Tag Archives: District 20

Unger Fires Campaign Manager for Stealing Lit

By Adam Pagnucco.

District 20 House candidate Darian Unger has fired his campaign manager for stealing and destroying literature belonging to his opponents.  Unger terminated him immediately upon seeing video of the act.

Unger’s campaign began paying John Rodriguez as a campaign manager in November 2017.  Rodriguez was profiled by the Washington City Paper’s Loose Lips in 2016 for his work with a firm called District Political in D.C. political campaigns, including fundraising.  The article ends with these paragraphs.

Apparently, Rodriguez still has some money to splash out. While LL was reporting this column, Rodriguez called, unbeknownst to his partners, to ask the name of the City Paper employee in charge of ad sales. He went on to ask whether LL would be aware if City Paper suddenly received a lot of money, and pondered how much he would have to spend in ads to gain more “power” to kill stories like this one.

It’s one more offbeat scheme from an outfit that tried to make its name with unlikely candidates. Unluckily for District Political, though, the problem with underdogs is that they tend to lose.

Update, 10 a.m.: According to a District Political statement released shortly after this article was published, Rodriguez is no longer a partner at the firm.

Now to the matter at hand.  The video below is security footage from the Silver Spring Civic Center on June 17.  At the beginning of the video, Senator Will Smith, Delegate David Moon and House candidate Lorig Charkoudian can be seen delivering lit to a storage area.  Smith, Moon and Charkoudian are running as a team in District 20 along with Delegate Jheanelle Wilkins.  Unger is a House candidate in the same race.  Smith deposits a box of lit on top of other materials and the group departs.  Soon after, a man matching Rodriguez’s description enters the room, looks around, grabs the lit box and places it in a dumpster outside.

The District 20 team all went on the record and identified the man as Rodriguez.  The team said the lit was worth $600.  Your author sent the video to Unger and asked him for comment.  Unger replied, “I just saw your email and the video.  I spoke with the campaign consultant and fired him immediately.  I consider such behavior to be completely unacceptable.”

As of this writing, we are unaware of an apology by Unger to the District 20 team.

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District 20 Incumbents Team Up With Charkoudian

By Adam Pagnucco.

District 20 Senator Will Smith and Delegates David Moon and Jheanelle Wilkins have decided to team up with non-incumbent House candidate Lorig Charkoudian in the upcoming primary.  Moon explained his decision to endorse his team on his Facebook page, writing specifically about Charkoudian, “I’ve also worked these last few years with Lorig on criminal justice reform and know she shares my commitment to driving down mass incarceration in Maryland. She used to live on my block in Takoma Park, and I’ve gotten to see her passion for justice issues up close.”

The decision to include a non-incumbent on the slate is reminiscent of 2014, when Senator Jamie Raskin and Delegate Sheila Hixson teamed up with new House candidates Moon and Smith.  In that election, all four were on the Apple Ballot.  That’s not true this time around as MCEA has supported Smith, Moon, Wilkins and second-time House candidate Darian Unger.

In addition to the incumbents, Charkoudian is supported by Casa in Action, the Laborers Union, MCGEO and NOW.  Unger is supported by MCEA, SEIU Locals 500 and 32BJ and the Volunteer Fire Fighters.  (Unger is himself a volunteer.)  On May 22, Charkoudian reported a cash balance of $37,226 and Unger had $27,897.

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Campaign Finance Reports: Districts 20 and 39, January 2018

By Adam Pagnucco.

District 20

Everybody in this district is broke, including the incumbents.  Gone are the days when Jamie Raskin, Sheila Hixson, Heather Mizeur and Tom Hucker were raising money hand over fist and Jonathan Shurberg was writing himself six-digit checks!

If money is not a differentiator, the landscape will favor the three incumbents: Senator Will Smith and Delegates David Moon and Jheanelle Wilkins.  We anticipate that the three will team up, combine resources, get most if not all of the institutional endorsements and be reelected.  That leaves a contest for the open seat being vacated by the Queen of District 20, long-time Delegate Sheila Hixson.  Lorig Charkoudian, who runs a community mediation non-profit, has deep roots in Takoma Park and has been an advocate on progressive legislation at the state level (including abolishing the death penalty).  She finished second for last year’s Delegate appointment to Wilkins.  Howard University professor and volunteer fire fighter Darian Unger ran for the House in 2014 and finished fifth.  In that race, Unger was endorsed by the Washington Post, the Gazette, the Volunteer Fire Fighters, the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters.

The Big Question: will there be a mixed slate featuring the incumbents and either Charkoudian or Unger?  Such an event would be a repeat of 2014, when incumbents Raskin and Hixson teamed up with newcomers Moon and Smith to sweep the primary.

District 39

We should run a poll of Seventh State readers on whether this district is messier than District 17.  Last time, the four incumbents – Senator Nancy King and Delegates Charles Barkley, Kirill Reznik and Shane Robinson – had no primary opponents and cruised to reelection.  This year, Barkley’s decision to run for County Council At-Large has opened a seat.  MCGEO President Gino Renne threatened to defeat Reznik last May a month after Renne’s employee, Gabe Acevero, began his campaign for the House.  Shortly thereafter, the incumbents chose to slate with newcomer Lesley Lopez and it was Game On.  Just last week, County Executive Ike Leggett piled on, endorsing Acevero and accusing the incumbents of slating with Lopez in a “smoke-filled room.”  That’s an ironic comment from Leggett considering that he was first elected in 1986 as a new candidate invited by incumbents onto a mixed slate.

Putting aside the admittedly fun political food fight, the data above shows one salient fact: no one has any money except the incumbents.  That’s a big deal for Lopez as she can benefit from pooled resources with the rest of her slate.  Acevero’s path to victory necessitates rolling up lots of labor support – and not just from MCGEO and its affiliates – and raising enough money to break through.  That’s not easy to do in this district, which lacks the legions of liberal activists of District 20 and the wealthy neighborhoods of Districts 15, 16 and 18.

The Big Question: will the tumult over the incumbents’ mixed slate filter down to the voters or is it just something that the chattering class (and obsessive bloggers) will yap about?  If it’s the latter, the slate strategy could pay off.

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David Moon for Senate


By Adam Pagnucco. (Editor’s Note: As always, this post–and endorsement–reflects the views of the author. No broader support or opposition to David Moon is meant by this post or note.)

I still remember the day I first met one of the great masterminds of MoCo politics.

It was March 2008.  A group of us gathered at SEIU Local 500’s headquarters to discuss how to help Nancy Navarro win the upcoming Council District 4 special election.  The room was full of progressive activists, ace operatives and labor people, most of whom had lots to say.  Your author, not being shy, ranted and raved with the best of them.  Off at the end of the table sat a quiet, scrawny little guy who looked like he weighed about 80 pounds.  He stared into his computer and said almost nothing during the two hour meeting.  I elbowed the attendee next to me and asked, “Who’s that?”  “Oh, that’s David Moon.”

Moon was already a household name among MoCo activists at that point, having been the campaign manager behind Jamie Raskin’s 33-point State Senate victory two years before.  But he was just getting started.  Moon’s skills were put to the test during the two special elections that followed as he endured a close loss by Navarro the first time, followed by an even closer win the next year.  I had been involved with union organizing and political campaigns during my time in the labor movement, but I had not met many campaigners of his caliber before.  Moon was simultaneously creative and disciplined – a rare combination for anyone.  He would do the tedious, mind-numbing work of producing the walk sheets and handling the follow-up data entry, and then turn around and come up with something new on the fly.  He could think big picture and then slap Apple Ballot stickers on lit all night.  He seemed to live on Diet Coke and junk food.  If you wanted to find him, the best way was to locate the largest pile of empty cans and wrappers and see who was sitting in the middle of it.  Most remarkable of all, Moon was almost without pretense.  All campaign managers have egos and some are unbearable.  But Moon would meet any suggestion, whether brilliant or stupid, with a shrug and grab the good ones while quietly disposing of the clunkers.

The David Moon of today was still evolving in the 2008-2010 period, but even then you could see where he was headed.  Most operatives are motivated by some combination of the thrill of winning, wanting a job with the victorious candidate, wanting to run for office themselves or just the fun of the game.  None of that was enough for Moon.  He had a Plan, and it was wildly ambitious.  He wanted to build a base for true progressivism in Montgomery County.  And by that I don’t mean just electing people who toss goodies to liberal interest groups while trying to move up the ladder.  Moon’s vision was to combine the political and economic forces of new residents, economic development, labor rights, people of color, environmentalism, smart growth and political reform into a movement for real change.  For a while, he did that through running other candidates’ campaigns and working with organizations like Action Committee for Transit, Communities for Transit, Casa de Maryland and FairVote.  But like most good quarterbacks, he eventually called his own number and ran for office himself.  He outwitted, outlasted and outplayed a number of capable opponents on his way to Annapolis.

As a Delegate, Moon has not backed away from any of the causes he supported early in his career, but he picked a focus: social justice.  Most freshman Delegates regard the House Judiciary Committee as a backwater.  They have to deal with the dominance of crusty old committee chair Joe Vallario and they can’t get the fundraising connections that members of other committees can (especially Economic Matters).  But Moon wanted to be on Judiciary; in fact, he actively lobbied for it because it is the place where criminal justice issues are decided.  And that’s where Moon has planted his flag.

Moon has been nothing less than a prophet on unfairness in the criminal justice system.  When he was running for Delegate, he wrote:

It’s time for a grown-up conversation about our criminal justice system. Maryland leads the nation in marijuana arrests, and black residents of Montgomery County are over 3 times more likely to be arrested for possession than white residents. This costs us between $100-$200 million a year and ruins the lives of young people by barring them from employment, student loan eligibility and more. Let’s look at the evidence and start rolling back the failed “War on Drugs” in Maryland.

Months later, the Baltimore riots erupted partly as a result of these issues.  Moon has been advocating on them ever since.  He has introduced numerous bills to rein in justice system excesses.  In 2015, he passed a bill through the House that would have excluded possession of a small amount of pot as a reason for parole violation.  (It died in the Senate.)  He has proposed letting voters decide whether to legalize marijuana and fought against efforts to recriminalize it.  Slowly but surely he is helping criminal justice reform advance, and in the years to come, the work of Moon and his allies will pay off.

Moon also returned to his political reform roots by teaming up with Republican Delegate Kathy Szeliga on a bill that would stream live video of General Assembly sessions, something that the Montgomery County Council has been doing for years.  He opposed tens of millions of dollars of corporate welfare given to Northrop Grumman even while many Democrats (including some from Montgomery County) supported it.  His greatest triumph was passing a constitutional amendment that would allow special elections for U.S. Senate, Comptroller and Attorney General vacancies.  (This is subject to approval by voters.)

Moon’s work on criminal justice has produced something that’s uncommon for MoCo legislators: growing collaboration on a key priority with lawmakers from the City of Baltimore and Prince George’s County, who often co-sponsor his bills.  Moon has also helped create an informal group of cooperating progressives who resist reactionary bills no matter their source – even including the Democratic leadership.  A progressive caucus is a long-time dream of the left, but Annapolis leaders have always prevented it through a combination of pressure and cooptation.  Such tactics do not work on the indefatigable Moon.  He will not and cannot be deterred.

David Moon is an unusual elected official.  His experience as one of MoCo’s top campaigners has given him the ability to pursue big picture goals through patience, methodical assemblage of leverage and the implementation of tactics designed to build momentum.  He has demonstrated that capacity throughout his entire career, both in office and out.  He has worked on nearly the entire spectrum of progressive issues.  His priorities are perfectly in line with District 20 Democrats, who are probably the most progressive constituency in the entire state.  He is the natural heir to Jamie Raskin.  While I can appreciate the perspective of those who would like to appoint a caretaker to serve out the rest of Senator Raskin’s term and there are other good people available, the prospect of sending Moon to the upper chamber has too much upside to resist.

David Moon for Senate.

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Jamie Raskin for Congress?

Jamieraskin

Sen. Jamie Raskin (D-20) is widely considered a lock to enter the race for Maryland’s Eighth Congressional District.

Getting Elected in District 20

Jamie Raskin was first elected to the Senate in 2006 in an impressive defeat of longtime incumbent, Sen. Ida Ruben. Though Raskin was a first-time candidate, he beat Ruben by 2-1 thanks to a strong campaign and grassroots organization.

It also didn’t hurt that Chris Van Hollen notably did not endorse Sen. Ida Ruben, who had not supported him in his original congressional bid in 2002. Since the 2006 Democratic primary, Raskin has been untouchable in this district.

Two of Raskin’s previous campaign managers, David Moon and Will Smith, have now joined him on the House side. Raskin remains very popular and a solid fit for this district, correctly perceived as the most progressive in Maryland.

In the Senate

Jamie made the transition from law professor at American University to politician in the Maryland Senate more smoothly than some likely expected. He worked well with his colleagues and  became a leader on the Judicial Proceedings Committee.

Currently, Sen. Raskin heads the Executive Nominations Committee. He is also serves as Majority Whip and is a past Chair of the Montgomery County Senate Delegation.

His work has unsurprisingly focused more on issues related to his committee. Sen. Raskin was a robust supporter of marriage equality. In this session, he is focusing much of his efforts on campaign finance trying to make the system more transparent in the wake of the disastrous Citizens United decision, which opened the floodgates of soft money into American politics.

One of the more loquacious members of the Senate, he is excellent at arguing for his point of view and parrying his opponents. Jamie’s passionate progressive views have also not prevented him in working with others to move forward even if the product is less than ideal from his perspective.

All of these issues and skills would transfer well to Congress, even if he would likely have to get used to operating as part of the minority instead of the majority. There is a reason that lawyers are not lacking in Congress or Washington even if Washingtonians can tell lawyer jokes with the best of them.

Campaign and Competition

Jamie cannot self finance but he is well-positioned to raise a lot of money. His profile extends beyond the local level–and not just because his spouse, Sarah Bloom Raskin, has served on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and is now Deputy Secretary of the Treasury.

Moreover, many of Jamie’s originals supporters are still very active in politics and eager to support his congressional bid. As he showed in 2006, he is quite capable of putting together an organized grassroots campaign.

District 20 has one of the richest pockets of Democratic voters in the State, though fewer than District 16 and similar in number to neighboring District 18. Raskin’s district would serve as a fine base for a congressional run.

Overlap with Other Candidates

Jamie Raskin will be a top-tier candidate. He shares a similar political profile with Rich Madaleno. Both are white males and strong progressives based in neighboring southern Montgomery County districts. They’ve worked closely together in the Senate on many issues. Either would benefit if the other does not run.

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A Competitive General in . . District 20?!

No Republicans hold office in Montgomery County at the county, state, or federal levels. However, in the bluest facet of this sapphire, a challenger of some credibility has emerged. In District 20, former Takoma Park City Councilman Dan Robinson has filed to run in the general election on the Green Party line. If there is a legislative district in Maryland where the Green Party is viable, it would be the ultra-progressive district home to nuclear free Granola Park.

How serious a challenger Dan is remains to be seen. Most Green Party targeted campaigns raised $20,000-$30,000. Dan will probably be able to exceed that amount. Like any third party candidate, this is a long shot. But conditions will likely be as good  as ever this November for an Emerald takeover.

Robinson could try to make the case that powerful Ways and Means Chair Sheila Hixson is a tool of a Democratic Leadership that is too moderate for the District 20 electorate.

If Jonathan Shurberg wins the Democratic Primary, Robinson could try to make the race about Shurberg’s ethics issues.

Robinson could attack Will Smith, who is a Homeland Security consultant, on the premise that he’s part of the military industrial complex and therefore not truly progressive.

These issues are typically irrelevant in state legislative elections but Jamie Raskin had some success attacking Ida Ruben over a non-binding resolution regarding the Iraq War in 2006. Robinson would have to make corporate welfare for Lockheed Martin a central issue in this line of attack.

Will Jawando is a corporate lobbyist. Robinson could probably ding him on that but I don’t see how he can turn it into the kill shot he needs in a region almost as full of lobbyists as lawyers.

David Moon, the most progressive candidate in the race, is squeaky clean as far as I can tell. Robinson would be foolish to target him.

Whoever the Democratic nominees are, they will have depleted their resources in the primary. They will also likely take the general election for granted. More than likely they, will have difficulty raising additional funds in the general–most donors will likely choose to devote their resources to tough races in other parts of the state–and I doubt many volunteers will be fired up about knocking doors.

Perhaps Dan Robinson can catch the sleeping giant and become the first Green Party State legislator in Maryland. I don’t expect it to happen. But I wouldn’t be totally surprised if he did.

 

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Push Polls in District 20?

MoonSmithShurbergThree of the District 20 Delegate Candidates: David Moon, Will Smith, and Jonathan Shurberg

District 20 has a lively delegate race with two vacancies caused by Del. Heather Mizeur’s gubernatorial run and Del. Tom Hucker’s county council candidacy. Local lawyer and Democratic activist Jonathan Shurberg is a candidate.

Jon has already loaned his campaign $125K and is rumored to be prepared to loan far more if needed to win the seat in his first run for elective office. Even in Montgomery County, he will clearly break towards the very high end of spending if he follows through and loans his campaign similar amounts in the future.

Rumors started earlier this week that Jon was the victim of a push poll when voters started receiving calls asking questions about Shurberg’s past three tax liens and previous disbarment, actually suspension, from the practice of law in Maryland (see also here and here) due to having misappropriated client funds. The poll also asked for responses to positive statements about his opponents.

Some speculated that David Moon or Will Smith–two other candidates in the race–had possibly sponsored the poll to undermine Jon’s campaign. Both know quite a bit about campaigns, especially in District 20. David ran Jamie Raskin’s 2006 campaign, has worked extensively as a campaign consultant, and is the author of the Maryland Juice blog, Will Smith, a former Obama appointee in the Department of Homeland Security, ran the D20 slate’s successful reelection campaign in 2010.

However, I could not imagine savvy, experienced campaign consultants like either David or Will carrying out a push poll because it just wouldn’t make much sense in this case.

First, the multi-seat nature of delegate races offers little incentive to go negative. When campaigning in these sorts of races, it’s best to be on friendly terms with everyone. If you meet a voter who says they like a rival candidate, it makes it easier to respond “she’s great, I hope you’ll vote for me too!” Attacking another candidate mainly risks losing votes from their supporters.

Second, there is no guarantee that it will benefit the ad’s sponsor, particularly in a race with so many candidates. Instead, it may aid another candidate, especially when the target denounces the ad as scurrilous and its sponsor as throwing mud. Finally, polling is costly and the money would be better spent on voter contact.

So who did the poll?

Turns out Jon did the poll to test out the impact of potential attacks and positive messages that other candidates may use.

Not a good use of campaign funds. Money is a very helpful campaign resource but only if it is spent wisely. Polling results are often dubious in down ballot races with so many candidates. Name recognition of the candidates is low. Voters respond as much to cues from endorsers as much as message.

One can test messages but it hardly requires a poll to know that voters will be suspicious of an attorney threatened with disbarment. Moreover, it’s working to counter a message that will likely never be used. Better to have spent the money on voter contact instead of exposing voters to negative information about his past.

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