There were more candidates than vegetable stands at the Palisades Farmers Market last weekend.
Ward 3, the District’s tony sector full of quiet neighborhoods and upscale commercial corridors, is suddenly the hub of a busy political campaign season that no one expected.
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Mary M. Cheh was widely predicted to win a fifth consecutive term representing the ward on the D.C. Council, leaving Ward 3 headed for a sleepy Democratic primary in June. Then Cheh dropped out of the race abruptly last month, saying she was ready to spend more time with her family. And in the days that followed, one local activist after another signaled their interest in the seat.
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Now, with just a few weeks to collect signatures to appear on the ballot, there are at least eight candidates running to represent Ward 3 — and all of them are engaged in a mad dash to make the case to their neighbors that they belong on the council.
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Judy Riggs, 82, went to the farmers market last Sunday for groceries, and found herself facing a line of candidates. She had questions for them about their priorities. “Mary announced she’s not going to run and now everybody’s coming out of the woodwork,” Riggs said. “Anybody ought to be able to run. But it’s going to take a while to figure out exactly who’s who.”
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Many of the candidates are current and former advisory neighborhood commissioners, including Deirdre Brown, a real estate business owner; Ben Bergmann, a lawyer; Phil Thomas, the chair of the ward’s Democratic Party; Matthew Frumin, a lawyer involved in many local organizations; and Monika Nemeth, who as an ANC became the first transgender person to win an elected office in D.C. and who was already running in the Democratic primary before Cheh dropped out.
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Palisades Community Association president Patricia Duncan and longtime D.C. government staffer Eric Goulet rounded out the candidates in the Democratic primary, until reporters at NBC4 and Washington City Paper reported Thursday that two more local activists were readying to enter the race.
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David Krucoff, known for his advocacy for making most of the District a part of Maryland, had already declared his intention to run as a Republican.
With most having not contemplated running until last month, the candidates are just beginning to stake out positions they say they would take as legislators.
Goulet, who has worked on the city’s budget and on health issues as a council staffer, begins almost every conversation with voters by saying the city needs hundreds more police officers to confront a rising homicide rate.
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Duncan touts her successful advocacy to get the council to budget tens of millions of dollars to build more schools in the ward, where public schools are oversubscribed, and her goals to improve special education and make buses more reliable.
Bergmann, a first-term advisory neighborhood commissioner, wrote a pages-long platform full of ideas like studying the feasibility of expanding the city’s public preschool program to include infants and toddlers, and shrinking the required minimum lot sizes so that rowhouses and other more affordable housing can be built in pricey neighborhoods.
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To run in the Democratic primary, a candidate must collect the signatures of at least 250 registered voters by March 23. On an unseasonably warm Sunday, five of the candidates all had the same idea that the Palisades Farmers Market would be the place to do that. Strolling the short stretch of sidewalk from the waffle stand to the cake pop stand, shoppers walked through a gauntlet of candidates and their campaign volunteers holding clipboards, each calling out, “Are you a Ward 3 registered Democrat?”
“Maryland!” one out-of-state visitor barked when he heard that question for the umpteenth time. “I should be wearing a sign,” he muttered.
Those who did stop gave the candidates a chance to ask voters what they wanted and to test out their nascent campaign messages.
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Many residents raised hyperlocal concerns, like trash not picked up from bins outside restaurants, or opinions about the right number of parking spaces.
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“We got one speed bump. We were supposed to get two,” one woman complained about her street.
“I’m somebody who got the Foxhall dog park built,” Thomas boasted of a park at Hardy Recreation Center as his opening line to several voters, until one responded, “Oh god, I hate dog parks.”
“Those dogs bark and bark,” she explained, but signed his petition anyway.
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Alex Bargmann, a 32-year-old Glover Park resident, spoke with Brown about his support of a plan that would create a protected bike route from Georgetown to American University, which some oppose because it would mean removing on-street parking spots. “I’m pro-transportation, pro-bike lanes and pro-housing. I think Ward 3 could do better to ease the housing burden on the city,” Bargmann said at the farmers market. “At the same time, crime’s important. There’s overcrowding at some of the Ward 3 schools — I’m sort of asking for all the above, I guess.”
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Several candidates named crime as their top issue, reflecting D.C. residents’ rising concern about safety in the city — even in Ward 3, which has recorded significantly fewer crimes in the first months of 2022 than any other ward in the city. Last year, the ward had two homicides out of 227 in the city.
Still, rising crime across the District and a few local incidents — including a gun battle in a hotel room at the Days Inn in the ward’s Van Ness neighborhood — have made residents uneasy.
When The Washington Post polled D.C. residents last month, 77 percent of residents of wards 2 and 3 said they felt safe from crime in their own neighborhood, and they were less likely than those in any other ward to name crime as their top concern about life in the District. But crime was still the most-mentioned concern, topping the list for 29 percent of the wards’ residents — more than twice as many who cited the next most common concerns, which were housing costs, poverty and homelessness.
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Shortly before dropping out of the race, Cheh was criticized for comments she made in response to the Days Inn shooting, in which she seemed to link crime in the Connecticut Avenue corridor with low-income residents using housing vouchers to rent apartments there.
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Despite the outcry about Cheh’s remarks, Harry Gural thinks she was on the right track. As head of the tenant association at a large apartment complex near the Van Ness Metro station, Gural has heard a rising tide of complaints from neighbors about drug dealing and fighting.
He downloaded publicly available police data and put together a presentation on crime in Police Service Area 203, which follows Connecticut Avenue from Cleveland Park to Van Ness. While the area has less crime than much of the city, Gural showed a sharp increase in crime there when comparing 2018 to 2021 to the prior four-year period — while almost every other Police Service Area in the city showed a decrease in crime. Violent crime increased 41 percent, he found.
“It appears to be linked back to some internal decision by the administration to resettle people in large numbers here without any policy or public discussion,” he said, arguing that the District should tell longtime residents how many voucher recipients move to their neighborhood, including how many people released from prison are getting housing assistance to live there. “This is a very liberal community that embraces the idea of helping the poor, but … the crime numbers overall are way up and you’ve had this mass relocation program at the same time.”
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Crime is a bipartisan focus in Ward 3. Republican candidate David Krucoff, who needs about 50 signatures from registered Republicans in the ward, knocked on dozens of doors of members of his party last month; his campaign pitch includes hiring more police and streamlining government services. He says he’s heard from many residents who don’t want their taxes raised. (Cheh voted against a tax increase on wealthy D.C. residents, which failed in 2020 but passed 8-5 in 2021 following the election of left-leaning members to the council.)
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When Krucoff rang doorbells, many were excited to speak to a candidate of their political affiliation in this deep-blue city. Lindsey Drath, 41, told Krucoff that Cheh did not do enough to advocate for parents in the ward who wanted D.C. Public schools to reopen earlier in the pandemic.
“I reached out to Mary Cheh and she said ‘you really need to take it up with your principal.' … She took no responsibility,” said Drath, who has three children.
Thomas said he hasn’t met many voters who objected to his characterization of crime as the most important concern. “We definitely need more police, as well as we need to hold police accountable,” he said. “I think people are receptive to more police.”
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Cheh, who filed to run for reelection and then changed her mind, never faced a primary challenger since her first election in 2006. She declined an interview request by The Washington Post, and has been hesitant to discuss her abrupt announcement that she was dropping out of the race beyond an online statement on Feb. 11 that said she wanted to spend more time with her family.
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The people running to be her successor are largely seeking to continue her work rather than calling for change. They praise her legislative history, including her focus on the environment and her advocacy for the ward’s public schools.
Brown, who filed paperwork to run about a week before Cheh’s announcement, said she had planned to run against the incumbent to solve problems she believes were not rectified during Cheh’s tenure, including overcrowded schools and the lack of affordable housing.
Other Democratic candidates have mentioned few differences from Cheh, such as Bergmann’s preference for the tax increase that Cheh voted. Cheh also recently backed a bill to remove the Office of the State Superintendent of Education from the mayor’s purview, a proposal criticized by Goulet, who supports mayoral control of the public school system.
Asked how they would be different from Cheh, several of the people running to succeed her struggled to answer. They’re more focused, they say, on standing out among each other in an ever-growing field.