By Adam Pagnucco.
District 18 House candidate Mila Johns has sent out a mailer calling for an end to MoCo’s liquor monopoly. The mailer contains an endorsement from Comptroller Peter Franchot, a hero to monopoly opponents who has been calling for its end for years. This is the first mailer we can recall seeing on this subject and we appreciate Johns’s courage in calling this question so publicly.
By Adam Pagnucco.
Early voting wrapped up yesterday and the State Board of Elections has posted results. Folks, we can say this: a wild race just got a whole lot wilder.
First, as we saw from the first day of early voting, turnout is waaaay up. Here is the distribution by party in the 2014 and 2018 primaries.
Early voting is up for everyone but especially for Democrats.
Now here is the early voting by Congressional, State Legislative and County Council districts.
The biggest increases in early voting have occurred in State District 15, State District 16, Council District 1 and Congressional District 6. The lowest increases – by far – have occurred in State District 20 and Council District 5.
Below we show early voting by gender and age group.
Women have an edge here but not a huge one. The age group results are astounding. Turnout is up by a gigantic amount for people aged 18 through 24. It went up by the least amount for people aged 45 through 64.
Additionally, one of the campaigns analyzed the voting patterns of those who voted early for us. Roughly half the Democratic early voters had voted in at least two of the last three mid-term primaries (2006, 2010 and 2014). The other half had voted less regularly or not at all.
We draw the following tentative conclusions from this data.
1. Voters in Congressional District 6 and nearby areas turned out more strongly than the rest of the county. This might reflect the intense campaigning of the congressional candidates there and especially the massive spending by David Trone. This is good news for countywide candidates who run strong in those places.
2. Voters in District 20 – the liberal heart of MoCo that includes Takoma Park and inside-the-Beltway Silver Spring – did not turn out to the same extent. This is not a great thing for countywide candidates whose base is in that area and is especially bad for County Executive candidate Marc Elrich.
3. Tons and tons of voters who are not targeted by most campaigns – especially young people, irregular voters and new voters – have come out and are roughly equal to the super Dems. This adds an element of unpredictability to the race. For the most part, these voters are not getting overwhelmed by mail, door knocks and phone calls as are super Dems. How are they getting information on local races? Television is one source. Those campaigns with the resources for a huge target universe (like Trone and David Blair) are communicating with them while others are not. If they are using Google to research candidates, they are encountering sources like Bethesda Magazine and the blogs since few other sites write about down-ticket races. Some of them may not be voting down-ticket at all and may only be casting votes for Governor and Congress.
4. And finally, we offer our standard caveat: we don’t know if higher early voting will cannibalize from election day voting or add to it. We won’t know that until Tuesday night.
This is a helluva race, folks. Every time we think we might be starting to figure it out – BAM! – something unexpected happens. If you’re a MoCo political junkie like we are, this election is one for the ages!
By Adam Pagnucco.
MoCo Democrats are not monolithic. There are several segments of them. There are the 40,000 or so Super Democrats, the ones who vote in every mid-term primary. Then there are the sixty percent of MoCo Dems who are women. There are the voters who live in the Democratic Crescent – the area from Takoma Park over to Bethesda and Cabin John – who disproportionately turn out to vote. And of course there are people over age 60, who account for a majority of regular voters. Candidates are aware of all of these groups and target their communications to them. But there’s one group – potentially a big one – which few people are talking about.
Term limits voters.
In the 2016 general election, 70% of voters approved term limits. We know that a majority of the Democrats who voted in that election supported term limits because of simple mathematics. In that election, 62% of the voters were Democrats. If all 38% of the voters who were Republicans, third party members or independents voted yes, then the other 32% must have come from the Dems. Divide 32% by 62% and you get 52% of Dems voting for term limits. If a few of the non-Dems voted no, the Dem percentage goes up.
The other thing we know about term limits voters is where they live. Every part of the county voted for term limits except Takoma Park. In most Downcounty areas, term limits support ranged from 60% to 70%. Upcounty areas were more supportive with term limits getting 80% or more of the vote in Clarksburg, Damascus, Derwood, Laytonsville, North Potomac and Poolesville. Upcounty areas have greater concentrations of Republicans than elsewhere. We ran a correlation coefficient between Republican voter percentage and term limits vote percentage at the precinct level and it worked out to 0.6 – meaning that partisan status was associated with most, but not all, of term limits variability. In other words, other things were at work too.
That’s about all we know about term limits voters from public data. There’s a whole lot we don’t know, including:
How many people who voted for term limits in that general election are going to be voting in this mid-term primary?
We have said it before and we will say it again: MoCo Dem primary voters are not the same people as MoCo general election voters. Just because a majority of presidential general election Dems voted for term limits does not mean that a majority of this year’s mid-term primary Dems will have voted for them. In fact, we bet it will be a lot less purely because the 40,000 or so Super Dems will be somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of this year’s electorate and we are skeptical that they disproportionately voted for term limits. That said, the number of term limits voters this year won’t be zero – they are definitely out there. Even if you split the difference and assume that a quarter of this year’s Dem primary voters supported term limits, that’s a big enough chunk to swing an election.
Why did people vote for term limits?
This is another question to which there is no answer outside of polling. We tend to agree with former Council Member Steve Silverman, who told Bethesda Magazine, “It was a combination of interests that created the perfect storm that led to the passage of term limits.” In other words, there were many factors that drove those votes: anger with the nine percent property tax hike, concerns over land use, unhappiness with traffic and cost of living or maybe a simple desire for change, however nebulous that might be. While we believe that the Dem primary electorate is indeed different from the general electorate of two years ago, we don’t believe those concerns have gone away.
Who will they support this time?
That’s an easier question. Whatever the reason, it’s hard to interpret the vote for term limits as anything other than a call for change of some kind. The current Democratic field for Executive contains three term-limited Council Members and three people who are not term-limited Council Members. That’s a little simplistic – Marc Elrich is running as a progressive change candidate despite his 31-year history of elected office. But since Takoma Park is Elrich’s home base and that is the only area in the county which voted against term limits, we are hesitant to believe that many term limits supporters are Elrich voters. Rather, we believe they will lean to the three outsiders – Delegate Bill Frick (D-16), former Rockville Mayor Rose Krasnow and businessman David Blair. And of those three, Blair has by far the most resources with which to communicate with them.
Speaking of Blair, we found his recent exchange with Washington Post reporter Jennifer Barrios fascinating.
When asked about his political base, David Blair considers the question then poses one of his own.
“My political base,” he says after a pause. “So does that mean who’s going to come out and support me?”…
“The people that tend to gravitate to me are the ones that believe Montgomery County is a great place to live but we’re slipping,” Blair said. “And there’s a level of frustration, and it could be related to transportation, schools, social services and this — why can’t a county with this level of wealth pay for the services that we need? — and a recognition that a healthy community needs a vibrant, growing business community.”
Those people sound like term limits voters and they have the makings of a political base. Marc Elrich knows exactly who his base is: progressives, development opponents and people who live in and around Takoma Park. Elrich’s messaging smartly concentrates on those voter segments. His troops’ ability to get out those votes is a major reason why he might be the next Executive.
Term limits voters won’t be a majority of the Democratic mid-term primary electorate. But they might be large enough in numbers to rival the size of Elrich’s base. If Blair can organize them – and if there are enough of them – we might be staying up late on election night.
By Adam Pagnucco.
Yesterday, Council Member Hans Riemer critiqued his colleague, County Executive candidate Marc Elrich, on Facebook. Today, Elrich responded to Riemer in the video below released by MCM.
By Adam Pagnucco.
This is the fourth straight mailer sent by Council Member Roger Berliner, who is running for Executive, against David Blair. Berliner’s grounds for criticizing Blair are that he is a former Republican, has no experience in government service and is self-funding most of his campaign, all of which are true. In this particular mailer, Berliner says, “My other Democratic opponents have a history of involvement in local issues and have earned the right to be considered. I hope you choose me, but they each have experience as Democrats worth evaluating. I respectfully urge you to not consider David Blair.”
Berliner has officially joined the Anybody But Blair camp. We reprint the mailer below.
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.
By Adam Pagnucco.
Businessman David Blair is the only candidate in the County Executive race to be targeted by both negative mail and two negative TV ads. The combined expenditures for these mailers and TV ads now total over a half million dollars, making Blair the only Executive candidate to take fire on that financial scale.
How do we evaluate these attacks?
First, your author has a background in evaluating evidence of corporate conduct. For sixteen years, I was a strategic researcher in the labor movement. One of my jobs was to investigate companies who were targets of union organizing campaigns. I performed dozens of these investigations and it was painstaking, tedious work. The basic descriptives of the company – its business lines, affiliates, history, executives, finances, work locations, project experience, client lists, political contributions and so on – were a necessary predicate for researching its safety, labor, environmental, legal and media records. Some of the dossiers I compiled were over a hundred pages and required months of travel to assemble. I had three primary tasks: gather the information, determine its utility and craft it into communication pieces that were truthful, relevant and avoided the risk of defamation litigation. Over the years, I uncovered extraordinarily bad behavior on the part of employers including but not limited to sexual harassment, racial discrimination, threatening deportation to block union organizing campaigns, environmental destruction, bid rigging, intentionally exposing employees to lethal working conditions to save money and a LOT more. That research background gives me a standard of comparison for some of the allegations against Blair and it is partially through that prism that I write today’s post.
Here are the main allegations against Blair.
He is a former Republican with a spotty voting record.
This is true and Blair has admitted to it. Blair is one of two former Republicans running for office in MoCo this year. The other is Council District 1 candidate Meredith Wellington, who was a Republican member of the Planning Board as recently as 2007, four years after Blair became a Democrat. Those who would pass judgment on Blair for this should hold Wellington to the same standard assuming that either is to be judged at all.
He is a self-funder who has not held political office.
This is also true. Blair is one of MANY self-funding Democrats who have run for office, including Senators Dianne Feinstein, Richard Blumenthal, Herb Kohl and Jon Corzine and House members John Delaney, Jane Harman and Jared Polis. Then there is party-hopping, self-funding former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who now spends millions to promote gun control and plans to spend $80 million to elect Democratic House candidates, acts for which he is praised by the left. And liberal self-funder Ned Lamont, who famously challenged Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman from the left in 2006, was just endorsed by the Democratic Party for Governor. All of these politicians self-financed millions in their races so if Blair is to be criticized, so must all the rest. In any event, only one self-funder above the $200,000 level has won office from MoCo in the last twelve years. Our county’s history demonstrates that money can never substitute for a real agenda that connects with voters.
One of his former companies settled a class action over disability insurance.
There was indeed a settlement and there is a website documenting the lawsuit. The complaint alleges a variety of violations related to disability insurance sold by one of Blair’s companies that was endorsed by former actor Christopher Reeve. But Blair himself did not settle the case: he sold the company in 2012 and the suit was settled five years later. That means one or more of the successor entities and/or co-defendants made the decision to settle, and if Blair thought the suit was without merit, he did not get to decide whether to fight it at trial. Finally, a settlement does not equate to a trial verdict in determining the truth of a complaint – indeed, the whole point of a settlement is to avoid trial and a finding of fact either way. The Blair campaign commented on the suit here.
“Blair’s company jacked prescription drug prices.”
This is a key claim in Progressive Maryland’s TV ad and it is based on one 2012 opinion article in the Daily Kos. Now let’s reflect on the nature of the Daily Kos. It’s a liberal opinion blog that allows content submissions from thousands of people without the editorial standards of traditional journalistic organizations like the New York Times or the Washington Post. The site’s terms of use state:
We are an Internet Service Provider, e.g., We are Not Responsible For and Do Not Necessarily Hold the Opinions Expressed by Our Content Contributors.
It should go without saying that with hundreds of thousands of registered users, and tens of thousands of diarist/bloggers, there is great diversity in thoughts and opinions. So just because you read it on the site doesn’t mean “the site” said it or thinks it. That would make for a very schizophrenic site.
The Daily Kos itself does not represent its content as fact-based. Accordingly, without further investigation, an opinion article of this kind does not automatically deserve the presumption of truth.
A still shot from Progressive Maryland’s ad.
As a corporate researcher and a political writer, your author is acquainted with the standards of defamation when applied to public figures. Briefly put, a public figure (like a celebrity or politician) can only win a defamation judgment against a defendant if the defendant knowingly made a false statement or made a statement with “reckless disregard for the truth.”
This came up all the time in my work for the labor movement as fortifying our communications against defamation suits was a very high priority. For everything we said about a targeted employer, I had reams of paperwork (usually court records) to back it up. I am confident that my union’s attorneys would have blocked me from using something like the Daily Kos article unless I had interviewed the author and acquired documents to back up his or her statements. And even then, our attorneys probably would have still blocked it as unverified by a traditional media organization, government entity or court.
Finally, the way in which Progressive Maryland’s ad characterizes the settlement and the Daily Kos post is very problematic. The ad said, “Blair’s company jacked prescription drug prices and another company sold virtually worthless disability claims.” It would be truthful to say that Blair’s companies were accused of these things. But allegations from settled claims that were not decided in court and an opinion blog post should not be characterized as objective facts. It’s these kinds of loose standards that make people so skeptical of political ads.
David Blair is equivalent to Donald Trump.
This one has been made in both negative TV ads and by Blair critics too numerous to count.
Another still shot from Progressive Maryland’s ad.
Equating Blair to Trump fundamentally misjudges the nature of Trump. If Trump’s sole failings were his wealth and inexperience, he would be no different from all the many other self-funders who run for office. The real reason why Trump is the Anti-Christ of progressive politics is that he is a vicious racist, misogynist and xenophobe whose narcissism is matched only by his greed and stupidity. He is literally separating children from their parents and jamming them into detention centers. And that’s just a start! Saying that Blair is the same as Trump is over the top.
Trump is holding immigrant children in cages like this one. David Blair is not Donald Trump.
Our judgment on Blair is that he has his liabilities, especially being a former Republican and desiring high office without prior elected experience. It’s understandable that voters might choose to oppose him on those grounds alone. But critiques of his business record pale in comparison to the dozens of investigations your author conducted in the labor movement. And his critics’ claims that he is equivalent to Trump are out of bounds. Furthermore, we give him credit for highlighting economic competitiveness as one of his core themes as it aligns with our many concerns on that issue.
Whatever its outcome, we eagerly await the end of this increasingly brutal campaign.
By Adam Pagnucco.
Council Member Hans Riemer has used Facebook to weigh in on his colleague, Marc Elrich, who is running for Executive. Riemer and Elrich have cooperated on numerous progressive priorities like Elrich’s $15 minimum wage bill, Riemer’s bill to restore the county’s earned income tax credit, protecting Ten Mile Creek and instituting paid leave, but the two have occasionally disagreed on land use issues. Other than Nancy Floreen, who has endorsed Rose Krasnow, the other incumbent Council Members who aren’t running for Executive themselves have been quiet on the Executive race. We reprint Riemer’s Facebook post below. (Disclosure: your author was Riemer’s Chief of Staff from 2010 through 2014.)
By Adam Pagnucco.
Council At-Large candidate Bill Conway has sent out the mailer below quoting Congressmen Jamie Raskin and John Delaney as well as Delegate Aruna Miller (D-15), who is running to succeed Delaney. Miller and Delaney have endorsed Conway. Conway’s campaign tells us that Raskin has authorized the use of his picture and quote even though Raskin has not endorsed Conway.
By Adam Pagnucco.
As part of its campaign to take out Senate President Mike Miller, SEIU Local 500 has released this video slamming him for accepting campaign contributions from the NRA.
