By Adam Pagnucco.
In this column, I am debuting what will hopefully be a popular new concept: a one sentence post.
Here it is.
None of the school board candidates have any money.
Done. Want more? Well, twist my arm! The table below shows receipts and expenditures for all school board candidates in this cycle. Burn rate is expenditures divided by receipts and is a measure of how fast the candidates are spending their money.
A note. Jonathan Long filed an affidavit instead of a report, meaning that he has not received or spent more than $1,000. In other words, like everyone else, he has no money.
Here’s how bad this is. If all fourteen candidates were to combine their cash balances, they might be able to afford one mailer to a sliver of the voters. But since many of them are running against each other, that’s not likely.
So what happens when no one has any money to communicate with voters? Unfortunately, that’s a typical scenario in school board elections. Four years ago, I wrote a post titled Three Keys to School Board Races, in which I studied school board races from 2006 through 2018. I found that the vast majority of the time, winning candidates had at least one of these three assets: incumbency, the Apple Ballot and/or the Washington Post endorsement. These advantages were not absolute – for example, former high school principal Jeanette Dixon defeated an incumbent who was backed by both the teachers and the Post in 2016. But candidates with all three advantages won more than 90% of the time.
This year, the teachers have refused to endorse any incumbents and the Post has not endorsed in the primary. I have no idea whether the Post eventually will, but in 2022, the paper sat out the primary and endorsed in the general. If the Post stays out of the primary again, that would take one of the three historically important factors off the table.
History suggests that in normal circumstances, the three incumbents (Lynne Harris, Rebecca Smondrowski and Shebra Evans) and the three Apple candidates (Rita Montoya, Natalie Zimmerman and Laura Stewart) would emerge from the primary. That’s the default I would expect to see. But the past year has been a really bad year for MCPS. Will voters blame that on the incumbents? Will they blame the teachers union? Do they even know who the incumbents are? Will any of the challengers suddenly show any money? District 4 challenger Bethany Mandel is a published author who is good at getting free press but so far that has not resulted in campaign cash. Does she or anyone else have any game?
MCPS is hugely important to the county. Its $3+ billion budget is by far the largest of any school district in Maryland. The school board does critical work. But many voters don’t bother voting for school board candidates and donors mostly ignore them. If you care about MCPS, then do your homework, read our questionnaire responses, pick your candidates and do what you can to help them win. If you don’t, then the past year could in retrospect seem like an increasingly typical year rather than an unusually bad one.