A trio of candidates backed by members of the local Democratic Party committee won seats on the board of the McLean Community Center in a fraught election that infused the normally apolitical center with controversy following a “Drag StoryBook Hour” event for preschoolers last summer.

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       With about 2,500 ballots cast — more than 10 times the usual amount — preliminary results showed Kristina Groennings, Anna Bartosiewicz and Ari Ghasemian leading the other six candidates by at least 750 votes.

       Katherine Gorka, a former Trump administration official whose presence in the race generated intense concern among Democrats, came in a distant fourth place, with 643 votes, preliminary results showed. The election will be certified by the county Board of Supervisors in the coming weeks, which will officially appoint the winners to the board, a community center spokeswoman said.

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       “It’s been a real wild ride,” Groennings, 45, said about the run-up to the election, during which residents queried the candidates about their positions on the Pride Month event, co-sponsored by the center and a local library last June, that featured performers in drag reading aloud stories about gender fluidity to a group of children and their parents.

       Groennings, who received the most votes with 1,531, said she understood the interest but suspects most in the liberal community of 50,000 don’t see a drag event as a high priority.

       “There are so many other things we can talk about,” she said.

       The bulk of the voting occurred through absentee ballots cast in advance of the McLean Day family festival Saturday that served as the election’s main venue, a reflection of the aggressive lobbying on behalf of Groennings and her running mates by members of the Dranesville Democratic Party Committee.

       How "Drag Story Hour' set off culture wars at Virginia community center

       While Gorka was the sole Republican in the field, some local Democratic Party committee members worked to whip up votes by warning residents of a conservative plot to take over the community center.

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       “This year, the vote is more important than ever,” read one email from a former party committee chair to local Democrats. “Now, right-wing candidates have filed to run in this year’s election and the people of McLean deserve better than to accept an agenda of intolerance.”

       Julie Waters, the party committee chair, said none of the candidates received official endorsements, but she acknowledged that some members favored the “more progressive” candidates.

       The concerted effort angered several of the other candidates, who said the election was meant to be nonpartisan and about substantive issues affecting the community center, such as whether to install electric vehicle charging stations in the parking lot and whether the center’s governing structure should be changed.

       “The aggressive campaigning going on is ridiculous,” Lauren Kahn, one of the candidates, wrote to a local newspaper.

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       “We will serve the entire Greater McLean community, not the narrow agenda of any political party or other special-interest group,” another slate of three candidates — Maire Shine, James Lawless and Debra Butler — wrote in a different letter sent to the same newspaper.

       Groennings said she and her running mates worked harder than the others, spending their own money on campaign signs and get-out-the-vote efforts — a $2,000 expense for Groennings.

       “My 78-year-old mom was out canvassing every day for over two weeks,” she said. “I had people supporting my campaign that were not Democrats. I think that was really encouraging because that should be how the community board is run. It’s not supposed to be a political institution.”

       Kathleen Gillette-Mallard, who was among a group of residents upset about the drag event, said she voted for Gorka, Groennings and Butler, based on their responses to questions about that issue.

       Though Gorka didn’t win, she said, the election showed that there is a substantial number of residents who are worried about the community center’s direction.

       “We’ll see what happens,” Gillette-Mallard said. “We will work with that new board and we will be calm and cool and reasonable and, hopefully, the concerns of a pretty big segment of people in the community will be heard.”

       correction

       A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to an email written to local Democrats about the McLean Community Center board elections. The author is a former Democratic Party committee chair, not a current party official. The article has been corrected.