland tags on the Fenty-mobile. Suburban Maryland, and Prince George’s County in particular, is known in District political lore as the mythical Ward 9, where people – former residents or native Washingtonians – who may work for the D.C. government, or maintain family, business or church ties to black Washington now reside.
The Ward 9 tags, and crisp attire of the Fenty canvassers do suggest that they may be paid by the Fenty campaign, and may not even be District voters. They did not seem to be neighbors of the voters in this largely white and affluent, and historically gay neighborhood.
This quick glimpse of last minute electioneering reinforces the notion that Fenty volunteers are in short supply, but the mayor’s campaign funds have yet to run dry.
