With business background and progressive backing, Harrison Roday makes debut in Richmond politics

Harrison Roday’s first brush with government came in eighth grade, when he served as a page in the Virginia General Assembly.

As someone who has always liked to work, Roday said in an interview with The Richmonder, he loved the chance to get out of middle school and go to a job assisting the people who write Virginia’s laws. 

That early experience at the statehouse — plus stints as a White House intern and campaign aide for U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine — gave Roday a “public service mentality” he’s now leaning on as he tries to win an election of his own and become Richmond’s next mayor.

As he introduces himself to voters for the first time, Roday, 33, has invoked Kaine and his wife, former Virginia education secretary Anne Holton, as two of his biggest role models apart from his own parents.

“What they preach is really rolling up your sleeves and getting involved where you can make a difference,” Roday said.

With a background in business, finance and manufacturing, Roday said he feels he can make a difference on City Hall’s “execution issues.”

“If you want to get things done, you have to work with, join hands, and partner with the people on the line, not just tell everyone what to do,” Roday said. “And when we think about City Hall and Richmond, I think there's very frequently a callous attitude thrown around of, ‘Well, if only we hired a chief transformation officer to tell everyone what to do, City Hall would be fixed… And I just don't buy into that style of change and that type of management.”

The grandson of German Jews who fled the Nazis, Roday grew up in Henrico County and graduated from Collegiate. Both his parents are retired attorneys, and both are frequent contributors to Democratic campaigns.

After graduating from William & Mary, his first job out of college was in the industrials group of Morgan Stanley. He eventually landed at American Industrial Partners, a New York-based private equity firm focused on manufacturing, where he grew to appreciate the “common purpose” of factories.

“People come from up to 100 miles away every morning and commute to work on shift, and everyone comes in the building together in the morning to accomplish one thing,” he said. “It's a very cool idea to me, and I think it’s analogous to what we need to do in our community to get things done.”

Roday said his former job required frequent travel, and he decided to move back to the Richmond area in early 2020 around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I’ve spent the majority of my life in Virginia,” he said. “It was never a question of if I was going to be back here. It was a question of when.”

After his return, he launched a nonprofit, Bridging Virginia, that provides access to capital and technical assistance to “historically marginalized businesses and places.” 

He now works as a co-founder and partner at Third South Capital, a firm he started with college friends that focuses on investing in or buying small software startups. On the economic disclosure form he filed to run for mayor, he listed more than a dozen companies he or members of his immediate family have a stake in. They include names like Shopping Cart Apps, EntryThingy and Clipboard History Pro.

As he battles skepticism about his private equity background, Roday has emphasized the rights of workers and has said he’s more interested in standing up for renters than he is in lowering tax bills for well-off property owners.

“Some people go work in business, and their values change in a bad way,” he said. “What happened to me when I worked in the private sector is I came away strongly believing what I was taught growing up, even more so. Which is that workers and people who don't have as much access to opportunity as they should need a bigger seat at the table.”

He said Richmonders should look at the work his nonprofit does to “evaluate whether or not I'm someone who's walked the walk on what I say my values are.”

Roday’s campaign platform includes promises to invest $100 million in affordable housing efforts, create a permitting “shot clock” to speed up building approvals, creating an office dedicated to gun violence prevention within the mayor’s office, auditing all City Hall departments and creating a five-year improvement plan with metrics that can show how the city is doing on its goals.

Those types of stances, particularly his position on affordable housing, have earned Roday the endorsement of New Virginia Majority, a progressive activist group that’s already dedicated more than $50,000 in resources to try to help him get elected.

Though mayors have little control over federal or state abortion laws, Roday has stressed the importance of reproductive rights and says he’ll provide “supplemental funding” for abortion providers and work with city police to ensure any threats against abortion clinics are taken seriously.

In a post-Roe world, Roday said he feels the local aspect of the abortion rights battle is “underrated” in a city that has multiple Planned Parenthood facilities and another on the way.

“I think it's really important that we have a mayor who's been a consistent advocate for reproductive rights and access to abortion,” he said. “Particularly while Governor Youngkin is still advocating for sending the rights and freedoms of women back into a different age.”

Though Roday talks about a return to positive, Kaine-style politics, he has frustrated some supporters of Dr. Danny Avula by portraying his fellow mayoral contender as untrustworthy on abortion rights. Though Avula served in the Youngkin administration in a social services role, Avula says he supports abortion access and his campaign has portrayed Roday’s attacks as misleading.

Roday was rumored to be considering a run for lieutenant governor before deciding to run for mayor. 

When asked about that, he said he doesn’t “hide from the fact that I am interested in public service broadly” but is “very focused” on the job of mayor.

“I bring an outside perspective and a track record of getting things done that are very tangible,” he said. “Whether it's working to actually do the transformational type work in organizations that is akin to what City Hall needs. Or starting organizations from scratch that solve problems instead of doing studies about things.”