By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
A political ad depicting Will Jawando reaching into a cookie jar labeled “Taxpayers’ Pockets” ran in the Bethesda Today newsletter last week. Within days, Jawando had called it a racist minstrel caricature. Evan Glass had called it appalling — and then kept going, expanding his condemnation to a full catalog of discrimination: racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, sexism, xenophobia. The story had traveled far enough to reach national identity politics terrain — GOP-linked organizations, dehumanization, the legacy of Jim Crow.
There is just one problem with the framing. The man who made the ad is Black.
Reardon Sullivan — first vice chair of the Montgomery County Republican Party, candidate for the District 1 County Council seat, and the architect of the term limits petition that ended Marc Elrich’s political career — created the AI-generated ad through his affiliated Committee to Control MoCo Spending and placed it in the Bethesda Today newsletter. Sullivan, who is Black, dismissed the racism accusation directly. He called the ad humor. He noted that he uses the same cartoon style to depict white officials, including Elrich. He said he plans to run a revised version.
Bethesda Today subsequently pulled the ad after reviewing it against their editorial policies. That is an editorial judgment. It is not a finding of racism.
That distinction has been largely absent from the coverage. It shouldn’t be.
A Metaphor With a Paper Trail
The cookie jar is not a racial image in Sullivan’s political vocabulary. It is a fiscal one — and it has been for years.
Sullivan has built his entire public profile around a single argument: Montgomery County’s political class taxes residents, diverts the money, and calls it governance. His Stop the Spend ballot initiative sought to cap annual county spending increases to the prior year’s Consumer Price Index. His campaign for county council is grounded in the same premise. The Committee to Control MoCo Spending — the same committee that ran the Jawando ad — has published the cookie jar metaphor explicitly: “When the children keep sneaking cookies from the cookie jar, what do you do? You move the cookie jar.”
That framing targeted the council broadly — Elrich, Jawando, and the council majority together — as documented in the committee’s own paid advertising. The same ads cite Andrew Friedson’s finding that county spending increased 44 percent over eight years. The imagery is consistent across targets regardless of race.
The Montgomery County Republican Party has separately run ads targeting Jawando on public safety, opposing his efforts to remove School Resource Officers from schools, and characterizing his record as a threat to community safety. Sullivan’s own campaign has run straightforward policy advertising about the FY27 budget hearing, documenting constituent concern about proposed tax increases, including a 6 percent property tax hike.
This is the context in which the cookie jar ad appeared. It is a sustained, documented, multi-front fiscal accountability campaign — not a racial targeting operation.
The Financial Record Sullivan Was Pointing At
Whether the image was artful or clumsy is a matter of taste. Whether the underlying argument has merit is a matter of record.
Jawando’s campaign for county executive has been built on a specific promise: that he is the candidate of small donors, grassroots organizing, and public financing. He was among the first candidates certified for Montgomery County’s Public Election Fund. His message is explicitly anti-money-in-politics.
Federal campaign finance records tell a more complicated story — one that MDBayNews has previously reported and that no other Maryland outlet has followed.
Jawando’s dormant U.S. Senate campaign committee, which raised $1.3 million during his 2023 Senate bid before he withdrew, made $115,000 in transfers to the Working Families Party PAC in the spring of 2025 — $15,000 in March and $100,000 in April. The transfers were among the final disbursements before the committee formally terminated, closing with a cash balance of $24.20.
Five months later, in September 2025, the Working Families Party endorsed Jawando for county executive, committing field staff, digital infrastructure, and organizational support to his campaign.
Jawando has not publicly explained the relationship between the transfers and the endorsement. He has not been asked to by any other outlet in Maryland.
Sullivan also pointed to the county budget record the ad was referencing: Elrich and Jawando have repeatedly proposed budgets that rely on one-time funds to cover ongoing expenses — a structural problem Friedson himself called “unprecedented” at the April budget hearing.
Sullivan’s cookie jar metaphor was crude. The conduct it was gesturing at is documented.
Glass’s Calculation
Evan Glass did not need to insert himself into this story. He chose to — and then kept going. Though they haven’t been widely viewed.
In a thread posted today, Glass called the ad “appalling” and characterized it as designed to “divide, inflame and dehumanize.” He invoked his own experience being targeted by antisemitic and homophobic attacks as personal credibility for the claim. He described Jawando as “my opponent” — a telling slip that frames this as campaign positioning, not civic conscience.
Then he continued. In subsequent tweets, Glass expanded his indictment: “We cannot normalize hatred in our political discourse. We cannot look the other way when racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, sexism, xenophobia, or any form of discrimination is used as a political weapon.” He condemned the attacks “in the strongest possible terms.”
There is something Glass did not mention in any of those tweets. Sullivan had already made cartoons targeting Glass directly — one depicting him seated at a desk beneath a Pride flag, with a speech bubble reading “Evan, we get it. You’re gay. Now what?” and another rendering him as a bug-eyed caricature in the same hand-drawn style as the Jawando cookie jar image. Both mock Glass. Neither prompted a public statement about bigotry, dehumanization, or the weaponization of discrimination.
Glass found his outrage only when the target was his primary opponent and the political benefit was available. That is not principle. That is arithmetic.
That is worth sitting with. Glass — who had already been depicted in Sullivan’s cartoons and said nothing — issued a sweeping condemnation of discrimination-as-political-weapon while deploying an unsupported discrimination charge as a political weapon. He even cited his own experience with homophobic attacks as moral authority for the claim, while staying silent about a cartoon that reduced him to exactly one thing: his sexual orientation.
He framed the source as “GOP-linked organizations” — plural. The cookie jar ad was paid for by a spending accountability committee run by a local council candidate in a different race. The Montgomery County Republican Party has separately run ads on Jawando’s public safety record and the county tax burden — standard opposition research, not dehumanization. Collapsing all of it into “organizations” running coordinated discriminatory “campaign ads” is not an accurate description of what happened. It is a framing choice made by a candidate who benefits from it.
Bethesda Today pulled the ad. No one is calling Bethesda Today racist for having run it. That’s because no one actually believes the racism charge survives scrutiny. What survives scrutiny is its political utility.
What the Framing Does
Montgomery County’s Democratic primary is three candidates deep in a race where every point matters. Jawando and Glass are statistically tied. Jawando carries higher unfavorable ratings. Glass has the momentum and the endorsement trajectory.
An ad that raises Jawando’s documented financial conduct — his dual committee structure, his $115,000 PAC transfer to the organization that subsequently endorsed him — is a threat to his campaign’s central rationale. The most efficient way to neutralize that threat is to make the ad about race rather than about money. That is what happened this week.
Sullivan expressed frustration, according to the Baltimore Banner’s reporting, that he receives most of his criticism from white liberals and that Jawando gets largely unchallenged media attention as an incumbent. That frustration is not hard to understand. A Black Republican made a documented fiscal argument against a Black Democrat, supported by years of consistent public rhetoric and a paper trail of campaign finance records. A gay Democratic candidate declared it an act of bigotry in the strongest possible terms.
The ad may have been clumsy. The underlying question it raised was not. And the question still hasn’t been answered.
MDBayNews previously reported on Will Jawando‘s campaign finance structure, including the $115,000 transfer from his dormant Senate committee to the Working Families Party PAC and the subsequent WFP endorsement. That reporting is available at mdbaynews.com.
Sources: Evan Glass tweets, @EvanMGlass, May 8, 2026. Ginny Bixby, “Jawando decries candidate’s ‘racist’ ad,” The Baltimore Banner, May 4, 2026. Adam Pagnucco, “Republicans Attack Jawando,” Montgomery Perspective, May 7, 2026. Committee to Control MoCo Spending paid Facebook advertisements, May 2026, archived at ControlMoCoSpending.com. Montgomery County Republican Party paid Facebook advertisements, May 2026. Reardon Sullivan for MoCo paid advertisements, May 2026, including display advertising at The Baltimore Banner. Sullivan campaign cartoons depicting Evan Glass, circulated May 2026. Federal Election Commission disbursement records, Jawando for Maryland committee, March–April 2025. Michael Phillips, “Will Jawando’s Campaign Finance Structure,” MDBayNews, 2025, available at mdbaynews.com. Reardon Sullivan, “Is Will Jawando Really Coming Out Against Tax Increases?”, Montgomery County Republican Party website, 2026.
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