DC's At-Large Council Fight Comes Down to How Voters Rank — Silverman and Owolewa Both Want the Top Line
Two at-large seats, four candidates and a ranked-choice ballot: independent incumbent Elissa Silverman is urging supporters to rank her first, Democrat Oye Owolewa is asking Democrats to do the same for him, and the second choices may decide who sits on the Council.
Beneath the mayor's race on the District's ballot sits the contest election guides keep calling the main event: the fight for two at-large seats on the DC Council, decided this year by ranked-choice voting. Four candidates are running — Democrat Oye Owolewa, independent incumbent Elissa Silverman, Republican Darrell Green and Statehood Green candidate Darryl Moch — and in a ranked-choice race, the order voters write down matters almost as much as the names.
Silverman is the only candidate in the race with Council experience. She served from 2015 to 2023, then won a June special election to finish the term of Kenyan McDuffie, who resigned in January to run for mayor; she is now seeking a full four-year term. She has urged her supporters to rank her number one, explicitly warning that ranking a Democrat first impacts her chances. Owolewa — the District's elected shadow US representative and a former ANC commissioner — is countering with the mirror-image ask: Democrats should lock in his victory as their top pick. Green, a retired DC police officer, and Moch, who chairs the DC Statehood Green Party, are competing for the same first-choice rankings in hopes of an upset.
The mechanics are new for a general election. Ranked-choice voting, introduced in this year's June primaries, applies to races with three or more candidates: voters may rank up to five candidates, and if a voter's first choice is eliminated, that ballot moves to the next choice still in the race. With two seats to fill and four candidates dividing first choices, the transfers — whose supporters rank whom second — are where the race will be settled.
District voters can cast that ranked ballot at any voting center in the city on Tuesday, regardless of where they live, with centers open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. The winners will take two of the Council's 13 seats — the body's citywide voices, voting on the same laws, budget and agency oversight as the ward members elected alongside them.
