By Adam Pagnucco.
In Part Two, we discussed Marc Elrich’s assets and liabilities. Let’s move on to David Blair and Hans Riemer. First, some disclosures: I was Riemer’s chief of staff at the county council from 2010 through 2014 and I worked for Blair’s campaign in this cycle.
Blair’s Assets
Let’s start with the obvious: Blair lost by 77 votes last time. Right from the beginning, many folks saw this election as a two-person race, which was great for Blair and terrible for Riemer. I have little doubt that this contributed to the decisions by the Washington Post and the Sierra Club to line up with Blair instead of Riemer in their quest to unseat Elrich.
Another thing: Blair can be surprising in person. The first time I met him, I expected him to be like David Trone, whom I interviewed in 2016. I described Trone then as “by turns ebullient, gregarious, intense, and blunt” with “all the nuance of a nose tackle on the goal line.” I got a kick out of Trone but Blair is much more low key and well-mannered. He is interested in others and treats them with civility and respect. These are appealing traits in a candidate for office and are the polar opposite of the obnoxious rich guy stereotype. Other Blair personality traits include his work ethic (I hated his love of early morning meetings) and his penchant for extreme preparation that would shame many eagle scouts.
Next is geography. Elrich has a base in the county’s southeast, but in 2018, Blair developed a base too: the upper I-270 corridor along with Falls Road (Potomac) and Travilah Road (North Potomac). In past elections, these areas did not stand out as strengths for Elrich or Riemer.
Now to an obvious advantage: money. Look, the guy has cash. Not the kind of cash I get when a $200 dividend check from Amica comes in the mail, but real cash. That said, let’s remember that this county has seen a lot of wealthy people run for office and lose. Even Trone, the ultimate poster boy for MoCo self-funders, narrowly lost the MoCo portion of his congressional district to Aruna Miller in 2018.
Money doesn’t guarantee election but it does help reach voters, which leads us to Blair’s greatest strength: a growing unease in the electorate. Even with his money, Blair would not have been a viable candidate decades ago because the county was at its zenith. The principal challenge back then was how to manage the consequences of success, like traffic and surging development. But over the last 15 years or so, many voters have become more concerned about the county’s lack of job and business creation, its soaring cost of living, rising crime in some areas and even strains in the school system. That led to a willingness by some to try a new approach, creating an opening for someone like David Blair.
Blair’s Liabilities
One of Blair’s biggest liabilities is that he is so different from any county executive in our history. The folks we have elected are a long-time government official (Jim Gleason), two state senators (Charles Gilchrist and Sidney Kramer), three long-time county council members (Neal Potter, Ike Leggett and Marc Elrich) and a mayor of Rockville (Doug Duncan). Even many of the folks who ran and lost – Steve Silverman, Phil Andrews, George Leventhal, Roger Berliner, Rose Krasnow, Bill Frick, Bruce Adams, Nancy Floreen, Gus Bauman and David Scull for example – had years of government service. Kramer was the only one of them with significant experience as an entrepreneur but he had also served for 12 years in the state senate and county council. Now comes Blair, who has never been an elected official and argued that his business experience prepared him to run a government. Would MoCo Dems, many of whom work for government directly or indirectly, buy that?
Another liability is that Blair was not as steeped in the details of county government as his opponents. That’s natural considering that one of them had spent 12 years in government (Riemer) and the other had spent 35 years in government (Elrich). Any challenger facing incumbents would have to deal with such a gap and Blair was no exception.
Blair also did not have the relationships with endorsing organizations that Elrich and Riemer had. Between the two of them, Elrich and Riemer had been endorsed by almost every organization that plays in county politics and had worked with them for many years. In a business where relationships are paramount, Blair was on the outside looking in.
Here is a liability that may seem strange but proved meaningful in the campaign: Blair is a gentleman. Negativity is not his thing. His inclination is to diagnose problems and figure out how to fix them, not to simply rail against them. He is much better suited for an open seat race, which is a beauty contest, than to do the dirty work of taking down an incumbent. Blair finally came around to going after Elrich, but by then, Elrich already had thousands of mail votes locked in. We will discuss that later in this series.
Finally, Blair had to deal with the allegation that he was a rich guy trying to buy an election. Some voters cared about that and others did not but it was a natural line of attack for opponents. Riemer used that point in his TV commercial.
Riemer’s Assets
I used to work for Hans Riemer and I will tell you this: the guy knows how to campaign. He understands messaging, he knows how to put together a field operation, he works his patootie off on fundraising and he gets how running against an incumbent is different from an open seat race. He has spent his entire career in politics and advocacy and it shows when he runs for office. He was an underdog from the start of this race but I’m not sure anyone else in the county could have done better than Riemer against the likes of Elrich and Blair.
He also has a base that resembles my past self from 2006: younger people who want to buy homes, think jobs and housing are good things, want walkable neighborhoods with amenities and don’t believe that development is evil. They aren’t politically organized – yet – but they’re out there and are probably growing faster than Elrich’s anti-development crowd. Geographically, they are concentrated in Downcounty, an area with high turnout and lots of interest in politics. It did not happen in this race, but someday, someone is going to win the county executive’s seat with these people in their corner.
Riemer’s Liabilities
Riemer’s liabilities boil down to one key point: he could not match the advantages owned by Elrich and Blair. Elrich is the incumbent, a politician who has been around for decades, the guy who was always going to get almost all of the union and progressive endorsements and is the King of Takoma Park and a large chunk of Silver Spring too. Blair had the money, the staff, the vendors, the outsider credibility, the Post endorsement, the Sierra Club, the photo finish from last time and a geographic base in which the others did not play much. On that latter point, Riemer’s geography overlapped with Elrich’s geography – they were both concentrated in the southeast, leaving the rest of the county to Blair.
Virtually all of the county’s influential players saw the race this way and almost all of them who got involved lined up with Elrich or Blair, leaving very few aligned with Riemer. In fact, Riemer was one of the only political pros in the county who thought he had any chance to win.
What would have happened if Riemer had teamed up with Blair to take out his old enemy, Elrich? We will never know.
In the next part of the series, we will start breaking down what actually happened in the election.