How Georgetown Voted

Well, last week’s election likely disappointed a lot of my readers. But win or lose, it’s important that we all vote when we can. And here is how Georgetown voted:

President

Harris and Walz carried Georgetown comfortably with 82% of the vote. Trump got about 13%. That’s about the same split that Biden and Trump got in 2020 (Biden actually got 84% last time, while Trump was right on the same 13%).

Despite dropping out and endorsing Trump, RFK Jr. still got 39 votes (which was about 0.75%). There were 178 write-ins and 49 people just didn’t choose a candidate.

Trump only got about 7% of the vote city-wide, which makes Georgetown a more Trump-favoring neighborhood than the average. But it’s far from the Trumpiest neighborhood in DC. That is, surprisingly, Hill East.

Council

The only ostensibly competitive election for DC Council this year was for the two At-Large seats. One can go to a Democrat and the other has to go to someone not registered as a Democrat. In recent years that’s meant it goes to a former Democrat who just pretends to be an independent. That trend continued this year. Robert White was the Democratic nominee and won one of the seats easily. Citywide he garnered 62% of the vote. In Georgetown he also was the leading vote getter, but only received 30% of the vote. (This is a weird vote to tally. Voters are given two votes, so if everyone voted both votes the most any one candidate could get is 50%. With White winning 62% of the vote citywide, it’s clear a lot of people just vote once and stop there.)

Christina Henderson is the faux-independent for this election cycle. She got 23% of the citywide vote to secure the second At-Large seat. In Georgetown she got a lot closer to White with 11% of the vote.

By far the biggest vote getter for this seat in Georgetown was “undervote” (i.e. didn’t vote for one or both the slots). That came in at 46% of the vote.

For the Ward Two seat, the race was even less competitive. Brooke Pinto ran unopposed and won 81% of the vote in Georgetown (which is about what she got Wardwide). Her biggest “competitor” was undervote, which got 15% of the total. The 81% tally is an increase over Pinto’s Georgetown total she received four years ago when she got 77%. That, however, was a contested election, with Dupont’s Randy Downs making an independent run.

Initiative 83

The only really competitive ballot line for DC this year was for Initiative 83. This would change how we vote in DC by introducing ranked choice voting and semi-open primaries. Ultimately though, it wasn’t even close. The initiative won easily across the city, with 73% of the vote. (Which really should not have come as a surprise since literally no ballot initiative has ever lost in DC). This came despite opposition to the measure from the DC Democratic party, which (probably correctly) views this change as a minor erosion of its power in the city.

Georgetown backed the measure by a similar share. Of the people that voted either yes or no, the yeses totaled 71% of the vote. (Honestly given that Georgetown has a higher number of non-Democrats, you’d think it would do even better.)

As someone who has long been advocating for a change along these lines, I was thrilled to see it win. But unfortunately it is no self-activating. The Council needs to actually ratify the change via the budget. There was some talk that if the initiative passed without getting support from African-American voters that the Council could use that to ignore the results. However, even in Ward 8 the measure won with 71% of the vote. The lowest ward-wide vote for it was Ward 4, which is historically a Black ward (although lesser so these days) and it still gave the measure 68.5%.

So if the Council nonetheless chooses to ignore the will of the voters, it won’t have much of a leg to stand on to do it.

ANC

Oh, I almost forgot the ANC. Six of us ran for reelection and were all unopposed. Not surprisingly we all won with North Korea-like voting totals.

The student commissioners are graduating in the spring and thus did not run again. No one made the ballot given the difficulty in getting qualified signatures on campus in the middle of the summer. But at least two students announced write-in candidacies. Who actually won those contests will be announced soon.