Tag Archives: Sunil Dasgupta

How Many More Votes Will be Counted?

By Adam Pagnucco.

As of right now, here is the status of key election results in MoCo.

School Board At-Large: Lynne Harris 53%, Sunil Dasgupta 46%

School Board District 2: Rebecca Smondrowski 60%, Michael Fryar 39%

School Board District 4: Shebra Evans 66%, Steve Solomon 33%

Circuit Court Judge: Bibi Berry 23%, David Boynton 21%, Michael McAuliffe 21%, Christopher Fogleman 20%, Marylin Pierre 14%

Question A (Authored by Council Member Andrew Friedson, freezes property tax rate with unanimous council vote required to exceed): For 62%, Against 38%

Question B (Authored by Robin Ficker, would limit property tax receipt growth to rate of inflation and remove council’s ability to exceed): For 42%, Against 58%

Question C (Authored by Council Member Evan Glass, changes county council structure to 4 at-large seats and 7 district seats): For 61%, Against 39%

Question D (Authored by Nine Districts for MoCo, changes county council structure to 9 district seats): For 42%, Against 58%

You can see the latest results here for school board and judicial races and here for ballot questions.

But all of this is subject to a HUGE caveat: not all the votes have been counted. How many more remain?

Three batches have yet to be counted. First are the remaining election day votes. As of right now, only 3 of 40 election day vote centers in the county have reported 80% or more of their results. At this moment, 6,474 election day votes have been cast for president. That suggests tens of thousands of votes more could come in.

Second are the remaining mail votes. According to the State Board of Elections, MoCo voters requested 378,327 mail ballots. At this moment, 177,628 mail votes have been cast for president. This suggests that roughly 200,000 mail votes are out there. Not all of them will ultimately result in tabulated votes but it’s still a lot.

Third are provisional ballots. How many are out there is not known right now. However, this will be by far the smallest of these three categories and they will make a difference only in tight races.

So let’s put it all together. At this moment, 312,452 total votes for president have been tabulated. (I don’t have an official turnout number, but since the presidential race has the least undervoting, this figure is probably reasonably close to turnout so far.) This suggests – VERY roughly – that 55-60% of the votes have been counted, with the vast majority of outstanding votes coming from mail ballots.

What does that mean for the results above? To determine that, we need to examine how different the election day votes and the mail votes were from the total votes tabulated so far since those two categories are where most of the remaining votes are coming from. And of those two categories, mail votes will be far larger than election day votes.

President

MoCo’s votes for president (as well as Congress) are not in doubt but the differential results by voting mode are suggestive of a pattern affecting other races. Former Vice-President Joe Biden has received 79% of total votes as of this moment. However, he has received 51% of election day votes, 65% of early votes and 90% of mail votes. That illustrates a strong partisan pattern associated with voting, with election day votes most friendly to Republicans and mail votes most friendly to Democrats. Keep that in mind as you proceed to the races below.

Circuit Court Judges

Challenger Marylin Pierre has so far received 14% of early votes, 14% of election day votes, 15% of mail votes and 14% of total votes. Each of the incumbent judges cleared 20% on all of these voting modes. This is a non-partisan race so the partisan pattern noted above has minimal effect here. With little reason to believe that the next batch of mail votes will be different than the mail votes already tabulated, it’s hard to see Pierre pulling ahead.

School Board

The district races are blowouts. Let’s look at the at-large race between Lynne Harris and Sunil Dasgupta. Harris has so far received 53% of early votes, 60% of election day votes, 53% of mail votes and 53% of total votes. These are not big leads but they are fairly consistent. For Dasgupta to pull ahead, he would need to pull at least 55% of the outstanding votes yet to be counted, more than flipping the outcome of the existing votes. Unless the next batch of votes – especially mail – is somehow fundamentally different from what has already been cast, it’s hard to see that happening.

Ballot Questions

There are two things to note here. First, none of these results are close at this moment. Second, while these are technically non-partisan, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party endorsed in opposite directions and both sides worked hard to make their views known. The partisan split seen in the presidential election had an impact on the ballot question results.

First, let’s look at election day voting. Judging by the presidential race, this was the most favorable voting mode for the GOP. Here is how election day voting (so far!) compares to total voting (again, so far).

Question A For Votes: Election day 51%, total 62%
Question B For Votes: Election day 60%, total 42%
Question C For Votes: Election day 52%, total 61%
Question D For Votes: Election day 60%, total 42%

This looks like good news for supporters of Question B (Robin Ficker’s anti-tax question) and Question D (nine districts). After all, there are probably tens of thousands of election day votes yet to be counted.

However, the big majority of outstanding votes are mail ballots. Joe Biden received 90% of mail ballot votes tabulated so far, a sign that Democrats dominated this voting mode. Here is what the mail votes (so far) look like.

Question A For Votes: Mail 68%, total 62%
Question B For Votes: Mail 34%, total 42%
Question C For Votes: Mail 65%, total 61%
Question D For Votes: Mail 33%, total 42%

The mail votes uphold the winning margins of Questions A and C and depress the results for Questions B and D. That’s not a surprise if 1. Democrats voted disproportionately by mail and 2. Democrats stuck with their party’s position on the ballot questions. Indeed, we know here at Seventh State that this post on the Democrats’ statement on the ballot questions got huge site traffic.

As a matter of fact, one could even go so far as to say that once the ballot questions turned partisan, it may have been the beginning of the end.

Plenty of votes remain to be counted so let’s respect that. We may know a lot more by the weekend.

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Early Results on MoCo Races

By Adam Pagnucco.

The first batch of votes on MoCo races has been reported. This is VERY early and VERY incomplete. So far, the reports include only early votes and less than half the mail ballots requested by MoCo voters with no election day votes tabulated. All of that means these races are FAR from decided, folks!

All of that said, here are the earliest results. Bear in mind that the final percentages are going to be different, but how different they will be cannot yet be said.

School Board At-Large: Lynne Harris 53%, Sunil Dasgupta 46%

School Board District 2: Rebecca Smondrowski 60%, Michael Fryar 39%

School Board District 4: Shebra Evans 67%, Steve Solomon 33%

Question A (Authored by Council Member Andrew Friedson, freezes property tax rate with unanimous council vote required to exceed): For 63%, Against 37%

Question B (Authored by Robin Ficker, would limit property tax receipt growth to rate of inflation and remove council’s ability to exceed): For 41%, Against 59%

Question C (Authored by Council Member Evan Glass, changes county council structure to 4 at-large seats and 7 district seats): For 62%, Against 38%

Question D (Authored by Nine Districts for MoCo, changes county council structure to 9 district seats): For 41%, Against 59%

It is probably not a coincidence that these results mirror the recommendations of the county’s Democratic Party, but the results are far from final.

At some point tonight, the election day votes should be added in. You can refresh them here for school board races and here for ballot questions.

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Who Has the Edge in the At-Large School Board Race?

By Adam Pagnucco.

This year saw one of the most contentious school board primaries in recent county history. With incumbent at-large school board member Jeanette Dixon announcing her retirement, a 13-member field filled social media and press accounts in their quest to succeed her. Perhaps the foremost issue was MCPS’s boundary study, which was both supported and opposed by numerous candidates. The primary’s survivors are former PTA president and MCPS teacher Lynne Harris and Universities at Shady Grove professor Sunil Dasgupta, both boundary study supporters. Now they are facing off in a general election that will reach its conclusion next week.

Who is going to win, Harris or Dasgupta?

Here is what we know. Harris has been endorsed by the Washington Post and is supported by a large number of PTA activists, including her campaign manager, Laura Stewart. Dasgupta has been endorsed by MCEA, wielder of the mighty Apple Ballot, as well as SEIU Local 500, Casa in Action and Progressive Maryland. His campaign manager is MCPS teacher Chris Wilhelm, who ran a strong campaign for county council at-large two years ago. (Wilhelm and Stewart, besides being the campaign managers, are both well-qualified to be school board candidates themselves!) Dasgupta has outraised Harris but neither has the money to effectively reach a general electorate which will probably have a half million voters. The campaign seems devoid of the rancor that characterized the primary although some teachers were upset with Harris’s remarks criticizing MCEA over the issue of school reopening.

Both candidates have written guest blogs on Seventh State. Dasgupta wrote Distance Learning May be Plan C, but it is the Best Option Right Now on July 17 and Changing the Reopening Timeline: a Recipe for Confusion and Anxiety on September 28. Harris wrote Reopening Plans – MCPS is Behind on October 25. All three posts attracted significant numbers of readers.

At first glance, both Harris and Dasgupta seem to have plausible chances to win. But this is Seventh State, so let’s not stop there. On to the spreadsheet!

Let’s look back at the last twenty years of school board races. The table below examines the frequency with which candidates who finish first in a primary go on to win the general election. (Races in which there are two or fewer candidates don’t have primaries but rather advance directly to a general election.) Incumbents appear in bold, with appointed incumbents also appearing in italics.

In the last 18 school board races with both primaries and generals, the top finisher in the primary went on to win the general 15 times. That’s good news for Harris, who finished first in the primary this year. But let’s not declare the race over yet. The three cases in which the top primary finisher did not win have four things in common.

The election had an open seat.
That’s the case this year as Harris and Dasgupta are vying to replace a retiring incumbent.

The top finisher in the primary received a low percentage of the total vote.
In the 2000 at-large race, Charles Haughey finished first in the primary with 26% of the vote. In the 2012 district 2 race, Fred Evans finished first in the primary with 25% of the vote. In the 2018 at-large race, Julie Reiley finished first in the primary with 32% of the vote. All three would go on to lose the general. Harris’s percentage in the primary, 29%, is in the same ballpark as these other candidates.

The second finisher in the primary had either the Post or the Apple Ballot.
In the 2000 at-large race, Sharon Cox was endorsed by the Post. In the 2012 district 2 race, Rebecca Smondrowski was endorsed by the Post. In the 2018 at-large race, Karla Silvestre had the Apple Ballot. All three came back from second-place finishes in the primary to win the general. As noted above, Dasgupta has the Apple.

The difference between the top and second finishers in the primary was five points or less.
In 2000, Cox trailed Haughey by 1.8 points in the primary. In 2012, Smondrowski trailed Evans by 2.6 points. In 2018, Silvestre trailed Reiley by 4.1 points. All three came back to win the general. Harris led Dasgupta in this year’s primary by 8.6 points. That’s a bigger margin than the other three races discussed here.

And so, Dasgupta meets three of the four conditions under which second place primary finishers won school board general elections over the last 20 years. Only the margin by which Harris finished first in the primary augurs against him.

So what do you think, readers? Does Harris have the edge because she won the primary by almost 9 points? Or can Dasgupta come back to win?

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Top Seventh State Stories, September 2020

By Adam Pagnucco.

These were the top stories on Seventh State in September ranked by page views.

1. Free-For-All
2. Why Montgomery County Ballot Questions B and D Are Truly Bad Ideas You Should Vote Against
3. Harris Blasts MCEA Over School Reopening
4. Harris Apologizes for Comments on School Reopening
5. Progressive-Backed Judge Candidate Courted, Donated to Republicans
6. Changing the Reopening Timeline: A Recipe for Confusion and Anxiety
7. Ballot Question Committee Scorecard
8. Post Editorial: Vote Against All Charter Amendments
9. Judge Candidate on Floyd Cops: “Lock Em Up”
10. Why Progressives Should Support the Friedson Amendment

Free-For-All, which called into question the county’s strategy for dealing with the police department, was the runaway leader this month. That suggests that there is considerable unease about the county’s approach to MCPD which goes far beyond the groups the county hears from regularly. School board candidate Lynne Harris’s criticism of MCEA, for which she later apologized, produced a flood of site traffic. The two posts about circuit court judge candidate Marylin Pierre were circulated by her opponents on the sitting judge slate. The rest of the posts were mostly about MoCo’s charter amendments, on which voting has already begun.

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Harris Blasts MCEA Over School Reopening

By Adam Pagnucco.

Silver Chips, the online newspaper for Blair High School, had quite a scoop yesterday. The newspaper asked school board at-large candidates Lynne Harris and Sunil Dasgupta for their opinions on the statement issued by MCPS and its three employee unions about potential reopening for in-person instruction. According to Silver Chips, Harris said the following in an email on Saturday:

Personally I’m completely frustrated that the associations, especially MCEA, would NOT get in the boat and row since Spring to help create meaningful Covid plans for teaching and learning, especially limited in-person instruction––they were obstructionist, inflammatory, and just said ‘no’ to everything. We need plans in place NOW to bring small groups of students into schools safely––for special education instruction, for specialized arts and other programs that require access to MCPS facilities and resources to be equitably delivered, for CTE programs that can’t be delivered virtually etc.

Harris had more to say about this topic on her website.

Silver Chips also carried a reply from Dasgupta that conforms with his guest blog on Seventh State today.

Dasgupta has been endorsed by MCEA (the teachers) and SEIU Local 500 (support staff) among others. Harris has been endorsed by the Washington Post editorial board, which at various times over the years has been critical of MCEA.

During the primary, there weren’t a lot of apparent differences between Harris and Dasgupta as both were defending MCPS’s boundary study from criticism by fellow at-large candidate Stephen Austin, who finished third, and his supporters. Silver Chips has done the public an immense service by revealing a meaningful difference between these candidates.

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Changing the Reopening Timeline: A Recipe for Confusion and Anxiety

Guest column by Dr. Sunil Dasgupta, Candidate for Montgomery County Board of Education At-Large.

MCPS’s decision to start the 45 day clock on potentially reopening school buildings is premature. While MCPS should absolutely be working collaboratively with teachers, staff, families, and students on a reopening plan, starting the clock before answering some basic questions is disruptive and anxiety-producing for everyone involved.

To calm anxieties and provide a clear path forward, MCPS leadership should focus on three goals in the near term. The first goal should be clear communication with all stakeholders. The second goal should be to meet student needs in the immediate context of online learning. And the third goal should be to collaboratively develop a safe reopening plan with employees, families, and students.

Clear Communication

Clear communication with the public has been MCPS’ biggest shortcoming during the pandemic. We are only four weeks into the first quarter, so it is unclear why MCPS is making an announcement on a 45 day timeline that could place some students and staff back in buildings in early November, after announcing in July that the first semester would be online-only.

In his July announcement regarding the fall semester, MCPS Superintendent Dr. Jack Smith wrote, “the safest choice for our district is to remain in a virtual-only instructional model through the first semester—January 29, 2021; or until state and local health officials determine conditions in our county allow for students to return safely after the first semester.” MCPS should stick to its previous timeline in order to ensure student and staff safety, and to provide desperately needed clarity for all stakeholders.

Meeting Students’ Immediate Needs

MCPS has performed much better in this area, but there are still students who need additional resources and support to make online learning as productive as possible. Many students in certain zip codes still lack access to high-speed internet and functioning Chromebooks. MCPS leadership and local staff are focused on this issue, and they should continue to reach out in every way possible to get these students and families connected to the learning that is taking place online.

MCPS recognizes that student mental health is suffering during the pandemic and is rightly focused on providing additional support to students and staff. And the school system continues to provide meals to thousands of students on a weekly basis.

A Collaborative Plan for a Safe Reopening

While teachers and staff are doing an amazing job considering the circumstances, not every student’s needs can be met through online instruction. Unfortunately, MCPS continues to persist with poorly designed surveys to gauge what families and staff want, hindering our ability to craft a reopening plan that fits the situation.

To honor individual choices of families and employees, MCPS needs better data. Rather than running poorly-designed surveys, there needs to be a census of every student and every staff member. We should ask the question, “When do you want to return,” and offer a menu of conditions to choose from. The census could be tied to student and employee dashboards, so everyone must answer before they can proceed with schoolwork. Importantly, respondents should have the ability to log back in and change their minds by picking a reason from a menu. Rather than an artificial 45 day timer, this evolving census data should help drive decisions to return.

The MCPS employee associations must be at the table contributing to the discussion on safety precautions, equipment and materials, protocols for testing, tracing, and quarantining, medical leave, substitution, and the many transitions between online and in-person delivery of instruction. There is also considerable work to be done to assess infrastructure – especially school building ventilation – and to identify safe teaching spaces. Teachers and staff must be involved in every step of the planning process.

What Now

This difficult moment requires steady leadership, deep collaboration, and clear communication. We should be squarely focused on how to safely meet the needs of all students. By all means, we should be planning how and when to reopen, but setting an artificial timer is not going to bring clarity. It’s a recipe for confusion and further anxiety.

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Top Seventh State Stories, July 2020

By Adam Pagnucco.

These were the top stories on Seventh State in July ranked by page views.

1. Restaurant: My Staff Will Not Wear Face Masks
2. MCEA: MCPS Reopening Plan “Wholly Inadequate” to Protect Students and Staff
3. Volcano in Rockville
4. The Upcounty Doesn’t Vote and Nobody Seems to Care
5. Distance Learning May be Plan C, but it is the Best Option Right Now
6. MoCo’s Book Club
7. Elrich on Hot Mic: “Can I Say the Council is Fact Proof?”
8. MCEA President Responds to MCPS Video
9. Kleine on the Line Again
10. MCPS Releases “Just the Facts” Video

The post about a restaurant not requiring face masks was one of the top five most-read stories in the history of this blog. (That puts some perspective on the relative importance of politics!) Marilyn Balcombe and Sunil Dasgupta deserve congratulations for their excellent and widely read guest posts. Aside from those, the top posts generally reflect the top two stories of the month: MCPS’s reopening decision and the county’s ethics-challenged Chief Administrative Officer Andrew Kleine.

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Distance Learning May be Plan C, but it is the Best Option Right Now

By Sunil Dasgupta, candidate for Montgomery County Board of Education, At-large.

Students, families, and school staff are waiting anxiously as MCPS debates what school will look like in the fall. Who will return to school buildings, and when? How will transportation work? Will students and staff be able to choose virtual learning and instruction? There are infinite questions and no great options.

Plan A for the fall was to bring all students back into classrooms. Under normal circumstances, this would of course be the optimal plan, and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) argued for the physical presence of students in schools as necessary for child development. But CDC’s 6-feet social distancing guidance requires each student and teacher have 36 sq ft of exclusive space while in school. Even using Parks and Recreation facilities, tented outdoors classrooms, or small self-contained pods, MCPS cannot make full time in-person instruction possible for all students.

Plan B is the hybrid model—part in-person and part online with shift attendance—which is reflected in the draft plan that MCPS released this week. This plan attempts to bring students and staff back into buildings while meeting CDC guidelines, but it raises questions about safety, risk, and reward. One high school English teacher pointed out that, under the draft plan, he would meet with his students in-person only six times in the fall. The potential benefit of the hybrid model does not seem worth the risk, and with a substantial number of students and staff opting for online instruction, a great deal of the burden of carrying forward instruction would remain online.

That leaves us with Plan C: online, virtual, distance learning only, at least for the fall semester. The last few months have shown that it is very difficult to provide high-quality distance learning. Even in a large, wealthy jurisdiction like Montgomery County, we see noticeable gaps in access, engagement, and continuity of learning. While online learning has been more manageable and accessible for some, many families are reporting confusion over scheduling, technology problems, lack of student engagement, and absence of learning. When combined with serious equity and access issues, the results have been far from satisfactory.

None of the plans are perfect. But only one plan is safe: Plan C. MCPS should stick with distance learning for the fall semester, and the school system should make the announcement as soon as possible so we can create the best Plan C possible.

We can provide additional training for teachers, set higher expectations for students, and create more engaging curricula. We can make concrete plans for technology troubleshooting and meeting the needs of students with special learning needs and English Language Learners. And we can give families time to plan for how to manage life once classes resume.

But we can only begin preparing for more equitable, better organized, and ultimately more powerful online learning experiences for our young people once the school system makes the call to go with the imperfect, yet safe Plan C. Waiting longer risks losing the vital prep and training time needed to get this right.

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Harris, Dasgupta Hold on to Leads

By Adam Pagnucco.

Moments ago, the State Board of Elections updated its vote count of MoCo’s at-large school board race. Lynne Harris and Sunil Dasgupta have been in first and second place since the first counts were released and that has not changed.

At this point, 113,429 votes have been recorded in this race and 123,568 votes have been cast for president. Bethesda Beat reported last week that the county board of elections had received “more than 271,450 ballots” as of Thursday. That number has no doubt gone up since then. That probably means at most half the ballots in MoCo have been counted as of a week after the primary election.

In the District 4 race, incumbent Shebra Evans and Steve Solomon look like they will advance to the general election.

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In-Person Vote Helps Dasgupta Over Austin

By Adam Pagnucco.

Last night’s first results in MoCo’s at-large school board race had a partial count of vote-by-mail ballots. In that count, Lynne Harris had 28.3% of the vote, followed by Sunil Dasgupta (18.4%) and Stephen Austin (16.2%). Dasgupta led Austin by 1,154 votes.

This morning, in-person votes have been posted along with the early vote-by-mail votes. Jay Guan did really well on in-person votes but not enough to break into the top three overall. Meanwhile, Dasgupta added another 186 votes to his lead over Austin. The top two candidates advance to the general election.

Tens of thousands of votes remain to be counted. Final results won’t be available for a while, so keep watching!

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