Cobb Expands Lead To 69 Votes Over Bowers As Roanoke Mayor's Race Nears Finish Line

Democrat Joe Cobb has taken a 69-vote lead over Republican David Bowers in Roanoke’s mayoral race one week after Election Day as officials continue counting ballots.

About 150 mail-in ballots that trickled in by Friday — as well as about half of more than 1,200 provisional ballots that election officials are still verifying — helped Cobb take the edge over Bowers, who last week proclaimed victory after being 19 votes ahead.

The city’s electoral board must certify the final results by Friday, but with more than 40,000 votes cast in the mayoral election, the still-narrow margin means a recount may be likely.

“I’m encouraged,” Cobb said Tuesday night. “Every time I get some positive news that expands that lead a little bit, I’m encouraged by that.”

Cobb thanked election officials for their thoroughness and said he would respect voters’ decision regardless of the election’s outcome.

Virginia in 2022 enabled same-day registration for voters, with those voters’ ballots given a provisional status. If the voter’s eligibility is confirmed, the vote will be counted. More than 800 provisional ballots under review are from same-day registrations on Election Day.

Some additional provisional ballots, counted Monday and Tuesday, came from voters who did not have identification but who later submitted a copy of their ID to election officials.

Bowers did not immediately respond to messages late Tuesday; earlier in the day, as a reporter drove by him and yelled he would call him later when more votes were posted, Bowers threw his hands up in what appeared to be exasperation.

The hard-fought three-way race for mayor pitted Cobb, the city’s vice mayor, against former mayor Bowers and independent Councilwoman Stephanie Moon Reynolds.

As of Tuesday evening, preliminary results gave Cobb 15,150 votes (37.3 percent), Bowers was 0.17 percentage points behind with 15,081 votes and Moon Reynolds was third with 10,175 votes (25 percent). Late Tuesday, Cobb expanded a lead he took late last week, as provisional ballots showed he earned 192 more votes to Bowers’s 176 and 121 for Moon Reynolds.

Because officials must verify each provisional ballot, it could take until Friday’s certification deadline before Roanoke knows who the mayor is.

“Although these practices take extra time, they are a necessity in order to protect the integrity and security of our elections,” Nick Ocampo, the city’s director of elections and general registrar, said in a statement. “This year’s election is evidence that every vote counts.”

Bowers, asked last Wednesday if he would accept the certified results if they showed him losing, replied, “I’m accepting the results right now. I stand here before you as the mayor-elect of Roanoke.” Bowers declined to answer questions about the final vote tally, citing advice from legal counsel that he said was still being engaged.

“The Roanoke City GOP has had volunteers observing every minute of the canvass, Charlie Nave, chairman of the Roanoke City Republican Committee,” said in an email. “I am confident that the Electoral Board, the Registrar, and the Registrar’s staff are competent, transparent, and committed to following Virginia Code, even when we disagree with it. If there are problems with our electoral system, it is not because of the Roanoke Electoral Board, the Roanoke Registrar of Voters, or his staff.”

Cobb said Bowers is jumping the gun.

“He is not the mayor-elect until all of the votes are counted,” Cobb said. “He’s making that up.”

The morning after the election, Cobb said he did not know why he ran about 2,500 to 2,800 votes behind two of the Democratic City Council candidates, Terry McGuire and Phazhon Nash.

Republican Nick Hagen took a third open Council seat, becoming the first Republican on Council in two decades. Hagen beat out former city treasurer Evelyn Powers, an independent, and a newcomer Democrat, Benjamin Woods.

Moon Reynolds peeled votes away from Cobb in the city’s predominantly Black precincts, which usually vote for Democrats. She took more than half the vote in Lincoln Terrace and Eureka Park, which went heavily for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

Moon Reynolds also appeared to pull votes from Bowers in Republican-leaning areas where he ran behind numbers posted by Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Cobb, meanwhile, ran behind Harris in some predominantly white parts of southwest Roanoke, including Raleigh Court, Crystal Spring and South Roanoke, a precinct Cobb won as vice mayor in 2022 but which swung to Bowers this year.

Some homeowners in those neighborhoods have sued the city over the elimination of single-family-only zoning, a policy Cobb supported and which Bowers has made a campaign issue.

“I think we each had different constituents, different bases, if you will, that supported us, and there were a lot of interesting issues that emerged this election year locally that I think captured a lot of attention,” Cobb said. “I knew it would be a close race. I didn’t know it would be quite this close.”

The preliminary results for mayor came as a bit of a surprise after a Roanoke College poll released two weeks ago showed Cobb with 50 percent support to Bowers’s 26 percent and Moon Reynolds’s 18 percent.

David Taylor, director of the college’s Institute for Policy and Opinion Research, said he has three theories for why the mayoral poll results did not reflect results at the ballot box. The poll’s City Council estimates did closely match reality.

The poll was weighted for gender, race, age and political party affiliation based on who showed up to vote in Roanoke in 2020. It’s possible the 2024 electorate was different.

Taylor also noted nine days elapsed between the end of data collection and the election. The very publication of the poll could have influenced the electorate, such as spurring Republicans out in an attempt to defeat Cobb or convincing Democrats to stay home.

Finally, Taylor said the sheer uniqueness of the three-way mayor’s race scrambled normal dynamics. A rarely competitive third-party candidate, in this case Moon Reynolds, garnered a significant share of the vote, which otherwise may have gone to Cobb.

Since a poll is only a snapshot in time, doing more polling may actually be helpful, he said.

“Any one poll, it's more likely that it's going to be wrong than right,” Taylor said. “And if you do more polls, you can average those and get a better estimate on where the true opinion actually is.”

Shanna Brown, 42, voted on Election Day at the Highland precinct, which encompasses most of downtown. Brown cited a lack of activities for youth as a key concern.

“I voted to who my heart says will really make a change,” Brown said. “Roanoke still look the same after all these years.”

Brown said she cast her mayoral ballot for Moon Reynolds.

“I see a lot of her signs, and she’s putting in the work,” Brown said.

Lori Baker-Lloyd, an Old Southwest resident in her 60s, went to the registrar's office on the first day of early voting in September. Baker-Lloyd said her first two choices for mayor were Cobb and Moon Reynolds, but she declined to say where she landed.

“It was hard,” Baker-Lloyd said. “I have so much respect for both of them.”