RICHMOND, VA. — A hothead with a mug shot. Shunned by his city’s political elite. Blunt, unapologetic, quirkily charismatic, frequently dishonest.

Leading a mayoral election, as a white man, on the strength of his unshakable bond with struggling minorities who believe he is the only one fighting for the little guy.

If the Joe Morrissey story sounds familiar, it is. Except that the late Rob Ford had nothing on him.

The 59-year-old front-runner in the race to become mayor of Virginia’s capital city of Richmond, a job once held by Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine, spent three months worth of nights in jail in 2014 and 2015 for his criminal relationship with an underage girl: his 17-year-old receptionist, whom he married this year, when she was 20, after they had two children together.

Myrna Pride is black. Morrissey confirmed that he conceived their son Chase — after Pride turned 18, he said — by distributing a photo of the three of them posing in the plantation attire of the slavery era.

Before that, he claimed that the nude photos of an underage Pride on his phone were the result of a hacking by her jilted “former lesbian lover.”

Before that, he fathered three children with three other women he did not marry; was repeatedly jailed, fined and reprimanded for such behaviour as beating up a contractor, threatening a judge and fist-fighting an opposing lawyer; got disbarred (later reinstated); and moved to Australia.

He leads by four points to 12 points in the polls.

He thinks the investigation into his formerly illegal relationship with Pride is part of the reason why.

And after you spend an afternoon with him in a black neighbourhood, hearing people shout “Fightin’ Joe” in his direction, it all makes its own strange kind of perfect sense.

“This is one of the greatest in the world. Just like Muhammad Ali,” said Duane Walker, 55, a realtor and refinisher, as he approached for a photo.

Morrissey’s success reflects the nationwide frustration with power brokers and politics as usual that fuelled the campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. It is a product, in particular, of the deep alienation of a low-income black community that feels neglected and disrespected by affluent whites and blacks alike.

“A lot of people say Joe Morrissey will be the real first black mayor of Richmond,” said campaign manager Deborah MacArthur Repp, 67, a Canadian dual citizen and McGill graduate. “He’s the only one the black community trusts to represent them at the negotiating table.”

Morrissey, the city’s elected top prosecutor in the early 1990s, said there are “two Richmonds”: the prosperous one of private schools and hip restaurants and the troubled one of crumbling schools and police sirens. To the segment of the black community that is experiencing severe poverty and high rates of incarceration, his relationship with Pride, and his time behind bars, makes him not an embarrassment but an everyman.

“They spent a fortune,” he said in a Sunday interview, “$2 million, two years, coming after me. And what ends up happening? All the African-Americans, when I knock on the door, they go: ‘How’s Bella? How’s Chase?’ So, in many ways, they have helped me elevate me to the stratosphere that I’m in.”

“Stratosphere” is hyperbole. In a crowded field, he was at 28-per-cent support in one recent poll, to 24 per cent for economic development executive Jack Berry, who is white. But this is how he talks.

“I don’t give a damn. I really don’t. And neither does the public,” he said of what he called media “hoopla” over the relationship. “I got thick skin and I’m resilient and I learned a long time ago you don’t quit. When I was 17, I won a state wrestling championship on a torn ACL. When my dad, who was a doctor, said, ‘You can’t possibly wrestle.’ And I told him: ‘You can’t possibly wrestle. I can.’”

Repp, a nurse and policy wonk who has known Morrissey for 30 years, offered a series of explanations for his popularity. The city’s black churches, she said, practise a “redemptive Christianity” that emphasizes recovery from adversity. Morrissey, she said, has proven his commitment to the underdog. His wife, she said, is now idealized by some black women as the fulfilment of every girl’s “princess” fantasies.

And then there’s this.

“Most women have a soft spot in our heart for a bad boy,” she said. “And when the bad boy is also good-looking …”

Repp, who is also white, said Morrissey is unlikely to get more than 12 per cent of the white vote. Ask a white resident about him and you’re likely to hear a response like this one from respiratory therapist Megan Rife, 45: “I respect his fighting spirit, but he’s still a pedophile in my eyes.”

But he is far and away the preferred choice of the black community, which makes up about half of the population of 200,000, even though there are two black candidates with significant government experience.

Ask a working-class black voter about him and you’re likely to hear something like this: “Nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes. We’re only human. You can’t show me not one person who walks the face of the earth that hasn’t made a mistake,” said Sheila Williams, 55, during a break from her job at a convenience store.

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“I actually don’t think it was a mistake — well, of course you shouldn’t be messing with people younger. But: they’re married now. And I’m not one to judge,” she said. “He made an honest woman of her. They seem to be living happily ever after, so hey. And the fact that she’s an African-American: I think that’s beautiful.”

At the 2nd St. Festival, in the historic black district of Jackson Ward, Morrissey, a lean man with dimples, greying hair and a baggy shirt, did not need to walk around to meet voters. For almost three hours, he simply stood in an intersection and waited for them to surround him for photos and autographs. When competitor Levar Stoney, the black former Secretary of the Commonwealth who is endorsed by the state governor, walked by with his own campaign team, nobody looked up.

“The ex-offenders alone, we’re going to put you back in,” Anna Claiborne, a 52-year-old nurse with an old conviction, called out to Morrissey with a laugh.

“I appreciate everything you stand for,” Carlos Jackson, 38, a former heroin dealer who now works at a car dealership and gives speeches about second chances, told him softly, his hand on the candidate’s back.

Morrissey spent three decades earning such intimacy. As a Democratic state representative — who was re-elected as an independent last year while serving his jail sentence — he has championed causes dear to the black community, like the restoration of voting rights to former felons.

As a lawyer, he was described by a federal appeals court as having a 15-year history of “unprofessional conduct mostly involving an uncontrollable temper, inappropriate responses to stress, and dishonesty.” But he managed to build a reputation among clients and their families as an aggressive, empathetic advocate.

And he is simply around. Morrissey spends time hanging out in parts of a segregated majority-black city where most white people don’t venture. It means something.

“He’s always in the community. You can see him in the clubs, in the bars, with the people. I feel like to be a politician, that’s the way you’ve got to be — in the mix. If the police were doing that, there wouldn’t be so much police violence,” said Brandon Brown, 32, a food-service director.

He is far from universally popular among black residents. Jeff Morton, 59, an electrical engineering specialist, called the relationship “quite inappropriate.” Pride’s estranged father, who loathes him, had allies walking the festival wearing T-shirts that read, “Our children’s lives matter. Joe Morrissey took a plea of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Ask him what he did.”

Morrissey is now being investigated by the state bar over his elaborate hacking defence, which investigators have alleged was “knowingly false.” Stoney called him “a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” He asked voters to choose “a mayor we can all — all, I stress all — be proud of. And not someone that’s going to keep us on the front pages of newspapers in Toronto.”

Morrissey rejected the comparison to Ford. (He said he is “physically very disciplined,” has never once consumed drugs or even coffee, and fell into trouble not because of personal excesses but because he was too passionate about defending clients.) A nimble communicator with a Georgetown University law degree, he effortlessly answered questions on everything from education reform to renewable energy.

He exuded an unpretentious charm. He mentioned his wife and kids at least five times.

“I need an SUV for my growing family,” he said when Jackson brought up the car dealership. When Brown complained of another politician who refused to give him straight answers, Morrissey said, “He ain’t Joe.”

Asked why white voters are so much less willing to forgive him than black voters, he responded by insulting white people and boasting about himself at the same time.

“I don’t know. Here’s the funny thing,” he said. “You get some of these white folk that are so dismissive and judgmental, but when their little kid Johnny gets busted for possession of coke, you know who they come to? They come to me.”

Morrissey betrayed no concern about his reputation in the white community as a kind of predator. At one point, he commented at length on the “beautiful smile” of a little girl. Later, he requested a hug from an adult. Nobody seemed to mind.

Correction - October 11, 2016: This article was edited from a previous version that misspelled Deborah MacArthur Repp's surname.