Sep 12, 2008  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO JR  | COMMENTS     

Veteran D.C. City Councilmember Carol Schwartz (R-At-Large), a strong gay rights supporter, lost her re-election bid in the city’s Republican primary Tuesday to a little-known challenger who supports same-sex marriage and has pledged to aggressively court gay voters in November.

Patrick Mara, a 32-year-old former congressional staffer, was credited with outflanking Schwartz by waging a highly organized, well-funded and carefully targeted campaign directed at Republican voters, who make up about 7 percent of the city’s largely Democratic electorate.

Preliminary tallies show Mara took about 60 percent of the vote to Schwartz’s 40 percent. The numbers reflected votes in all but one of the city’s 143 precincts.

D.C. Councilmember Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), one of the city’s most gay-friendly elected officials, defeated challenger Cary Silverman in the Democratic primary, 64 percent to 35 percent.

Silverman, who expressed strong support for gay rights during the campaign, lost to Evans in all of the Ward 2 precincts with high concentrations of gay voters.

In the citywide race for shadow senator, gay Democratic activist Phil Pannell lost to incumbent Paul Strauss, taking 34 percent of the vote to the 65 percent Strauss won. Pannell lost to Strauss in all of the city’s eight wards.

Pannell also lost to Strauss in most precincts with large numbers of gay voters, although Pannell’s vote count in the heavily gay precincts was higher than in other precincts.

Strauss is a longtime supporter of gay rights and had the backing of gay Democrats in his home base of Ward 3.

“It was hard to beat a 12-year incumbent who was extremely well financed,” said Pannell, who was outspent by Strauss in the shadow seat campaign.

The city maintains two shadow Senate seats and one shadow House seat to lobby for D.C. statehood and congressional voting rights.

Pannell won a separate race for a seat on the D.C. Democratic State Committee from Ward 8, his home base, by finishing first in the four-person race.

In that contest, Pannell captured about 28 percent of the vote, coming in ahead of rival candidate Anthony Motley, who received about 26 percent of the vote to finish second. Under rules set by the 82-member State Committee, which serves as the governing body of the city’s Democratic Party, the top two vote winners in ward contests win seats on the committee.

Pannell ran on a slate of State Committee candidates that he and incumbent gay State Committee member Jeffrey Richardson organized called Obama4UnityBeatsMcCain. However, most of the candidates on that slate, including Richardson, lost to members of two competing slates backed by State Committee Chair Anita Bonds.

Gay Democratic activist Dwayne Revis, who also ran on the Obama4UnityBeatsMcCain slate, lost his race for a State Committee seat from Ward 4. Gay Democrat Ron Collins, a member of the State Committee from Ward 6, won re-election to his seat on one of the rival slates backed by Bonds.
Had the Pannell-Richardson slate won a majority of seats on the State Committee, Richardson was expected to become the new chair of the committee, making him the first openly gay chair of the D.C. Democratic Party.

Evans, who received a rating of +10 by the Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance, the group’s highest possible rating, is considered one of the Council’s strongest allies of the gay community. Evans also received the endorsement of the Gertrude Stein Democratic Club, the city’s largest gay political group. Silverman, an attorney and Ward 2 civic activist, received a GLAA rating of +8.5.

Stein Club President Mario Acosta-Velez said the club backed Evans because of his many years of advocacy on behalf of local gay rights issues, including his introduction and efforts to help pass gay rights legislation.

In other races, City Council incumbents Muriel Bowser (D-Ward 4), Yvette Alexander (D-Ward 7) and Marion Barry (D-Ward 7) each won in the Democratic primary by large margins.

Although the three Council members received somewhat lower ratings by GLAA than Evans, they have expressed support for nearly all of the gay- and AIDS-related issues deemed important by gay activists.

Congressional Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-At-Large) and incumbent Council member Kwame Brown (D-At-Large) were unopposed in the Democratic primary and are expected to easily win their races in the November general election. Both are strong supporters of gay and transgender rights.

In a separate Democratic Party race, former City Council Chair Arrington Dixon, considered a strong supporter of gay rights and one of the first on the Council to advocate for same-sex marriage, lost his re-election bid for a seat on the Democratic National Committee to Vincent Orange.

Orange, a former Ward 5 D.C. Council member, ...