D.C.'s Schwartz Decides to Fight

Yesterday, the candidates' reactions to Schwartz ranged from being dismissive to describing her as desperately hanging on.

"It doesn't change our strategy right now," said Michael Brown, 42, who lost a run for the Ward 4 council spot last year and dropped out of the Democratic mayoral primary in 2006. "My name recognition is as high as anyone else's right now."

Hunter, 42, was less diplomatic. "To drag it out and go out with a write-in?" he asked as he sat in his U Street campaign office, a block away from Schwartz's. "The dynamics of this city have changed, the issues have changed, and it's time for the people who address them to change."

Hunter said Schwartz's poor performance in the primary shows that the general public has grown tired of Schwartz and her recent votes against the smoking ban, school reform and open council meetings.

But Schwartz said the primary was skewed by special interests and college Republicans.

She noted that the business community had backed Mara in part because of her support of legislation that now requires employers to provide most workers in the District with paid sick leave. She also said Mara "targeted and registered" young members of the GOP who turned out to vote for him.

Democrats rule the District, and Republicans make up about 7 percent of the city's registered voters. The Schwartz-Mara matchup drew about 13 percent of registered Republicans, or 3,735 people.

"Why should these hundreds of students with no real vested interest in the District of Columbia, rather than the hundreds of thousands of voters who do have a vested interest, decide my fate, the potential fate of our city and the possible fate of workers who need sick leave?" Schwartz asked in her prepared speech yesterday.

Mara said Schwartz was reaching in thinking that college students put him over the top. He also downplayed the help of the business community, which, coupled with his own campaign, flooded Republicans with more than a dozen mailings.

He said he recruited students to help him get out the vote, but many of them were not registered to vote in the District. The government relations manager, who once worked as a congressional aide, attributed his win to an aggressive door-to-door campaign. "On Election Day, 90 percent of the voters I came into contact with I had met in their living rooms, in their kitchens. . . . I had sat down and talked to them," he said.

He will use the same strategy for November, he said.

Schwartz called herself the "underdog."

She said she decided to be a write-in candidate after receiving e-mails, phone calls and letters, particularly one written by her two daughters. She mulled it over at her vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Del., over the weekend and made calls to supporters Sunday night and yesterday morning.

"What's the worst thing that can happen? I can lose again," she said.