By Adam Pagnucco.
The Montgomery County Republican Party has shown up strong at this year’s agricultural fair in Gaithersburg, gathering signatures to oust their principal nemesis in county government. And where are their counterparts in the county Democrats? Not present formally, and that makes for an interesting contrast.
First to the Republicans. Led by the party’s 2022 nominee for county executive, Reardon “Sully” Sullivan, they are actively gathering signatures for a ballot petition that would lower term limits for the executive from three terms to two. Make no mistake – this is aimed squarely at County Executive Marc Elrich, a Democrat who barely squeaked through his primary last year. Their ballot question website states:
Marc Elrich doesn’t get why we’re hemorrhaging good jobs, good businesses, and our tax base is shrinking. But great companies like Amazon, Boeing, Raytheon and Clark Construction do, they chose to move or expand their businesses to Northern Virginia. Why? Because Montgomery County is overtaxed and overregulated. NOW ELRICH WANTS TO RAISE OUR PROPERTY TAXES 10%!!
Sully gathers signatures at the fair.
The party is trying to repeat their success of 2016, when they got term limits passed in the wake of an 8.7% property tax hike. They can’t beat Elrich in a general election, but they are hoping that a ballot question making his current term his last will constitute an equivalent feat.
And so they are gathering signatures to get term limits on the ballot again. They need at least 10,000 legal signatures from voters to make it happen. A model is provided by the group that put a proposal for nine council districts on the ballot in 2020. That group obtained 16,391 signatures, of which the county’s board of elections found 11,522 to be valid. With roughly a year to go, the Republicans appear to have a plausible shot to make the 2024 general election ballot.
One more signature.
Whether Democrats like it or not, Elrich is the de facto head of the county’s Democratic Party as any sitting executive from the party would be. So where are the Democrats as the GOP runs wild at the fair? The fair’s vendor list shows a booth rental by the Republicans but not the Democrats.
Who is there and who is not?
My sources tell me that the Democrats have had a policy for several years of not getting a fair booth in odd years (when elections are not held). Whatever the reason, the GOP is quite pleased that they can gather signatures with no apparent opposition. Democratic elected officials are less pleased.
Let’s not exaggerate this event. The Republicans have not elected a county official or a member of the General Assembly in MoCo since 2002. No local GOP is likely to elect any of its candidates in a deep blue county while its national leader faces four(!) different indictments. But as I wrote last November, “…The local GOP’s path to relevance goes through the ballot question process. They should identify Democratic excesses, test which of them are least popular with the general electorate, craft legally sound remedies and conduct petition drives for ballot placement.” Whether or not term limits are the answer (and we already have them), the more that Republicans discuss Elrich’s proposal for a ten percent property tax hike, the greater the odds that they will have another triumph at the ballot box.
One by one, the signatures are coming in.
And as for the Democrats? The county’s party, which is responsible for defending its office holders – including Elrich – is preoccupied with infighting and in the midst of a long-term fundraising decline. The fate of Nathan Feldman, the Montgomery County Democratic Central Committee member who called for the resignation of the party chair, could very well exacerbate the party’s internal squabbles.
MoCo will almost certainly be blue for decades to come. But the contrast between a focused and motivated GOP weaponizing the ballot box and a divided Democratic apparatus standing idly by while Republicans attempt to claim the head of their top county official is not a happy one for the left. We shall see how far this goes as the 2024 general election approaches.