The Fall of Levar Stoney
A rising star in the Virginia Democratic Party plummets to earth.
The story of Levar Stoney was not supposed to end like this.
The fast-rising, homegrown Democratic talent who rose to became the youngest mayor in the history of Richmond at 35 conceded his bid to become Virginia’s next lieutenant governor on Wednesday. Though the final margin of his primary loss to Democratic State Sen. Ghazala Hashmi was narrow, it was within the Richmond city limits Stoney governed for two terms that he was handed his worst results.
Hashmi defeated Stoney by only 3,500 hundred votes statewide. In Richmond, however, Hashmi bested Stoney by more than 10,000 votes. The result was a bitter pill for Stoney. He had won reelection to the mayoralty in 2020 months before race riots devastated American cities. Richmond was no exception. Thousands rallied beneath the Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue, demanding the Confederate general’s likeness and other Confederate statues in the city be removed from public property. Stoney joined with protesters and eventually made good on their requests, but not before city officers teargassed activists, a move that would come to mar Stoney’s tenure.
The young mayor, who grew up in Hampton Roads, Virginia, apologized for the response by city officers, but the damage had been done. Thousands descended upon Richmond City Hall the next day, creating a chaotic scene in which Stoney was repeatedly shouted down as he attempted to navigate the tricky situation. In the end, the statues came down, but Stoney, who campaigned as the “millennial who took down the Monuments,” was remembered as an establishment player who refused to throw his full support behind the protesters.
Then came the proposed $562 million Richmond Grand Resort and Casino. Stoney pushed for the Richmond-area casino project throughout his tenure, but was twice rejected by voters, the second time by a wider margin than the first. “I’ve sat down with those who were operators and casinos who wanted an opportunity to build in Richmond, and I negotiated with them,” Stoney said. “The voters had a say twice, and they said no.”
Stoney claimed the casino, which was to be located off I-95 south of Richmond, would bring good-paying jobs for low-wage black workers in the area, and voters in the southern part of the city voted in support of the project. Those same voters also selected Stoney for lieutenant governor on Tuesday night. But the typically whiter and wealthier citizens of the west and north ends of Richmond, the ones who hold the real political power in the city, organized and voted overwhelmingly against the project. Many of the voices and voters who criticized Stoney’s ham-handed response to the statues were definitive “nos” against building out gambling in the capitol and again on Stoney’s bid for statewide office.
Had Stoney’s failures only amounted to what Democratic voters viewed as an unacceptable lack of enthusiasm for the removal of Confederate statues and a botched casino push, he very likely would’ve carried enough support in Richmond to defeat Hashmi on Tuesday night. But there was a third, more pressing issue that doomed Stoney’s bid for higher office: the water.
Richmond has suffered two boil-water advisories in the last 12 months. Though both advisories occurred under the stewardship of the newly elected Mayor Danny Avula, the criticism fell on Stoney. The first advisory, in January of this year, left Richmonders without drinking water for six days during a major ice storm that coated the city and made transportation difficult. Stoney’s administration was criticized for failing to address the city’s aging infrastructure and for the poor communication during a disaster. And though the second boil advisory happened under Avula’s watch in May, the issue haunted Stoney on the campaign trail. Speaking in Alexandria days before Tuesday’s primary, Stoney blamed the water issues on the former Mayor Dwight. C Jones: “This came out of the administration before me. Do we wish that the prior administration would have gotten it done so we didn’t have to deal with it? Obviously, we wish that.”
Stoney’s deflection on the issue failed to convince voters in the city. “It was here in the City of Richmond that cost him his dream of being a lieutenant governor,” explained WTVR political analyst Bob Holsworth. The man who was considered the protégé of former Gov. Terry Mcauliffe and who was once tapped as the future of the Democratic party in Virginia lost in humiliating fashion, squarely undone by the very city that helped launch his political career.
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