By Adam Pagnucco.
Part One listed Will Jawando’s assets and liabilities. Part Two looked at Andrew Friedson. Part Three examined Evan Glass. Part Four recited a timeline of key events in the election cycle. Parts Five and Six broke down Jawando’s performance. Parts Seven and Eight looked at Friedson’s performance.
Let’s start profiling the performance of Council Member Evan Glass. The chart below shows his percentage of the primary vote by state legislative and county council district. Glass finished third in every district except for State Legislative District 20, where Jawando finished first, Glass finished second and Friedson finished third. Glass was endorsed by District 20 Senator Will Smith, which may have helped him.
Now let’s look at Glass’s performance by region and local area. See my methodology post for definitions.
Glass finished first in tiny Washington Grove but lost everywhere else. Aside from District 20’s Downtown Silver Spring and Takoma Park, where he finished second (and Friedson third), he finished third in the rest of the county.
Let’s examine Glass’s results in the 25 precincts with the highest population percentage of Asian, Black, Latino and White residents. My methodology post contains information on where these precincts are located.
Glass finished second in heavily Black precincts and third in the other three groups. As I wrote in Part Seven, Friedson finished third in heavily Black precincts and they proved to be an impediment to his campaign.
When analyzing the results for Jawando and Friedson, I included correlation coefficients showing patterns in their performance. I am not doing that for Glass. None of the variables I tested – race, income, Blair/Elrich 2022 performance and even the results for Jawando and Friedson – generated significant correlations. The top predictors of Glass’s performance were Asian population percentage (-0.33) and Blair 2022 performance (-0.32), but most academics would regard those correlations as statistically weak.
The story here is that Glass significantly trailed his rivals almost everywhere and in every kind of precinct aside from Washington Grove, Downtown Silver Spring and Takoma Park. This was not an encouraging performance from the man who finished a strong first in the council at-large race in 2022. I’m not disparaging Glass’s skills as a candidate or his merits as an elected official. A politician usually does not go from great to poor overnight barring a major disaster, and Glass did not have one. But perhaps this was not the year for the county’s interest groups and its Democratic voters to go for a careful and nuanced candidate like Evan Glass.
Next: We will look at the role of council at-large voting in predicting the results of county executive races.