Julius D. “JD” Spain Sr. won the Democratic primary for the Arlington County Board, according to unofficial results, cementing this Northern Virginia locality’s embrace of urban growth in a race that spotlighted fault lines over the issue.
The contest for the open seat held by Chair Libby Garvey (D), who is retiring, was conducted using ranked-choice voting. Preliminary results were not tabulated until Friday afternoon so that elections officials could include late-arriving mail-in ballots.
The five-way race was most prominently shaped by the board’s much-debated vote last year to eliminate single-family-only zoning in favor of more “missing middle” housing.
But the candidates also laid out contrasting visions on how they might push to fill the empty office buildings straining the county budget and tackle rising incidents of youth overdoses — as well as what kind of experience and temperament they would bring to the board.
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“I want large-scale community buy-in in my decisions,” Spain said minutes after the result was announced. “People no longer want to hear about divisive issues. They want to move forward with innovative thinkers but also those who lead with empathy.”
Given some of the policy disagreements between candidates, he said, his win points to the fact that Arlington’s soaring housing costs are “still a significant issue.”
At least two others are running in the general election: independent Audrey Clement, who has unsuccessfully run for the board a dozen times, and Republican Juan Carlos Fierro, who lost the race last year. Spain will be heavily favored to win in liberal Arlington, where just one person has won a spot on the board since 2000 without the Democratic nomination.
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The Arlington County Board has five members who are all elected at-large and serve staggered four-year terms. There is no permanent chair; that title is selected by the board each January and usually rotates between members from one year to the next.
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Spain, 51, a consultant who unsuccessfully ran for the board last year, pitched a focus on mental health issues and said he would push the county to continue leaning into urban development. A past president of the Arlington NAACP, he also did not shy away from the sometimes sharp criticism he took toward the board he is now on track to be joining.
Edie Wilson, president of the Shirlington Civic Association, said she backed Spain because he would push the board toward change and away from the limitations she said were imposed by single-family zoning.
“The restriction to single-family homes was put in place as segregation ended in many parts of the country, including Virginia,” Wilson, 72, said Tuesday outside the Charles Drew Community Center in Green Valley. “It was implicitly restrictive. It’s time for us to move forward, and to do that, we need to be able to adopt new housing.”
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About 2 in 5 Arlington residents are people of color, but all five seats on the Arlington County Board are occupied by White lawmakers. If the results hold and he wins the seat in November, Spain, who is Black, will bring racial diversity back to the body — a point he noted on the campaign trail.
Joanne Hawkins, 69, said she was drawn to Spain because of their shared interest in public health and boosting Arlington’s public school system. “He seemed to me more interested in the school systems,” said Hawkins, a retired nurse. “I’m always hoping that we’ll have better school systems here. That’s what I read about, and that’s what stood out to me.”
Arlington Registrar Gretchen Rienemeyer calculated the preliminary results before a small crowd late Friday afternoon. Her office had to process any mail-in ballots that came in before a noon Friday deadline to begin the vote-counting process.
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Voters filled out their ballots by ranking up to three candidates in their preferred order, and the tabulation process worked as follows: Votes were tallied and the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes was eliminated; their votes were then reassigned to their next-ranked candidate. The process repeated until one person had won a clear majority.
Arlington residents generally expressed less confusion with this year’s ranked-choice system, which is nearly identical to the one that has been used for an Alaska congressional seat, a New York City mayoral primary and the GOP’s most recent Virginia gubernatorial convention.
Last year’s county board primary for two open seats relied on a slightly different form of ranked-choice known as “single transferrable vote,” which left some residents and politicos with questions and frustrations before and after the primary.
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John Ausink, 70, said he voted for Natalie U. Roy, who had opposed “missing middle” and also lost last year’s election, “partly because of what I believe was careless implementation of the ranked-choice voting.”
Roy had more first-choice votes than all but one other candidate in the 2023 primary but did not end up winning the seat — a result that Ausink’s wife, Elaine Simmons, called “anti-democratic.”
County elections officials encouraged voters to rank as many candidates as they would like. Given the tabulation method, ranking more than one person does not hurt a voter’s first-choice pick.
But after their confusion over last year’s results, Ausink and Simmons ignored that advice: They only voted for Roy “and didn’t vote for anybody else for second and third, because that can be used against her,” Simmons said.
Spain took the lead anyway.
Jordan D. Brown contributed to this report.
