By Adam Pagnucco.
Council Member Evan Glass, who is running for executive, has released an internal poll claiming that he leads the Democratic primary race for county executive. The poll, by Impact Research, shows Glass at 21%, Council Member Will Jawando at 20%, Council Member Andrew Friedson at 16% and Mithun Banerjee at 1% with 43% of voters undecided. The poll sampled 400 likely Democratic primary voters and had a margin of error of +/-4.9%.
First I reprint the polling memo. Then I will give my take on it.
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March 23, 2026
To: Interested Parties
Fr: Impact Research
Re: Evan Glass is Best Positioned in the Montgomery County Executive Primary
Recent polling shows Evan Glass up one point in what is currently a two-way race between him and Will Jawando in the Democratic primary for Montgomery County Executive. Glass heads into the final stretch of the campaign with the highest net favorability of any candidate while Jawando has higher unfavorable ratings and Andrew Friedson’s lack of name recognition will be difficult to overcome.
Evan Glass currently leads Will Jawando by a point in the Montgomery County Executive Democratic Primary. With 92 days until voting starts, Glass is at 21% and Jawando at 20%. Andrew Friedson is in third, at 16%, while Mithun Banerjee is at 1%, and 43% percent of voters are undecided. Critically, among voters who know both Glass and Jawando, Glass extends his lead to three (28% Glass / 25% Jawando).
Despite two terms on the County Council, most voters don’t know Andrew Friedson. Two-thirds of voters (65%) do not know Friedson, and even among those who do know him, he trails Glass in net favorability by double digits across almost every major demographic and geographic subgroup in the county.
After having received more the 88,000 votes in the 2022 Democratic primary, the most votes in County Council history, Glass is well known and holds a favorability advantage over Jawando. Jawando is slightly better known (62%) than Glass (54%) but this is mostly due to Jawando’s higher unfavorable rating (19%). As a result, Glass (+28) maintains a 5-point net favorability advantage over Jawando (+23). That lead grows significantly among voters who know both candidates, with whom Glass holds a +46 net favorability rating versus just +26 for Jawando – a 20-point gap among the most informed segment of the electorate.
The findings in this memo are based on a poll of N=400 interviews of likely 2026 Democratic primary voters in Montgomery County, Maryland. Interviews were conducted via phone and text-to-web from February 9th through 12th, 2026. The margin of error for a sample of this size is +/- 4.9 percentage points at the 95% level of confidence and is higher for subgroups.
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My Take
Let’s stipulate for the sake of discussion that this poll was professionally conducted and used a representative sample of MoCo Democratic primary voters. Even assuming that, its results do not conform to the opinions expressed in the polling memo.
First, the poll’s margin of error is +/-4.9%. With Glass at 21%, Jawando at 20% and Friedson at 16%, that means all three candidates are statistically tied. Only Banerjee is behind. This is not a two-way race between Glass and Jawando, it’s a three-way race that includes Friedson.
Second, with 43% of voters undecided, any of these three candidates could surge past the rest of the field.
Third, I wrote a detailed analysis of David Blair’s polling in the 2022 executive race showing that horse race numbers from early polls are unreliable. Blair was down by 30 points against incumbent County Executive Marc Elrich in his first two polls but ultimately came within 32 votes of winning by election day. Part of the reason for his late surge was his huge campaign spending advantage over Elrich. Friedson has that advantage in this year’s executive race, although it’s not nearly as large as Blair’s.
Here’s why I’m generally reluctant to credit early polls very much, at least on horse race numbers: the real campaign has not started yet. It won’t start until the candidates start pumping out mailers, TV ads and big social media buys; Apple Ballots start getting passed out; outside groups start spending money; and press attention ramps up. Aside from slowly increasing reporting by the media, none of that has happened yet. I would like to see what the polls look like in two months as election day gets closer.
If I could see any one result from a poll right now, here it is: what do Democratic primary voters think of Elrich’s package of tax increases? Friedson is yelling his opposition at the heavens while Glass is skeptical and Jawando is, so far, silent. All three council members must vote on this in a matter of weeks. Voter attitudes on taxes will determine who, if anyone, can get the advantage on that issue in the final three months.
One more thing. Glass had a great campaign performance in 2022, one of the very best ever by a council at-large candidate. He is right to point that out. But council at-large votes don’t automatically translate to executive votes because voters can cast up to four votes for council at-large candidates. An at-large candidate can be a voter’s fourth choice and still get a vote. But an executive candidate must be a voter’s number one choice to get a vote. These kinds of races are fundamentally different.
Back in 2022, I constructed the table below showing the drop-off in votes for council at-large winners who ran for executive in the next cycle. Those drop-offs ranged from 35% (for Marc Elrich in 2018) to 71% (for George Leventhal in 2018).
Glass got a ton of votes in 2022, but the real question is how many of them he will keep this year. The same is true for Jawando (who also had a great performance in 2022). The question for Friedson is whether his money advantage will help him attract enough votes outside of his district to triumph over two proven countywide politicians like Glass and Jawando.
So the real message of this poll is that – with no mass communication with voters so far – the executive race is a three-way campaign right now. Let’s see what happens between today and June 23.