HAMPTON — Mayor George Wallace was bested in commanding fashion in Tuesday’s mayoral race by challenger and council agitator Donnie Tuck – an upset that some say they saw coming from miles away and others were surprised by.
Tuck’s appeal in different parts of the city and the election’s turnout seem to have been important to helping him rake in nearly 60 percent of the vote to Wallace’s 40 percent.
Wallace campaign manager Roland White said the Wallace camp thought it would be close ahead of the election.
“We ran some analysis of things and we felt that there was a possibility that it could have gone either way and it went Mr. Tuck’s way,” White said. “You can look at the vote and where the votes came from and it’s pretty clear.”
He said areas where the campaign expected Wallace to perform well, he did, but support from other areas they had been counting on didn’t come through.
“I thought (we’d pick up) some of the areas in Northampton and in Fox Hill and other communities and it didn’t materialize in some areas,” White said.
Wallace won in the city’s urban core like the downtown, Coliseum Central, Aberdeen and Olde Hampton areas, and mostly where turnouts were middling to low. He also won his home precinct of Bethel.
Tuck won in the city’s more suburban areas. Northampton largely went to Tuck, as well as the Fox Hill, Grandview, Buckroe, Wythe and Phoebus areas.
Generally speaking, Hampton’s voting patterns in the mayoral race also aligned with the city’s racial breakdown – Wallace had a much stronger showing in predominantly black areas of the city, while Tuck won more votes in predominantly white areas.
However, the trend isn’t absolute. Tuck won the Lindsay precinct in the predominantly black southwestern portion of the city, where every one of the adjacent precincts went to Wallace.
Of particular note is how strong Tuck’s showing was in the eastern area of the city.
Tuck didn’t just win in Fox Hill and Buckroe – he took precincts in those areas by overwhelming margins. For instance, Tuck beat Wallace by almost 70 percentage points in Phoebus, taking more than 84 percent of the precinct’s total vote.
Map: Where Tuck beat Wallace
Wallace’s precinct wins are colored orange. Tuck’s wins are in blue, with the color getting darker as the margin of victory grows.
Turnout may have played a big role in Tuck’s win Tuesday. Hampton voter registrar Tara Morgan confirmed Wednesday after her office’s canvassing that turnout was 16.8 percent throughout the city – which means about one out of every six registered voters in Hampton actually made it out to the polls Tuesday.
Some of those precincts that Tuck won so convincingly were also the ones with the highest turnouts in the city – Asbury boasted 1,138 votes cast for the mayor’s race, which was both the highest number of votes in one precinct and the highest voter turnout rate in Hampton at 27.4 percent.
Tuck’s overwhelming dominance in Asbury – winning with almost 80 percent of the vote — and elsewhere in the eastern part of the city gave him a huge numbers advantage when it came time to tally the votes.
The most Wallace won any precinct by was the Phenix precinct, which he carried by more than 30 percentage points.
Word on the street
Many voters in those areas that went the heaviest in Tuck’s favor say many of the same things about their preferred candidate – and about the sitting mayor.
“He comes across as fair, caring about people and not just himself,” said Charlie Felts, who lives in Wythe but runs The Way We Were Antiques in Phoebus – both areas that backed Tuck overwhelmingly.
This stands in stark contrast Felts’ perception of Wallace. With a “Vote for Donnie Tuck” sign still perched in the window, Felts said Tuck won his vote years ago when he was first running for City Council and impressed him by actually coming out and meeting people.
“This black man comes to my door in a predominantly white neighborhood and acts humble and asks for my vote,” Felts said.
Next door to Felts’ book shop, Jacob Lelesch stands behind the jewelry case at Robert’s Antiques.
“A lot of people think it came out of nowhere and it didn’t,” Lelesch said. He said Tuck is a regular in the area, talking to merchants, dining and shopping, which has endeared him to the local community.
“George never came down here, I can tell you that,” he said.
Lelesch is convinced that Tuck won a huge groundswell of support in Phoebus and elsewhere with one simple action – speaking out during a crowded council meeting over the renaming of a bridge between Phoebus and Fort Monroe.
“It wasn’t about liking (the name of the bridge) or not liking it, people just wanted to talk about it,” Lelesch said. At that meeting in March, dozens were signed up to speak on the naming of the bridge for civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
Wallace pushed to hold an unscheduled vote to amend the name to include three famed slaves in an effort to appease critics who said the bridge’s name should reflect local history before the citizens had the chance to speak to the issue.
Tuck was the lone voice on council asking why the vote couldn’t wait until after officials had heard from the assembled residents. He voted against the compromise name in protest.
In Buckroe Beach, Janet Cole said the area’s backing of Tuck is likely reciprocation.
“He’s been very supportive of us in Buckroe,” she said, noting that he’s often a presence at meetings of the Buckroe Improvement League.
Cole said she recalls once – a meet-and-greet event – that she’d seen Wallace at a meeting of the civic group.
“I haven’t always felt that our input was wanted,” she said of Wallace, though she said she had rarely interacted with him directly.
Up in Fox Hill, Bob Padgett has a larger-than-life-sized sign bearing Donnie Tuck’s face on the fence in front of his house.
“He listens to us,” Padgett says, plain and simple. “He doesn’t act like, ‘I’m God.'”
A card-carrying Democrat, Padgett said he couldn’t back Wallace even with the bevy of Democratic heavy hitters lining up to endorse the sitting mayor, including senators, congressmen, the lieutenant governor and a handful of state-level officials.
“Tim Kaine doesn’t have to live with him. I have to live with him,” Padgett said.
Reversal of fortunes
Tuesday’s election flipped the script on two recent elections.
Tuck lost a run at the mayor’s seat in 2012, with then Mayor Molly Ward earning more than 64 percent – and winning many of the areas where Tuck finished strong this year.
Wallace won a major victory for the remainder of Ward’s mayor’s seat two years ago, beating challenger Frank Ottofaro Jr. with more than 63 percent of the vote. That race saw roughly 2,000 fewer votes cast than this year’s race.
Wallace has had a hand in running the city of Hampton for the better part of the last four decades. He was hired in 1975 as an assistant city manager and took the city’s top spot in 1997 as manager. Wallace was fired by the city council in 2005, filed a lawsuit which was settled for an undisclosed sum, and came back to win election to city council in 2008.
In 2013, he was elevated to the mayor’s spot after Ward was tapped for a job in the Obama White House and won a special election to finish the rest of Ward’s term in 2014.
Come July, he’ll be without a seat at the table in Hampton city government, but campaign manager White suspects he won’t receed from civic life after so long in the public eye.
“With all the organizations he’s involved in, he’s still going to be a very busy man,” White said.
Murphy can be reached by phone at 757-247-4760.
