As the dust has settled in Ward 7, the buzz among many local politicos is that Wendell Felder probably should have managed a bigger margin of victory in Tuesday’s Council race. He certainly had enough advantages.

Felder had years of name recognition on his side thanks to his time spent in local politics, not to mention the blessing of Ward 7 Councilmember Vince Gray, the endorsement of the Washington Post, and a bunch of outside money courtesy of the city’s biggest business group. With all that in his corner, how did Felder only best the rest of the 10-person field by a few hundred votes?

Loose Lips appreciates the argument, but the fact remains: A win is a win. Love it or hate it, D.C.’s electoral system does not require candidates win a majority of votes to claim a Council seat. The assignment for Felder was to get more votes than all the other candidates, and he has done exactly that. (Although Felder’s lead is all but insurmountable at this point, and he has claimed victory, analysts haven’t officially called the race yet.)

So how did he manage it? In addition to all those aforementioned advantages, politicos working both for and against Felder credited him with running one of the best door-knocking operations in the race and knitting together a political coalition that defied easy categorization. There’s no doubt that he is closest to Mayor Muriel Bowser after his years working for her administration (and her team privately telegraphed their support for his candidacy). But he avoided running as so much of a Green Teamer that he could still draw the backing of activists and politicians hoping to see the ward’s councilmember challenge the mayor on occasion.

“We may not agree on everything, and I am clear-eyed about that,” Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker, one of Felder’s most progressive endorsers, told LL at the winner’s Hill East watch party Tuesday night. “But I’m also wise enough to know that Ward 7 deserves a champion, even if we’re on different sides of an issue .… The coalitions he developed across political lines, across age differences, across geographic boundaries, that is the sort of thing you want to see in a councilmember.”

It’s an impressive feat that Felder could marshal the support of onetime bitter rivals Bowser and Gray (not to mention the support of Gray and the councilmember he unseated eight years ago, Yvette Alexander). Felder earned the blessing of developer-backed Opportunity DC, but also several labor unions. And he won over political newcomers such as Parker and Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto, but also many of the ward’s older politicos in Earl Williams, a Hillcrest organizer and husband of the late longtime State Board of Education Rep. Karen Williams.

But in many ways, Felder won Ward 7 the way candidates have been winning it for decades: He finished first in the Hillcrest and Penn Branch neighborhoods, even beating out other candidates who counted it as their political base, such as Veda Rasheed or Kelvin Brown. Felder’s closest competitor, Kingman Park Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Ebony Payne, finished 301 votes behind him there, not far off from his margin of victory.

Those are the types of neighborhoods where the backing of someone like Gray and much of the rest of the ward’s political establishment were a big boon for Felder. Add in his proficient field operation to educate voters about those endorsements, and it makes sense why he did so well in that area. “Out of a six- or seven-month span, we might’ve not knocked on doors for only 10 days,” Felder estimated during his victory speech.

“He’s a hard worker, he’s a grinder,” says Tyrell Holcomb, an advisory neighborhood commissioner on Minnesota Avenue NE who backed Felder. “I think at the core of what you want as a councilmember or in any aspect of elected official office is a person who talks to the people. And he did that from day one, as an ANC commissioner, as president of the Ward 7 Democrats: He talked to people.”

Chuck Thies, Gray’s Council spokesperson and top political confidant, agrees that Felder always saw “shoe leather” as his path to victory, considering that the ward has enough single-family neighborhoods where a door-knocking campaign can be effective. It’s much harder to pull off such an operation in, say, Ward 1, which is dominated by apartment buildings where access for canvassers is limited.

But there’s no guarantee that such a strategy would be effective, Thies says. Felder needed to spread the word about the late-breaking endorsements of influencers like Gray and the Post’s editorial board, and it’s much easier to do so via paid advertising. He sees it as evidence that it was far more than just Gray’s backing that won Felder the race.

“A door-knocking campaign cannot spread information rapidly,” Thies says, noting that Felder did not have a large social media presence with which to trumpet the endorsement, either. He says he arranged some media coverage of Gray’s endorsement and some TV interviews with Felder on his boss’s behalf, but otherwise left Felder to his own devices. 

That’s not to say that Felder didn’t have any money for advertising. He sent out some mail on his own, trumpeting his various endorsements, and benefited from some late support from Opportunity DC. (The independent expenditure group won’t have to disclose exactly how much it spent on the race until June 10.) But that could hardly compete with Payne’s media blitz, which surely played a huge part in her surprisingly robust performance.

That Payne, a relatively unknown ANC, could outperform more established candidates is certainly a testament to the strength of her anti-stadium, west-of-the-Anacostia-based campaign. She won all four precincts west of the river (though Felder came just a few votes shy in the main Hill East precinct) and did well enough in some of the ward’s Northeast sections to very nearly come away with a victory.

“It’s really just astonishing how well she did when she took on literally everybody,” says Chuck Rocha, Payne’s fiance and top political adviser who brought his national connections to bear on her behalf. “The mayor, over $300,000 of money that I was tracking from outside groups, the incumbent, the Washington Post … and she still has a chance to win.”

Rocha is hoping that some of the remaining mail-in votes break Payne’s way, at least enough to force a recount, but that is looking increasingly unlikely as election officials keep counting. But he is not wrong that her aggressive tack very nearly paid off, even if it ruffled a few feathers.

“Her approach of pissing off a lot of people and doing things that attracted attention was actually probably a pretty good strategy,” says Zach Teutsch, a progressive activist who says he was expecting to see Felder clear 30 percent of the vote instead of the 23 percent he managed. “It doesn’t matter how many people dislike you in a 10-person field, what matters is how many people like you.”

Of course, Payne wouldn’t have been able to mount such a media campaign if she hadn’t had access to all the non-District donors Rocha helped steer her way. Teutsch expects this shows the limits of “macro campaigning versus micro campaigning,” arguing that field organizing remains the surest path to victory in these ward races instead of just advertising.

“I always tell candidates to be wary about attacking people if voters don’t know you,” Thies says, referring to Payne’s late slew of attack ads. “If a stranger comes up to you and says, ‘Hey, this guy is an asshole.’ Well, if you don’t know the stranger well enough to trust their judgment, why would you think someone’s an asshole? It’s different if your best friend comes up and says, ‘This guy’s an asshole,’ because you trust your best friend.”

Payne will get much of the attention in the aftermath of the race because of her outsider status, but it is not lost on LL that State Board of Education Rep. Eboni-Rose Thompson finished an extremely close third. (As of Wednesday night, she was only behind Payne by 10 votes.) She was the only candidate in the race with the organizing muscle to match Felder’s campaign (and some politicos have argued to LL that her door-knocking operation was actually far superior), plus she had similar bona fides in the ward after years working as an ANC and on local school issues.

Even with all the national support, Payne only outraised Thompson by about $16,000 (and Thompson actually outpaced Felder on fundraising by about $10,000, as of May 10). She also had some outside spending on her behalf courtesy of the teachers’ and firefighters’ unions.

Jimmie Williams, a Democratic state committeeman in the ward, believes Thompson’s campaign simply “hit its stride too late.” Consider that her endorsements from At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson and Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George won her some decent buzz, particularly among progressives unsure about who to support in the race. But they didn’t come until the final three days of the primary. That’s not to say that their support could have counteracted Gray’s backing, but it probably would have blunted some of his late momentum if Thompson could have shown Felder wasn’t the only candidate with big-name support.

“I can’t control when campaigns release information,” Henderson said when asked about the endorsement announcement during Lewis George’s victory celebration in Takoma. “I was an early contributor for Eboni-Rose. I’ve seen her work for years.”

Henderson first contributed to Thompson’s campaign in November 2023, campaign finance records show, and she did not contribute to any other Ward 7 campaigns, so it’s unclear what the disconnect was there. Thompson’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It’s certainly easy to ask “what if” in a race as close as this one. What if Felder’s name hadn’t been listed first on the ballot? What if there hadn’t been both an Ebony and an Eboni-Rose in the running to potentially confuse voters? (Not to mention lesser candidate Ebbon Allen.) What if Rasheed, who finished second to Gray four years ago and was widely viewed as top contender, had performed closer to expectations and pulled more votes away from Felder?

Candidates and strategists can only entertain those hypotheticals for so long. The primary is, mercifully, already fading in the rearview. There will be new political battles to fight soon enough.

“Whatever happens, whoever our Ward 7 colleague is, I hope they’re coming to work,” Henderson said Tuesday night as the results rolled in. “We got a lot of shit to get done.”