Loose Lips must confess: He expected more out of the campaign to recall Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen.
The effort faced lots of hurdles, to be sure, but most politicos expected its backers to come up with the 6,400 petition signatures they needed to earn a review from the D.C. Board of Elections. The recallers dropped a bit of a bombshell Monday when they revealed that they have only managed to collect about 5,500 signatures by their deadline for turning petitions in to the BOE.
Still, the anti-Allen group wants the board to certify a recall election for the November ballot anyway, per a statement they sent to reporters. They claim that the elections office failed to provide them with a “mobile application” to assist in signature gathering, despite requirements that it do so in D.C. law. Similarly, they accused ex-Ward 6 Councilmember Tommy Wells, who was leading Allen’s anti-recall efforts, of colluding with “city officials and to thwart our signature-gathering efforts through baseless complaints and hearings.” LL is not holding his breath that the BOE will find those arguments persuasive. Nor does he find it particularly credible that Wells was doing anything improper by pointing out the recall campaign’s questionable campaign finance tactics.
“The organizers’ bad faith recall effort has now failed by every measure,” Allen writes in a statement to LL. “They failed to meet each signature collection, filing, and field organizing goal they set. After six months, more than one hundred thousand dollars spent, and an open campaign finance investigation into their illegal coordination with the DC Republican Party and a super PAC, they’re likely short the thousands of valid signatures needed to trigger a costly and wasteful recall election. And despite publicly acknowledging the recall campaign failed, they’ve still decided to file their petitions with the Board of Elections, wasting time and taxpayer dollars yet again to have the Board count each signature to confirm.”
This amounts to a heck of a face-plant for a group that spoke with such confidence about its ability to channel anger about crime in the ward into Allen’s ouster. The recall benefited from the political expertise of several campaign veterans with national experience and it was very well-funded, thanks to a mix of lobbyists, developers, and congressional staffers. (Between the main recall committee and an outside spending group, the recallers spent more than $144,000 on this campaign, good for about $26 per petition signature they collected.)
Yet the effort fell short by nearly 1,000 signatures. The recallers say they “narrowly missed” their target, but campaign pros know that they likely needed several hundred signatures above the 6,400 target in order to survive signature challenges that Allen was expected to file.
Predictably, the recallers are moving the goalposts on their misguided push, describing the campaign as a “long-shot effort” that was chiefly “designed to send a loud signal to the Wilson Building.” The Council has passed tough-on-crime legislation in recent months, they argue, so their work had its intended effect.
LL has to give the recallers some credit: They certainly gave Allen a workout in what was otherwise shaping up to be a sleepy summer. His anti-recall group raised about $193,000 since the start of the year and spent about half of it. The councilmember himself knocked on doors with some regularity. (Though LL wonders if Allen would have rather spent the time thinking about his next moves in 2026, like a run for Council chair.)
But it seems a bit silly to attribute the Council’s shift to the right on criminal justice matters to the recall campaign when there are so many other factors at play: pressure from Mayor Muriel Bowser, the specter of additional congressional interference, and the timing of the 2024 primary, to name just a few.
Despite the overheated online rhetoric and all the big spending, the recallers’ surrender is a signal that most people just didn’t buy what they were selling. They might be nervous about crime, but why should they blame the councilmember they just reelected with 96 percent of the vote? The push to target Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau looks to be falling similarly flat, as the recall committee recently said it has gathered just over a third of the signatures it needs with only two months to go.
“Ultimately, the recall organizers failed to appreciate that Ward 6 residents are thoughtful people looking for real solutions to our toughest problems, and they don’t respond to the fear and division we see play out every day on the national stage,” Allen says in his statement.