Stacks of pizza sat untouched, the salad bowls kept their plastic lids and roughly a dozen red-shirted volunteers sat in a circle Tuesday night, gazing at a lone television in search of pleasant news inside their small campaign office on Florida Avenue Northwest.
Upstart challenger David Grosso, a relatively unknown former D.C. Council staffer who started campaigning a year ago, unseated incumbent Michael A. Brown on Tuesday for an at-large seat in the only significant upset in the city's elections.
Voters in the District will decide Tuesday whether to reshape the D.C. Council in election contests that serve as a referendum on the makeup of a body that has faced a steady trickle of ethical problems in the past two years.
City lawmakers on Tuesday answered a mounting chorus of motorists who say the District is burdening them with pricey traffic-camera fines in an attempt to balance the local budget under the banner of public safety.
Since winning the race to represent Ward 5 on the D.C. Council five months ago today, Kenyan McDuffie hasn't made headlines as an emerging political personality. That's probably a good thing, considering that some of his most likeable colleagues are in the prosecutorial sightlines of the U.S. attorney and other investigators.
Maybe it was the setting — a house of worship — but a quartet of candidates vying for two at-large seats on the D.C. Council eschewed the bitter rhetoric and personal attacks that have dominated the past few weeks for veiled swipes and even cordiality during a debate in Georgetown on Thursday.
D.C. Council member Vincent B. Orange is set to host a small-business summit downtown on Friday -- a who's who event at which Mayor Vincent C. Gray and top officials discuss business opportunities in the city -- but a mailing that advertises the event tests the delicate boundary between an incumbent's duties and the fight for name recognition on the path to Election Day.
D.C. Council member Michael A. Brown has more in common with his former campaign treasurer, Hakim Sutton, than the elections they have weathered together: Both have a history of money problems.
D.C. Council member Michael A. Brown's campaign for re-election announced endorsements from nine unions Tuesday despite troubling headlines that have ranged from missing campaign funds to a close call on petitions he submitted to get on the ballot.
