By Adam Pagnucco.
Attainable housing. MCPS. Crime. Impact taxes. Building energy performance standards. Grants. Pending budget issues, some of which will be coming from the state and federal governments. That’s just part of the to-do list confronting the county council. It’s a large, time-consuming agenda even for full-time elected officials with staff. But over the last few months, Council Member Will Jawando added another big item to his list that has little to do with his job in Rockville:
Electing Democrats to Congress.
Last December, I reported that Jawando had established a federal PAC after dropping out of Maryland’s U.S. Senate race. The PAC, known as Will of the People PAC, did not do much for months but began sending out regular blast emails in September. The majority of the emails sought to raise money for Democratic candidates around the country and promised to split contributions between those candidates and the PAC. The beneficiaries included vice presidential candidate Tim Walz; U.S. Senate candidates Angela Alsobrooks (MD), Ruben Gallego (AZ), Elissa Slotkin (MI), Jon Tester (MT), Sherrod Brown (OH), Bob Casey (PA), Colin Allred (TX), Lisa Blunt Rochester (DE) and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (FL); and North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein.
A Will of the People PAC email soliciting money for Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Tester (MT). I have redacted the recipient’s email address.
The emails did not raise a lot of money. From its creation on 12/4/23 through 11/25/24, the Will of the People PAC has raised just $52,627. $10,000 of that amount came from Jawando’s U.S. Senate committee. Most of the expenditures have gone to digital fundraising costs, software and compliance, leaving just $14,337 cash on hand. So on this measure, the work of the PAC does not stand out.
Jawando being Jawando, we all know that he has run for higher office in the past (U.S. House in 2016 and U.S. Senate last year). My sources view him as a potential top-tier candidate for county executive should he decide to get into that race. Would emails like these help him win such a contest?
I could make a case for it or against it.
On the plus side, MoCo Democratic primary voters care a lot about national politics – probably more than local politics. They are deeply invested in Democratic control of Congress. Jawando can say that he is right there with them and did all he could to help the cause of a Blue Capitol. Set aside the miniscule amount of money raised by the PAC – it’s more than any of his potential rivals did. Also, putting emails into thousands of MoCo inboxes is a great way to maintain name recognition.
Now here is the negative side. The number one criticism I hear of Jawando is that he is allegedly more interested in national office than local affairs. Take a look at past Montgomery County executives and you won’t find a lot of them running for Congress. One exception is Sidney Kramer, who ran for a U.S. House seat in 1974 and lost a dozen years before he became county executive.
This quote from a source about Jawando is pretty typical:
He has never been very interested in the work of the County Council, and the County Executive seat is more of the same, but if it looks like a step toward achieving his goal of being the second coming of Barack Obama he will take it.
Whatever you think of county executives like Doug Duncan, Ike Leggett and Marc Elrich, they all had local agendas that were connected to the actual issues facing the community and were not creations of national left-wing politics. To the extent that Jawando continues to broadcast his federal ambitions, he is open to criticism that any run for executive is just a rung on the ladder to Congress and/or the White House.