By Adam Pagnucco.
Here is one of the most important questions about this year’s Democratic primary:
How many people will vote?
This question is of crucial importance to everyone running for office in Montgomery County because it determines their win number, which is the number of votes they need to get elected. That win number then drives their budget decisions, including the size of their mail and digital universes as well as – for the executive and congressional candidates – their TV ad placements.
It is one of the hardest questions to answer for a political campaign.
Years ago, a candidate asked me to determine a win number for a county Dem primary. That involved answering three questions: the number of Democrats eligible to vote, the percentage of those Democrats who would actually vote (turnout rate) and the percentage of those Democrats who would vote in their race. Also relevant is the number of candidates in the race.
The first question – the number of eligible voters – is a relatively easy one to answer. The State Board of Elections posts monthly voter registration reports by county and party. As of May 2026, Montgomery County had 407,126 active registered Democrats. That number typically rises right before elections so it could be a bit higher by election day.
The third question – the percentage of actual voters voting in a given race – is also not hard for a one-seat race. You just compare historical turnout to the actual number of votes cast in a geographic unit. For contested MoCo Democratic county executive primaries, the percentage of folks who vote that cast ballots in the executive race has historically been about 95%. Don’t ask me to do the math in council at-large races because they have multiple-candidate voting so it gets a bit more complicated.
The second question – turnout rate – is the hard one. To answer it, you have to study patterns over time. I looked at a bunch of factors – open and/or contested seats for Congress, governor, executive and so on – and found no pattern. There was only one factor that appeared to matter:
The party of the U.S. president.
Check out the chart below, which shows MoCo Democratic primary turnout in mid-term (gubernatorial) years since 1990. Years in which the president was a Republican are in red bars. Years in which the president was a Democrat are in blue bars.
In years with a Republican in the White House, MoCo Dem turnout averaged 41.0%. When a Democrat was in the White House, turnout averaged 32.4%. That’s an 8.6 point gap.
If we throw out the exceptionally low turnout Obama years (2010 and 2014), Democratic turnout averaged 36.7%. That’s a 4.3 point gap – smaller but still big enough to make a difference.
Here’s my theory to explain this: MoCo Democrats are laser-focused on national politics. When the president is a Democrat, they’re content and fewer of them bother to vote. But when the president is a Republican, they’re unhappy. Think about the things that have occurred under recent Republican presidents – the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, the start of the COVID pandemic and all things Trump-related. MoCo Dems may not be able to directly vote against a GOP president in a mid-term, but they want to do something to express their frustration, so they turn out to vote.
So what’s the implication for 2026? If we apply the average turnout rate in a GOP presidential year (41.0%) to current voter registration, the product is more than 165,000 Dem voters. That would be an all-time record for a MoCo mid-term primary and would significantly exceed 2022’s count of 145,762.
But it could be even more. If my theory is true, and unhappy Dems vote more often with Republicans in the Oval Office, can you imagine Dems being more upset with national politics than they are right now? What could that mean for turnout?
It’s hard to know at this moment, but consider this: while mail ballots sent are about even so far this year when compared to 2022, early voting turnout this year through day 7 is 32% higher than 2022 as of this writing. MoCo Dem registration is roughly flat compared to last time. That suggests but doesn’t conclusively prove a higher turnout rate this year. (Update: Counting all 8 days, early voting in 2026 is 22% higher than it was in 2022.)
Besides calculation of win number, there are additional strategic decisions based on the number of voters.
First is the size of the voter communications universe, specifically digital and mail. Digital comms are cheap and can be adjusted easily. Mail is expensive. Candidates need to set a mail budget (don’t burn your money on other stuff so quickly!) and pick their universe. Do you want more mailers to fewer people or fewer mailers to more people? High turnout implies the latter.
Second is targeting. Past data shows that there is a group of 30-40,000 Dems who religiously vote in MoCo mid-term primaries. Campaigns call them “Super Dems.” (One of these days I’ll get a batch of recent data to quantify this.) That means there will be well over 100,000 other Dems who vote in this election.
If I were working for a campaign this time – and I’m not – I would be obsessed with trying to figure out who these 100,000+ Dems are. Where do they live? What’s their demographic breakdown? What do they care about? How can they be identified and therefore targeted? I bet they don’t know as much about county affairs as Super Dems, so any campaign that has the resources to talk to them will get an advantage. In the executive race, that favors Council Member Andrew Friedson, who has a huge cash advantage over his opponents. It also favors the free-spending real estate-financed Affordable Maryland PAC.
Traditionally, MoCo candidates have focused their comms on Super Dems, and rightly so. After all, they know those folks will vote. But if this year’s turnout is as high as past patterns suggest, the candidates who win may be those who connect best with irregular voters. That lesson applies equally to outside endorsing groups.
This is the wildest of wild cards. And the election outcomes could depend on it.