By Adam Pagnucco.
I hear something like the following from more than a few people in every election season.
I really hate all the mail coming from these politicians. And I hate their emails too. And then the Facebook ads. I swear, if these politicians don’t stop bugging me, I am not voting for any of them!
All political pros understand that the above sentiment is not shared by most voters. Voter contact works, whether it’s through TV, mail, digital, door knocking, phone calls or preferably all of the above. If voter contact did not work, an awful lot of political vendors would be unemployed! But voters who just want to be left alone do exist and some of them live in this county. How do I know this?
Because they are the people who voted for Peter James for county executive.
James, a tech entrepreneur from Gaithersburg, got into the executive race in March after incumbent Marc Elrich, businessman David Blair and Council Member Hans Riemer had been campaigning for months. (I worked for Blair’s campaign.) His platform began with this sentence: “As county executive, Peter will implement robotics and automation that will keep our streets and public spaces beautiful at a lower cost.”
What would MCGEO President Gino Renne think of a MoCo candidate wanting to replace his members with robots?
A snapshot of James’s now defunct home page from the Internet Archive.
James had no endorsements and filed affidavits with the State Board of Elections stating that “we do not intend to receive contributions or make expenditures in the cumulative amount of $1,000 or more.” That means he raised and spent either zero or almost zero money. He had no shot to win against three opponents who had real campaigns. And yet, James received 2,429 votes in the primary, or 1.7% of the votes cast. That would have been enough to decide a race that came down to 32 votes. Why did these people vote for James?
One clue comes from the cast vote data that I have been crunching lately. Cast vote data does not identify individual voters, but it does reveal which candidates were selected by the same voters. In other words, we can use it to correlate James’s votes with votes for other candidates around the county. And here is a fact:
Voters who supported James were much more likely to support other candidates who had no chance to win.
Consider the chart below, which shows who James voters voted for in the council at-large primary.
The top three vote-getters were Laurie-Anne Sayles, Brandy Brooks and Dana Gassaway. Sayles was the leader of the non-incumbents among all voters but Brooks squandered her campaign funds and Gassaway had no shot at all. James voters would not have elected Will Jawando or Gabe Albornoz, incumbents with solid fundraising and lots of endorsements.
Now look at the table below, which shows some of the other candidates that James voters were supporting. None of these candidates had the endorsements or resources to win. But James voters liked them.
For James voters, the less name recognition, the less money, and the fewer endorsements a candidate had, the more they seemed to like it. (Sayles was the exception to this rule.) These were the voters who actually followed through on the oft-said, but seldom-honored promise to reward candidates who leave them alone and punish candidates who pester them. These may be the weirdest Democrats in MoCo, but they are out there and they vote.
So to all couch potato candidates, these are your voters. They may only be two percent of the primary electorate. But if you raise no money, send no mail and engage in no campaign activity of any kind, these folks will be with you to the end!