The 2020 spring elections in Staunton are the definition of anomaly, in that they ushered in a Republican majority on the City Council in a city that, later that year, gave Joe Biden a nine-point win over Donald Trump.
The 2024 cycle is a clean-up operation, though a lot of the heavy lifting to that end has already been done.
Andrea Oakes, one of the Republicans from the Class of 2020, stepped down early last year, and Adam Campbell, an independent, won a special election last fall to fill out the final year of her term.
Campbell joined a group of three independents elected in the 2022 cycle – Michele Edwards, Alice Woods and Brad Arrowood – to form a new governing majority on the City Council.
None of the remaining three from the Class of 2020 – Mayor Steve Claffey, Vice Mayor Amy Darby and Mark Robertson – are running for re-election.
In their place, we have a ballot with five independent candidates, led by Campbell, who is seeking a full four-year term in the all-at-large elections.
All at-large means: the top four vote-getters in this cycle will be elected.
AFP reporter Rebecca Barnabi, a Staunton resident and new homeowner in the city’s West End, has written profiles on each of the five – including Adam Campbell, Dan Gunnells, Jeff Overholtzer, Corrie Park and Blake Shepherd.
As you read through the pieces, you should get a sense of how different things are with this year’s election cycle relative to the 2020 cycle – not only that voting was done in May 2020 at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also on the heels of the concerted effort by Virginia Republicans to make local elections about national issues like the Second Amendment and Donald Trump.
The Republican majority elected in Staunton in 2020 only had a majority for two years, due to the surprise resignation of Oakes, but it wreaked plenty of havoc – including forcing out the city manager, Steve Rosenberg, for no good reason.
From discord for the sake of discord, Staunton seems to be headed back in the direction of having people on the City Council who aren’t auditioning for a spot on a job on Fox News, but instead are actually focused on doing what’s best for people who live in and love living in Staunton.
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Chris Graham
