In long-shot race for D.C.’s Ward 7 seat, Moten unrolls an unusual campaign

Ronald Moten bounds up to the young men standing on a broken patch of concrete between some public housing and the Anacostia Freeway.

“What up, soldiers?” he says, deploying his all-purpose greeting for young black men on a warm fall afternoon.

Republican candidate Ronald Moten is waging a campaign through methods both orthodox and not.

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A campaign pitch follows. Direct mail, robo-calls, television ads, yard signs — they might not get through to these dudes, but Moten, running for Ward 7’s D.C. Council seat, is making sure they listen to him. And it’s a safe bet they haven’t heard anything like this before.

“Guess what, I’m a Republican,” he said. “I’m a Civil Rights Republican. Republicans get money, right? You want money, right? You don’t want no check, do you? You want money, right? That’s what I’m trying to teach you — how to get money.”

He continues, dropping such names as Booker T. Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass — Republicans all, he tells them: “Barack is cool, but it’s bigger than Barack, see what I’m saying?”

The young men nod, they shake hands and Moten moves on, accompanied by volunteers carrying yard signs and handouts.

It’s hard enough being a Republican in the District, where three out of four voters are registered Democrats. It’s harder still in Ward 7, where a full 84 percent of voters tilt blue. And it’s especially hard in the Kenilworth Courts complex, located in a precinct that gave 1,088 of its 1,098 votes to Barack Obama in 2008. Convincing half of them to support him over Democratic incumbent Yvette M. Alexander would be a political miracle.

But these are Moten’s people, the young black men he’s been trying to reach for a decade as an activist, and now as a politician, trying to keep them off a trajectory like his own: high school dropout, up-and-coming drug dealer, convicted drug dealer, ex-offender.

That he’s now running for office — as a Republican, at that — is the product of circumstances dating back more than five years. Back then, the nonprofit youth-intervention group he co-founded, Peaceoholics, was riding high; it was the go-to group for politicians looking to quash neighborhood beefs that threatened to turn violent, or already had.

He was in particularly good stead with then-Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), a childhood acquaintance. Fenty’s administration funneled $14 million to Peaceoholics, not only to subdue conflicts but to counsel incarcerated youth and build housing for troubled young men.

With the money came scrutiny — including an audit ordered by Alexander, an ally of Mayor Vincent C. Gray, who defeated Fenty in 2010.

The audit found some accounting lapses, but no evidence of graft or serious misconduct. With Gray’s victory, Moten ended up on the wrong side. He is no longer officially affiliated with Peaceoholics, which has gone from about 60 staffers at its 2009 peak to fewer than a half-dozen now. Instead, Moten has endeavored to master the game that laid him low — “politricks,” he often calls it.

It’s been tough, especially as a Republican. Although observers saw the party switch as a savvy move to separate himself from a pack of Democratic challengers, Moten insists his conversion was honest, driven by abuses he saw in the local Democratic establishment.