A guest blog by Adam Pagnucco.

It’s time to dig deeper on geography.  Below are election day results for every state legislative district overlapping with Congressional District 8.

Of the twelve legislative districts sharing precincts with CD8, David Trone won nine of them.  Predictably, he won the five legislative districts in Carroll and Frederick Counties, and he got majorities in three of them.  He also won the precincts in Districts 14, 15, 17 and 19.  Senator Jamie Raskin won the precincts in Districts 16, 18 and 20, but those three accounted for 58% of election day votes.  No other candidates won any legislative districts.

A note about District 20, Raskin’s home base.  He received 52% of its votes, which was a lower percentage than Trone received in three northern legislative districts.  Seventy-four percent of Raskin’s election day votes came from outside District 20, meaning that he succeeded in diversifying his geographic base – primarily to other precincts inside the Beltway.  Raskin received more votes from District 16 than from District 20.

Here are the same results for county districts.

Again, Trone won every county district in Carroll and Frederick.  But he also won the precincts in Montgomery County Council Districts 2, 3 and 4.  Raskin won the precincts in Montgomery County Council Districts 1 and 5, and those two districts accounted for 54% of election day votes.

Here are the results for towns in Carroll and Frederick Counties.

Trone got a clean sweep here with one exception: in one precinct in Knoxville (Frederick County), one vote was cast and it went to Delegate Ana Sol Gutierrez.  In every other case, the rank order was Trone first, Matthews second and Raskin third.

Now here are the results for towns in Montgomery County.  Wheaton is defined as Zip Code 20902.  Glenmont/Norbeck is defined as Zip Code 20906 except for Leisure World, which is separated out.  Silver Spring (East County) is defined as Silver Spring precincts not in Zip Codes 20902 or 20906 and located outside the Beltway.

These results are much more diverse.  Of the fifteen towns in Montgomery, Raskin won eight: Bethesda, Cabin John, Chevy Chase, Kensington, Silver Spring (East County), Silver Spring (Inside the Beltway), Takoma Park and Wheaton.  No other candidate won a town inside the Beltway.  Kathleen Matthews won Leisure World and Derwood, which had just one precinct.  Trone won Damascus, Gaithersburg, Glenmont/Norbeck, Potomac and Rockville.  Delegate Ana Sol Gutierrez finished second in Glenmont/Norbeck, an area with a substantial Latino population.  The local data in Montgomery supports the narrative that Raskin’s victory was supported primarily by Inside the Beltway voters, and he rounded up enough votes from other places to prevent either Trone or Matthews from breaking through.

We will look at precinct demographics in Part Three.

  A guest blog by Adam Pagnucco.

It has been roughly three weeks since Maryland’s primary election on April 26 and most of the results are in.  All jurisdictions have reported returns from early voting, election day, absentee ballots and provisional ballots and unofficial precinct-level data files have been released.  While the City of Baltimore’s results have some problems, they are not relevant to Congressional District 8.  The time for a data crunch has arrived.

First, let’s examine the overall results.

Senator Jamie Raskin was the leader in early votes, election day votes and absentee and provisional ballots, but his leads were of different magnitudes.  Raskin won early votes by 16.1 points, a far larger margin than his wins in absentee and provisional votes (7 points), total votes (6.5 points) and election day votes (3.5 points).  As we proceed to analyze precinct votes on election day, let’s recognize that they underrate Raskin’s strength relative to the total vote count.

Here are total votes and election day votes by county for the top six candidates.

David Trone won an absolute majority of both total votes and election day votes in Carroll and Frederick Counties, but they comprised about a fifth of the electorate.  Raskin won Montgomery County by 13.7% in total votes and 12.3% on election day.  Kathleen Matthews placed second in all three counties.

This partially obscures the story of geography at a macro level.  Consider the following three areas: precincts inside the Beltway, precincts outside the Beltway and still in Montgomery, and Carroll and Frederick together.

Raskin won the Inside the Beltway precincts by 23.7% over Matthews, and since these are just election day votes, that probably understates his margin.  But in the Outside the Beltway Montgomery precincts, Raskin and Trone were basically tied while Trone won the northern counties handily.  Interestingly, more Montgomery County votes came from outside the Beltway than inside, but because Raskin had such huge support from inside precincts, he was able to withstand his opponents’ performance in other areas.

We will have a finer cut on geography in Part Two.

This is a guest blog by Adam Pagnucco.

Last October, we summarized fundraising in Congressional District 8 through the third quarter of 2015.  Today, we present updated numbers incorporating campaign finance reports through April 6, 2016, which are the last reports due before the primary.

First, let’s look at the top-line numbers by category.

Total Wine co-owner David Trone stands out.  His $12.5 million in resources, almost entirely self-funded, accounts for 67% of all money in the race.  Trone has set the all-time nationwide record for self-funding in a U.S. House primary and his financing approaches the range of recent major candidates for Maryland Governor.

Former WJLA anchor and Marriott executive Kathleen Matthews and Senator Jamie Raskin have both done well.  At the beginning of the race, many observers were predicting that it would take $2 million to win, and both Matthews and Raskin are roughly at that mark.  If it were not for Trone, their financial performance would be attracting more comment.  The other candidates combined have accounted for 9% of the election’s funding and face steep challenges to be heard.  (Dan Bolling’s report has not been filed as of this writing, so his numbers are not included here.)

Unlike state and county contributions, federal contributions must be designated for the primary or the general.  The candidates have collected relatively little general election money and their budgets are almost entirely available for the primary.

Burn rate, which is the percentage of money raised that has been spent, is not a terribly meaningful statistic at this point.  Most of the candidates’ money is gone now with the exception of Delegate Ana Sol Gutierrez, who can afford some late mailers if she wishes.  But Trone and Matthews have additional self-financing capacity, and even Raskin can self-fund to a limited extent.  (So far, he has given himself just $2,700.)  Additionally, this statistic is affected by the timing of bill payments.  Candidates who pay late look better on cash-on-hand than those who pay early.  Note: Trone’s raised figure includes the two self-funding contributions he made last week, but his cash on hand applies to April 6.  That makes his data not strictly comparable to the other candidates, but at this point, he and the others are spending as fast as they take money in.

The maximum allowable individual contribution is $2,700 per election, both primary and general.  Matthews leads in this category.  Thirty percent of her fundraising has come from maximum checks and her average individual contribution is the highest in the field.  Raskin has the smallest average individual contribution, but that does not include his lead in unitemized contributions of $200 or less.  There’s no way to tell from the campaign finance reports how many of those small contributions he has received, but they total over $300,000.  Raskin is the race’s small dollar leader.

In terms of geography, large amounts of out-of-state cash have been flowing into CD8.  Excluding self-financing and unitemized contributions, only Raskin has received a majority of his contributions from Maryland while Delegate Kumar Barve is close at 47%.  Nearly half of all money from Marylanders in this race has gone to Raskin.  Matthews, Gutierrez, Will Jawando, Joel Rubin and Dave Anderson have all received less than a third of their contributions from Marylanders other than themselves.  Rubin’s take from California is more than double his receipts from Maryland.  Matthews’ number one location of contributions is the District of Columbia and she leads in receipts from the District, Virginia, New York, California and Massachusetts.

Here’s a breakdown by locality, both inside and outside the district.  Matthews leads in funding from Potomac and is basically tied with Raskin in Chevy Chase, while Raskin leads in Bethesda, Silver Spring, Rockville, Kensington and Takoma Park (the latter by light years).  Matthews dominates in fundraising from large localities outside the district.  She has raised more than three times as much money from New York City as she has from Silver Spring, Takoma Park, Rockville and Kensington combined.

This data makes clear the fundraising strengths of CD8 candidates.  Trone is self-funding A LOT.  Matthews has tapped into a large monetary base combining national level Democrats, PACs and business money.  Raskin has national and PAC money too, but most of his financing is local and much of it is small dollar.  All three have the resources they need to win.  Given the fact that these three account for 91% of the funding in this race, it’s hard for the other candidates to break through.