Outgoing D.C. Council member Mary M. Cheh announced her pick Monday in the crowded race to replace her: Tricia Duncan, a community volunteer who is one of nine candidates vying to fill the Ward 3 council seat that Cheh has held for 15 years.

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       “Only Tricia has the personal qualities that will make her an excellent Council Member,” Cheh wrote in a statement. “Ask yourself, as issues arise over the next four years, who is most likely to exercise the best judgment and represent your values. I will answer that question by voting for Tricia Duncan.”

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       After Cheh’s statement, Ruth Wattenberg, the ward’s school board representative, tweeted that as the other elected official who represents Ward 3, she would be supporting education activist Matthew Frumin. She cast Frumin as the most electable of several candidates advocating for priorities like increasing density, affordable housing, diversity and bike lanes: “Among those who share his views, he has the clearest path to victory!” Wattenberg tweeted, with a photo of herself with a Frumin yard sign.

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       Duncan, a stay-at-home mother of two teenagers who formerly worked in real estate, has been involved in Ward 3 as a leader of her sons’ school’s parent-teacher organization and as president of the Palisades Community Association, which holds neighborhood events. She has advocated for the council to build new schools in Ward 3, and is running on a platform that includes increasing the frequency and reliability of bus routes and adding more members to the 13-person D.C. Council.

       Cheh had said she would not make an endorsement in the race to fill her seat, and in an interview Monday said she didn’t view her statement of support as a formal endorsement.

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       “I can’t go anywhere in the ward without people asking me [who I’m voting for] and I have to answer something,” Cheh said in an interview. “I finally figured, look, I’m just going to put out this statement. … I’m just telling people who I’m voting for, because they keep asking me.”

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       She said she won’t campaign for Duncan like she did for Christina Henderson (I-At Large), whom she endorsed in 2020.

       Cheh said her choice of Duncan was based more on personality than policy. “It’s more how you engage with people, whether you’re open, you have enough humility to think that you don’t have all the answers and you will ask others what they think,” she said in an interview Monday.

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       Cheh praised Duncan as “not ideological.” Some of Duncan’s stances seem to try to chart a middle course on some of the most divisive issues in D.C. politics. On housing, for example, Duncan says she wants denser housing around Metro stations but also says on her website “each development should fit the neighborhood” and boasts that she won concessions from a developer building a project in her neighborhood. On police, she agrees with most of the candidates in the Ward 3 race that D.C. needs to hire more officers, but doesn’t push the number of 4,000 officers that the most pro-police candidates are running on, and focuses on the need to hire more female officers, who she says would “decrease aggression and increase community trust.”

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       Duncan and Frumin are the two candidates in the nine-person Democratic primary field who have both raised and spent the most money so far. Many others are close behind in what has become a high-spending race, including advisory neighborhood commissioner Ben Bergmann, former council staffer Eric Goulet, former D.C. Library board member Monte Monash and Ward 3 Democrats Chair Phil Thomas.

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       Other candidates have been touting their endorsements, including Bergmann’s from Greater Greater Washington, former advisory neighborhood commissioner Deirdre Brown’s from D.C. Women in Politics, Frumin’s from Jews United for Justice and the Washington Teachers’ Union and Goulet’s from the D.C. Association of Realtors, Democrats for Education Reform and The Washington Post’s editorial board, which is separate from the news operation.

       The Democratic primary is June 21. The city mailed ballots last week to every registered voter, so many will cast their votes in May and early June.