Montgomery County’s Most Influential People, Part One

This may be the riskiest, most secretive and most sensitive series we have ever run on Maryland Politics Watch. It will no doubt be one of our most hotly-debated works too. Because today, we begin unveiling the results of an exhaustive two-week project designed to determine and rank, at least for the moment, the most influential people in Montgomery County.

Other publications have released most-influential lists before, notably PolitickerMD and the Gazette. Like many of you that have seen these lists, I agreed with some choices and disagreed with others. But my primary reservation about them is that they did not make clear their methodology. For all anyone could know, these lists were generated by a handful of editors sitting around a desk. And so I thought: how could this be done better?

If any one person generated a list of powerful figures in a local area, that list would be skewed. Every one of us has a station in life. There are some issues we deal with and some we do not. There are some groups of people we talk to regularly and others we hardly know. There are some pieces of our world we perceive (relatively) clearly and others we have never seen. The opinion of any one person or even a small group of people is therefore inherently limited and not up to this task.

And so I began to reach out to some of the smartest and most connected people in the county. Who did they think was influential? I started out by contacting several dozen of my best sources. That mushroomed into additional input from their friends and even others beyond them. These people are part of the small network of politicians, staffers, activists and lobbyists that really run Montgomery County. Slowly, secretly – sometimes painfully – they began to tell me the real truth as they saw it. They named who really had the stick and who did not.

And soon, soon enough, dear readers – you too will know what they said.