Team for Montgomery, 1986

In 1986, seven County Council candidates ran as a slate called Team for Montgomery: incumbents Neal Potter, Rose Crenca, Mike Gudis and Bill Hanna and challengers Bruce Adams, Mike Subin and Ike Leggett. All seven won. The slate members served a combined 108 years on the council and 8 years (and counting) in the Executive's office, making this perhaps MoCo's most successful political team ever. Here's their joint lit piece.

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Council At-Large Geography, Part Four

The bottom line in any election is who wins and who loses. We’re not ready to make that call for 2010, but we know in excruciating detail how the 2006 contest played out. And now we reveal all!

Here are 2006 at-large Democratic primary results for the top five candidates for all voters casting ballots at precincts by Congressional District, State Legislative District, Council District and locality. Our statistics are limited by the fact that precinct-level data excludes absentee and provisional voters. But we are using the precinct data to zero in on the geographic areas where each candidate ran strong and weak. That information is indispensable for evaluating possible results in 2010.


We understand that there is a tremendous amount of data in the chart above – too much to be digested in any one sitting. And we will break it down further in individual analyses of the four incumbents later in the series. But for the moment, we offer a few notes.

1. George Leventhal was not only the top vote-getter, he was also the most reliable performer. Leventhal finished first in five of eight State Legislative Districts and four of five Council Districts.

2. Marc Elrich and Duchy Trachtenberg were nearly tied, with Elrich barely capturing the second spot. But as we shall see, their votes came from very different places.

3. Nancy Floreen and Mike Subin were the two incumbents left off the Apple Ballot. Even though Subin had served five terms while Floreen was a freshman, Floreen had more money and worked much harder to win reelection.

4. Sixty-five percent of the at-large votes came from four areas: Silver Spring (31.2%), Bethesda (12.8%), Rockville (11.7%) and Gaithersburg (8.9%). Any candidate who runs weak in any of those areas risks a loss.

5. The Apple Ballot included Leventhal, Elrich and Trachtenberg in 2006. The latter two were challengers but these three candidates finished at the top in that order. In 2010, the Apple Ballot includes two incumbents – Leventhal and Elrich – and two challengers – Hans Riemer and Becky Wagner. Two incumbents – Floreen and Trachtenberg – have been excluded. Despite the Post’s best efforts to destroy MCEA, that change will impact this year’s at-large race.

We’ll look at the individual candidates in greater detail next week.

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Gutierrez Fights Immigration Warrants

The Washington Post reports:

Things got a bit heated when the issue of enforcing immigration warrants came up last week during Montgomery County Police Chief J. Thomas Manger's monthly meeting with members of the Latino community.

State Del. Ana Sol Gutierrez (D-Montgomery) was challenging Manger's decision to ask officers to pick up immigration violators and turn them over to the federal government. The civil warrants in recent years have been added to the FBI-run National Crime Information Center database and pop up when a county officer runs a computer check during routine stops.

Manger said he wished the warrants weren't in the database but couldn't ask his officers to ignore them. Manger has been criticized by some in the county who have called him a member of the Minuteman Project, an anti-illegal-immigration group.

The discussion prompted former County Council member Michael L. Subin, who heads the county's Criminal Justice Coordinating Commission, to stand up and defend Manger.

"Anyone who questions the honor of Chief Manger is questioning my honor," Subin said. "If you compare him to the Minutemen, you are calling him a racist and a fascist."

Gutierrez -- who identified herself when the meeting began only as a "citizen and taxpayer," not as a delegate -- reiterated that she felt the civil warrants didn't belong in the database, which was created as a repository for criminal records.

"I give up," Subin said, as he stormed out of the room. "I don't want to waste my breath."

Later that day, Gutierrez and other Latino leaders met with County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) but failed to persuade him to ask Manger to disregard the warrants.

Immigration isn't controversial just at the national level, though I fear that the federal government's failure to address the issue in a serious way will only exacerbate the problem. I'm just glad that the Constitution prevents this from becoming a multi-generational problem like in so many other countries without birthright citizenship. Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment reads:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

While the share of Latinos in the U.S. who are not American citizens is somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, the share of Latinos under the age of 18 who are citizens (and future voters) is over 80 percent. Politicians and parties should take note.

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