Arlington County Board Democratic primary won by Coffey, Cunningham
Maureen Coffey and Susan R. Cunningham are the winners of the Democratic primary for two open seats on the Arlington County Board, according to unofficial results, giving a partial victory to both supporters and critics of an effort to add more-dense housing in this Northern Virginia community.
The county’s June 20 Democratic primary was the first publicly run election in Virginia to be decided by ranked-choice voting. Preliminary results in the race were not calculated until Friday evening, to allow mail-in ballots to be counted.
A crowded field of six candidates — and no incumbents — put the new voting system on full display, as they and their supporters sparred over a controversial decision by local lawmakers this spring to eliminate single-family-only zoning.
Three of the candidates supported this push for more “missing middle” housing, campaigning in part on their support from urbanist groups and from the county board members who had pushed it through. Two others were endorsed by some of the initiative’s most vocal critics.
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But under the ranked-choice system, voters nominated one from either camp for the party’s ticket in November: Coffey, 28, a policy researcher who praised the county for taking action to build more housing, and Cunningham, 50, a consultant and interim CEO who said the policy was passed too hastily.
“People are living very different lives depending on where they are in Arlington,” Coffey said by phone on Friday evening. The county’s more urbanized corridors — home to many young renters like her — “also need a voice, and I’m excited to advocate for experiences that are just different from the ones currently represented.”
Cunningham, meanwhile, said the results confirm what she already knew. “Our community expects our leaders and each other to have more tough conversations,” she said, “and play out both the short-term and long-term of policy decisions.”
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End of carouselBoth candidates praised the ranked-choice system, noting that it gave representation to two camps of a community that had been split on the missing middle.
“There are two different constituencies that came out and voted and had two different sets of priorities,” Coffey said, “but both groups get someone to represent them on the board.”
The pair are strong favorites to win in the fall against independent Audrey Clement, who has unsuccessfully sought a spot on the board 11 times, and Republican Juan Carlos Fierro. Just one person without the Democratic Party’s endorsement has managed to win a seat on the board since 2000.
If the results hold and both Democrats win the general election, all five seats on the county board will be occupied by White lawmakers — a first in at least two decades in a county whose leaders often boast about its racial and ethnic diversity.
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Tensions over missing middle, which reached an apex with the county board’s decision in March to allow the construction of townhouses, duplexes and small apartment buildings in any residential neighborhood, emerged as a banner issue in this off-year election cycle.
Coffey, the former president of the Virginia Young Democrats, said while campaigning that she would focus on economic stability as housing prices and the cost of living have skyrocketed in the county, bringing her perspective as a union member and a renter.
She talked openly about the struggles of finding an apartment she could afford to purchase and drew heavy support from the millennials and Gen Z-ers who live in Arlington’s more urbanized corridors along the Metro, as well as urbanist groups and several sitting board members.
Cunningham, a consultant, stressed her lengthy résumé as a “problem-solver-in chief,” including work in the federal government and as the interim executive director of a local affordable housing nonprofit. She had previously run as an independent in a 2020 special election for the county board.
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While she said she hoped to bring people together following the “missing middle” vote, Cunningham nonetheless suggested lawmakers had approved the plan over the concerns of many residents.
Among first-choice votes, she won nearly every precinct in the more suburban northern end of the county, where opposition to the rezoning was highest.
The other candidates were Jonathan Dromgoole, Natalie Roy, Julius D. “JD” Spain Sr. and Tony Weaver.
While many of the candidates at times tried to redirect their campaigns to focus on other issues, plenty of voters at the polls on Tuesday had one thing on their minds: housing.
Elizabeth Holbrook, 65, drove her friend Marcia Basler, 78, to the polls at Innovation Elementary School on Tuesday morning. Basler, who recently had an injury, needed help reaching the gym to cast her first-choice vote for Roy, citing the candidate’s opposition to the missing middle effort.
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“This is not New York City,” said Basler, steadying her walker. “It’s Arlington. And it’s more cars, more traffic, more people. I’ve lived here for 50 years and I’m sick of it.”
The two women live in apartments in the nearby Colonial Village area. They’ve watched Arlington grow over the decades, and with it, the demand for more housing and amenities.
“We’re beginning to feel like we can’t breathe,” said Holbrook, who ranked Roy first and Cunningham second. “The county of Arlington has decided that every square inch of earth must have a building on it.”
End of carouselAcross the county that afternoon, Marin Bader, 27, showed up at the polls at Randolph Elementary in the Douglas Park neighborhood with very different motivations.
She said she ranked Weaver first — they are part of the same running group, and she wanted to support him — but ranked Coffey in second place over her support for missing middle.
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“Single-family zoning really makes no sense in Arlington at this point,” said Bader, who splits a garden-style apartment along Columbia Pike with a roommate. “I would like to one day own property here. Any way to increase land so we can build more homes is in my mind a good thing.”
Gustavo Sapiruka, 61, called himself a one-issue voter on housing. “I believe it’s a right to have a roof,” he said.
He voted for Cunningham because of her experience working on affordable housing in the nonprofit sector: “She would have a good understanding of how to create common-sense policies,” he said.
The primary election was also something of a test for ranked-choice voting in Virginia, which updated its vote-tabulation and reporting technology to accommodate the new system.
County board members had voted last fall to try out the practice in the Democratic primary, and they are expected to decide next month whether to extend the system to November’s general election. Other localities around the commonwealth have indicated they are closely watching Arlington’s race as they consider whether to follow suit.
Because two seats were open — rather than just one, as has been the case in the most-watched ranked-choice races elsewhere in the country — the counting method relies on a system known as “proportional ranked-choice voting” or “single transferrable vote.”
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Some voters and civic leaders, including those on both sides of the missing middle debate, had said the tabulation method was difficult to understand and had not been properly explained to voters by the county and state election offices.
But Liz White, executive director of the group UpVote Virginia, said she believed Arlington voters found ranked-choice to be easy and straightforward. Her group had stationed volunteers at polling sites during early voting, and she pointed out that the Arlington registrar’s office had received no complaints about the system on Election Day.
While voting in the Lyon Village area on Tuesday, Karen Methlie, 69, said neither she nor her husband knew about the system — which she called “ranked voting” — until they attended an event that featured several candidates.
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“I don’t quite understand what’s better about it,” she said.
If only first-choice votes had been counted — the closest parallel to the more traditional “first past the post” system — the election would have gone to the candidates who most vocally criticized missing middle.
Cunningham and Roy received about 25 and 24 percent of the first-choice votes, respectively, and putting them just ahead of Coffey and Spain, who had supported the plan. (About 16.5 percent of registered voters cast ballots in this “off-off year” election.)
“It does seem like the two camps on missing middle are pretty split closer than people expected,” said White. “In the old system, it looks likely that you could have ended up with two candidates from one camp getting both seats.”
After preliminary results were announced Friday evening, Roy cautioned that officials needed to explain proportional ranked-choice voting properly and allow voters to rank all six candidates, not just their top three. (The county’s voting machines do not allow more than three choices.)
“Ranked-choice voting can work really, really well, but it has to be explained, and people have to know what they’re doing,” she said. “I can’t tell you how many people had no idea this was going on.”
At the polls on Tuesday, others expressed little confusion about the process. Anawar Munshi, 38, and Mahmuda Happy, 24, pulled up to an elementary school in the red SUV that Munshi uses to drive for Uber.
It was the first time voting for Happy, who was born in Bangladesh and became a naturalized citizen last year. While both husband and wife declined to share their chosen candidates, they said voting in a ranked-choice race was easy.
“It was clear. It was not confusing,” Munshi said. “It’s not difficult if you know the person who you’re going to vote for.”
Happy, a homemaker, shrugged. She said she had little to compare it to.
“It’s the first time,” she said, “so maybe next time it will seem different.”
Mary Claire Molloy contributed to this report.
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