WILMINGTON — Devon Scott came within four points of unseating Mayor Bill Saffo, who has served without a serious challenge for over a decade.
Scott, a relative unknown, faced an uphill battle against an established candidate with more experience, better name recognition, and much deeper pockets.
Saffo was appointed to fill former mayor Spence Broadhurst’s seat in 2006, and faced his only real challenge in 2007, against now State Senator Harper Peterson and businessman Justin LaNasa. Since then, he’s consistently won by with more than 80 % or more of the vote — or run unopposed. And, while Saffo has his detractors, he’s also become the face of Wilmington, with earnest supporters, a record of completed projects to point to (as he featured in his television ads), and ability to tap a deep campaign fund (which he hasn’t had to use much until this year).
As of the end of October, Scott raised around $11,000 to run his campaign, with about $9,000 raised in the final month. Scott’s fundraising was built on a large number of small donations — $5, $10, and $25 checks. A lot of his campaign was run by volunteers and his campaign video, released in the last week before the election, was produced as an in-kind production.
At the same time, Saffo spent almost $22,000 out of his $55,000 war chest, including $9,000 to run two television commercials on WECT. Saffo’s donations were an order of magnitude above Scott’s, with checks for hundreds and thousands of dollars. Saffo netted half of Scott’s entire campaign fund with one donation from Alex Choquette, president of Boston-area Anchor Management Group donated $5,400. He also received a $3,000 donation from developer Charles Schoninger and $1,250 from the North Carolina Realtors PAC.
In spite of all that, the final vote was closer than almost anyone expected. As the precincts started reporting on Election Night, more than one journalist observed Saffo looking concerned — something the sitting mayor hadn’t been on election night in years.
In the end, Saffo persevered, but for Scott the political landscape has changed.
| NAME ON BALLOT | PARTY | BALLOT COUNT | PERCENT |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bill Saffo | 7,709 | 51.63% | |
| Devon M. Scott | 7,079 | 47.41% | |
| Write-In (Miscellaneous) | 142 | 0.95% |
Scott credits his near-victory to an organic campaign, aggressive use of social media, and spending a lot of boots-on-ground time going to events, going door to door, and meeting with anyone who wanted to share their perspectives.
While Mayor Saffo gets back to work on the city’s projects, Devon Scott goes back to work in the private sector, volunteering, brainstorming, and working on ways to capitalize on the momentum he built over the last three months. Scott agreed to sit down with Port City Daily to talk about his campaign, how politics in Wilmington have changed, and what comes next.
Where did you think this campaign would end up?
At the beginning of the campaign, we said our ‘win number’ was 7,500 — and we were, given the variables, right on for that. We knew what we had to get to and we were very close.
You know, I was actually surprised I didn’t win. And to be completely honest, I woke up the next day — and, generally, I’m very much in the moment, I like to remove expectation from things — but I really had no contingency plan for the next day, right? And I said, ‘Well, I, I suppose I need to start working again.’ I’ve thought of all this campaign time, and now I’m still going to campaign I’m still going to do community work. But I have five hours a day now given back to me and I’m like, I should probably start earning money to fill up the bank account I drained running this campaign.
You know, so that was me, coming to a moment where I realized that I had expected it to go differently. But it came so close that you can’t be upset.
[Two people come up to Scott — not to offer condolences, but to congratulate him. This happens throughout the interview.]
Things like that — I feel like, I ran into people at the polls, who said they were Saffo supporters, and I can’t complain about that. But I heard things like, ‘you should run for county commissioner,’ and ‘if I wasn’t such a good friend with Billy I would have voted for you.’ But there wasn’t a negative — there wasn’t a critique. So I feel like we won in that way, there was a lot of legitimacy.
Do you feel like this is a good blueprint on how to run a campaign?
[Laughs] I don’t think any of this can be reproduced.
We have a very different climate everywhere, it’s hard to generalize. The fact is, it would be a great blueprint to run against a long-term, long-standing incumbent who has had no serious competitors, since social media existed in a time when there is not polarization but definitely divisiveness about how the business of the city is being run — in that situation, it’s a great blueprint maybe 60% of the time.
But yeah, it would be really hard to reproduce because the blueprint was simply being nimble. We ran the campaign like a startup. We said, we have a goal, we have numbers and when the numbers don’t work out, or when we don’t get the same kind of engagement, the same type of activity or turnout, we switch.
It was much more a process than a blueprint.
You know, the key thing I kept saying over this campaign is rather than doing PR, do civic work, and then point to it, you know, you get a lot more done that way, you get better engagement, that way you get more supporters because they see that you’re supporting them.
A lot of the issues in this election have been articulated in some hostile rhetoric online — was there ever a temptation to tap into that, and go negative?
You know, not at any point. I realized that not only would that de-legitimize me, but it would de-legitimize our whole campaign. So there was no temptation there because it would just it would be corrosive. And also, I don’t personally believe that’s very useful. You know, you can’t really leverage that negativity except to polarize and if I’m going to do any good work as a consensus builder in a nonpartisan seat, doing that, and then I need to bring ideas and not just negativity.
To be concise, by not making enemies we made partners.
If you want to look at it from an interesting perspective, we created a platform, that was successful, that was validated in real-time, that Mayor Saffo can co-opt. I feel like Saffo won on leadership, and I won as a public representative. A partnership is just waiting to happen.
Speaking of platform, it felt like there was some overlap, at least philosophically, between you and some of the challengers in the city council race. Was that intentional?
[Laughs]. No, that was organic, it was not planned. That’s the kind of thing that you plan months before filing and we, going into to this, we had some conversations about it but something like that takes a lot more time then we had.
In comments we received from readers and saw on social media, we saw a familiar criticism of newcomers to politics — essentially saying you shouldn’t run for Mayor right out of the gate, that you should start with committee work or a council seat. Did you get this critique personally, as well?
You know, that was the majority of the push back we received. I think it’s cute and ridiculous at the same time.
When people ask me what makes me ‘what makes you think you’re qualified to be mayor’ — and the reaction has become almost a reflex now — is to say, ‘hey, do you vote? Then you’re a policy writer.’ And the other question is, ‘would you be asking me this if I was just running for council — and it’s almost definitely ‘no.’ And the mayor is just a supercharged Councilman. I might have to brush up on parliamentary procedure. I might need to practice those ribbon cuttings.
I think that we have this culture that you have to go through certain moves in order to talk to certain levels of leadership here because of, one, Southern politics and, two, because of small-town politics. So going directly for the jugular, so to speak, seemed like I was being I was a rabble rouser, you know, I was shaking the tree a little bit too hard. And I think, you know, that rattled a lot of people’s cages.
How did you feel about the media coverage of this campaign? Do you think there was enough pressure on candidates to provide specifics, enough fact-checking of what candidates said?
I would love to see more of that. Because I think that I keep saying over and over and over again, that an uninformed electorate is an affront to democracy. And if we can educate the electorate more, that’s great. And that doesn’t necessarily need to fall on journalism. I think if journalism put the pressure on the candidates and the pressure and the citizen for their pressure on journalism, and you know, that’s, that’s a feedback loop when the pressure comes from, from your readers.
Well, that probably also means the money can come from your readers. So now you can afford to do that. I know that they’ll read it if you put the facts out there. And it has to happen that way or else it’s not going to happen. But that person needs to be there. And it needs to be in all three fronts.
Despite the fact that Wilmington’s municipal elections are ‘non-partisan,’ partisan politics makes it way into the campaign. The New Hanover County GOP endorsed Neil Anderson and Harry Smith Jr. and, while the Democratic party kept a lower profile, we’ve heard about conversations behind the scenes. How did you feel about that?
It was really weird for me — I would have been actually remiss to have gotten direct Democratic support, because it’s interesting that a few days before an event that we were contacted by the PR representative for the New Hanover GOP, the person who was working their Facebook, and you know, I got a call from the Libertarian Party, and like, I’m getting all this interest, like, ‘don’t you want to switch parties?’
And my position was, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if we could just have a non-partisan election.’ And that worked for me because no one can endorse me, and I don’t have to answer to anyone. I can just go to the issues without thinking about what I’m supposed to say — I can just speak on the issues based on the conversations I’ve had with people and what they feel and what I know.
I definitely wish the involvement [of the parties] was a little bit more tempered, in a lot of ways, so that we could have an actual election of issues.
There will be two open seats on the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners (Patricia Kusek and Woody White have stated they will not seek re-election). Will you run in 2020?
You know, I know a lot of people who are very qualified, and who are probably going to run, and I’ll give them a hell of a campaign support.
But if they don’t run — I might have to. I don’t do things simply to do them. So it might happen. I definitely don’t see any offices above that — that doesn’t make sense to me. So [county commission] would basically be the ceiling. But my first thought is that I’m going to support the people, I won’t name, but the people I think are going to run.
Wilmington mayor race, 2021?
Yes. That’s definitely on the table.
The truth is that I almost can’t not do it. You know I spent a lot of money on signs, and I didn’t put a date on them, just in case.
Again, I didn’t just do this to do it — I felt a sent of urgency, to progress on certain things. And if that progression still needs to happen [in 2021], then yes. Absolutely.
In the meantime, what’s next?
We only decided to do this several months ago. And in that time — beyond what we’ve learned about running for office — we’ve built networks and partnerships and so I’m now looking for a way to maintain that momentum and develop it outside of the political sphere.
I think a lot of our concerns can be addressed — and I don’t want to say by another non-profit, because one more non-profit is not always the answer. But I think in building partnerships and, well, take economic development. I think one major issue we can tackle is the lack of coordination and communication between municipalities, between counties, between our economic development groups. There are issues like the Port, rail realignment, the hospital, Cape Fear Crossing, industrial development, mass transit — if we need funding from the NCDOT we can speak with a louder voice, if we need more shareholders to balance the risk of a project, we do do that.
So we’ll definitely have more to say about that. You’ll be hearing more, for sure.
Send comments and tips to Benjamin Schachtman at ben@localvoicemedia.com, @pcdben on Twitter, and (910) 538-2001
