By By JONATHAN CLAYBORNE
Staff Writer
Theoretically, the winner of Washington’s mayoral race could have been declared about 8:06 p.m. Tuesday, when the P.S. Jones/Ward 3 vote totals were posted at the Beaufort County Board of Elections.
Among some in the political know, the majority-black P.S. Jones precinct has long been described as a barometer for elections in the city.
Of the 1,517 voters registered in the precinct as of Monday, 1,055 were black, and 1,171 were Democrats.
By 1:15 p.m. Tuesday, just 120 people, or 9 percent of P.S. Jones precinct voters, had turned out. Turnout in the precinct was running behind voter participation in other parts of the city.
Ward 4, with its polling place situated in the Bobby Andrews Recreation Center on East Seventh Street, had served 199 voters by 1:15 p.m.. With an ending turnout of 415, Ward 4 would outpoll the city’s three other precincts.
P.S. Jones would finish with 214 voters, the smallest number among all of the wards in this off-year election.
Early Tuesday evening, poll worker William O’Pharrow noted that turnout was relatively flat or light at the P.S. Jones polling place, located at the Beaufort County Boys &Girls Club on Bridge Street.
The precinct’s voters tend to cluster their voting strength behind one candidate, making a formidable voting bloc, O’Pharrow said about 5:30 p.m., as a handful of voters trickled in.
Dorothy Woolard voted at the Boys &Girls Club.
“I always vote,” Woolard said. “It’s a privilege and it’s an honor to vote, for me.”
Asked what issues brought her to the polls on Tuesday, Woolard pointed to the electric-utility rates charged by the city and to property taxes.
“If it’s a change, I hope it will be a change for the better,” she said. “The most important thing is unity.”
Some political observers tagged P.S. Jones as key to the re-election efforts of incumbent Mayor Judy Meier Jennette, who squared off against three opponents, one of them a current councilman.
When the precinct’s results were released, they showed that Jennette had (unofficially) tallied 117 votes in P.S. Jones while opponent Archie Jennings, the new mayor-elected, had posted a respectable 65 votes and was running ahead elsewhere.
Election-watchers in the room wondered aloud if Jennette could close the widening gap; she couldn’t.
P.S. Jones was the only precinct Jennette won.
“I think a number of things happened,” said the Rev. David Moore, a political activist who was at the Board of Elections Tuesday night.
To Moore, the one-stop, or early voting, totals were the best indicator of how the election would finish.
Even before the early voting results were known, Jennings indicated he was pleased by the total numbers of voters involved in one-stop, a suggestion that he knew his campaign had momentum.
“I was really encouraged by the early voting turnout,” he said Tuesday afternoon.
Once posted, the one-stop numbers gave Jennings an early lead.
“That, to me, was the clearest indication,” Moore said. “P.S. Jones confirmed it, but I think that the Jennings campaign, I think they outworked the Jennette campaign. They did an excellent campaign in terms of work.”
The Jennings camp went door to door, handing out sample ballots, Moore related.
“They worked, and so they earned it,” he concluded. “It was surprising because, on the one hand, I thought that Judy has done such an excellent job in representing the city of Washington, and it could be that perhaps she got tied to the (electric) utility rates somehow or another.”
Jennette herself echoed that notion on election night, telling the Daily News, “A big deciding factor was the electric rates.”
Tuesday’s election effectively ended Jennette’s 20-year run in city government.
She was first elected to the council in 1989. She has served two two-year terms as mayor.
Jennings is a two-term councilman.
As a candidate for mayor, Jennette had faced only token opposition in her first two bids for the city’s highest office.
As an incumbent, she won the 2007 mayoral contest with 977 votes, or 88.82 percent of the tally in that race.
In 2005, Jennette won her first term as mayor with 1,027 votes, or 85 percent of the vote.
Jennings was first elected to the council as the second-highest vote-getter in the 2005 election. In an eight-way race for five seats, he won 15 percent of the total, or 767 votes.
In a nine-way contest in 2007, he captured the second-highest vote tallies again, scoring 14.80 percent, or 930 votes.
Also opposing Jennette this year were Mickey Cochran and Rick Gagliano.
Gagliano, vice chairman of the city’s Human Relations Council, had indicated he was relying partly on the minority vote to clinch a win.
On Tuesday night, he said all of the city’s voices should be heard.
“They didn’t come out like they should have this election,” he commented. “But it was a good election, I learned a lot. I congratulate the winners. This city will stand.”