By Adam Pagnucco.
Recently, I wrote about 2023 fundraising by MoCo’s state legislators and one of them stood out: District 18 Senator Jeff Waldstreicher. Let’s study his fundraising.
Waldstreicher is a MoCo native and a Blair High School graduate. He left the county for a few years to go to college and returned to win a House seat in 2006 at age 26. That would make him one of the youngest state legislators in MoCo history. (Joe Vogel was a little younger when he won a District 17 House seat in 2022). Waldstreicher served three terms in the House and then succeeded Rich Madaleno in the Senate in 2018.
To understand Waldstreicher, you should start with his district. District 18 (where I have lived for 20 years) is a political jungle. It includes Chevy Chase, Kensington and an activist section of Silver Spring along with Wheaton and a few precincts in Rockville and the edge of Bethesda. The district is full of people who think they could do a good job in Annapolis and/or D.C. – and maybe a better job than the incumbents. Every District 18 legislator – and not just Jeff – has to look around at the faces in their fundraisers and think about how many of them are looking to run. The district has a history of wild races, including then-Delegate Chris Van Hollen’s takedown of his incumbent senator in 1994 and Delegate Leon Billings’s defeat in 2002.
As a result of the district’s deep bench, Waldstreicher has always faced competition. There are only two politicians in the county who have won five straight competitive races – Waldstreicher and County Executive Marc Elrich. (Let that sink in.) Among Jeff’s top rivals have been attorney Dan Farrington (2006), self-funding Dana Beyer and eventual Howard County Delegate Vanessa Atterbeary (2010), future Delegate Emily Shetty, future Council Member Natali Fani-Gonzalez and Capitol Hill staffer Rick Kessler (2014), Beyer again (2018) and progressive organizer Max Socol (2022). All of these candidates had money and endorsements but none of them could defeat Jeff. In that kind of environment – when you know you are going to have competition but you’re not sure who – you have to work hard and raise money to survive. Jeff does those things better than anyone in the district.
Since it was established in 2006, Waldstreicher’s campaign account has recorded $1,645,862 in receipts. The chart below shows Waldstreicher’s annual fundraising.
At the start of his career, Waldstreicher did the bulk of his fundraising in election years, as do most politicians. But starting around 2016, right before he began getting ready for his first senate race, that changed. In the seven years from 2017 through 2023, Jeff failed to break six digits just once. His nearly $92,000 take in 2020 would have been considered a good year by most of our state senators but for Jeff it was a down year. Like Council Member Andrew Friedson, Waldstreicher does not take years off. Given the white-hot competitive nature of District 18, he can’t afford to do that.
The pie chart below shows the major categories of contributions for Waldstreicher’s entire career.
In his first race, Jeff was primarily a self-funder. That has not been the case for more than 15 years. He now enjoys hefty contributions from individuals, business and labor. That means he is responsive to many constituencies.
Let’s zero in on Waldstreicher’s individual contributions, his largest single source of money. The pie chart below shows their geography using zip codes as a determinant.
The financial core of Waldstreicher’s district is Chevy Chase and Kensington, but those areas only account for about a quarter of his individual contributions. Jeff raises money from individuals all over the county south of Route 28 (Norbeck Road). He also gets a third of his individual contributions from outside MoCo.
Putting it all together, here is the distribution of Waldstreicher’s total fundraising:
Business entities: 22%
Labor: 12%
Self-funding: 9% (insignificant for roughly 15 years)
Individuals in Kensington: 7%
Individuals in Chevy Chase: 7%
Individuals in Bethesda: 5%
Individuals in the rest of MoCo: 15%
Individuals outside MoCo: 19%
Other: 4%
This is an extraordinarily diverse fundraising base and it shows that Waldstreicher is not too dependent on any one constituency for money. That along with his tenacious work ethic and wary eye on potential competitors (including his delegates, who don’t come close to him in money) make him a great fundraiser and a formidable opponent for any challenger.