By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
For the first time in eight years, Montgomery County voters will pick a new chief executive this November. Marc Elrich, the county’s Democratic Socialists of America-aligned executive since 2018, is term-limited and running instead for an at-large council seat. That opened the county’s top job to its first real contest since 2018 — and set up a November matchup that looks lopsided on paper but has more moving parts than the county’s registration numbers suggest.
On the ballot in November: Democrat Will Jawando, an at-large county councilmember who chairs the council’s Education and Culture Committee, against Republican Esther Wells, a Montgomery Village certified public accountant and president of the Montgomery County Taxpayers League. Both are first-time county executive nominees. Only one of them has ever held elected office.
How the primary field narrowed
Eight candidates originally filed for county executive — six Democrats and two Republicans. One Democrat, Celeste Iroha, withdrew before voting began, leaving seven names on the June 23 primary ballot. By primary day, the real contest had come down to three sitting council members chasing the same job: Jawando, District 1’s Andrew Friedson, and at-large member Evan Glass. Two lesser-known Democrats, Mithun Banerjee and Peter James, rounded out the Democratic side.
None of the three frontrunners cleared 50 percent. Jawando finished first with roughly 52,700 votes — about 40.5 percent — followed by Friedson at just under 34 percent and Glass at nearly 22 percent. Friedson, who had skipped the county’s public financing program in favor of traditional fundraising and outraised the field, conceded once enough mail ballots had been counted to make the outcome clear. Jawando’s margin over Friedson ended up close to 6,000 votes — comfortable by the standard of recent Montgomery primaries, though nowhere near a majority mandate. He was formally certified as the Democratic nominee weeks later.
The Republican side was simpler. Wells, making her first run for office, beat 82-year-old Friendship Heights attorney Shelly Skolnick by a better than 3-to-2 margin, taking roughly 60 percent of a primary that drew fewer than 8,500 total votes.
Sitting outside both primaries entirely were the county’s nearly 189,000 unaffiliated voters.
Turnout tells its own story. Jawando’s winning total amounted to about 7.7 percent of the county’s registered voters — a reflection of Maryland’s closed primary system as much as anything else. Montgomery had roughly 404,000 registered Democrats eligible to vote in June, plus another 100,000 registered Republicans. Sitting outside both primaries entirely were the county’s nearly 189,000 unaffiliated voters — more than a quarter of the roughly 693,000 registered voters countywide — who won’t get a say in either party’s nominee until November, when everyone’s ballot finally counts the same.
Will Jawando: the council record he’s running on
Jawando, 43, grew up in the county in affordable housing, the son of a Nigerian immigrant father and a mother who ran a small business. He worked as a civil rights attorney and in the Obama White House’s public engagement office before winning an at-large council seat in 2018 — part of a wave election that also sent Elrich to the executive’s office. He was reelected in 2022 and currently chairs the council’s Education and Culture Committee.
County executive is not Jawando’s first attempt at higher office, and it isn’t his third. He lost the 2014 Democratic primary for a Maryland House of Delegates seat in District 20, finishing fourth with about 15 percent of the vote. Two years later, he ran for the open 8th Congressional District seat and finished fifth in a nine-candidate Democratic primary won by Jamie Raskin. His only two wins in that stretch have come at the county council level, in 2018 and 2022, bookending a 2023-24 run for U.S. Senate that ended before Angela Alsobrooks won the Democratic nomination. County executive is his fourth bid for office beyond the council in twelve years.
His campaign, built around what he calls the “Montgomery Promise,” leans into the same affordability-and-equity message that propelled Elrich, and it earned him Elrich’s endorsement along with backing from the Montgomery County Education Association and two SEIU locals. Unlike Friedson, Jawando ran through the county’s Public Election Fund, raising more than $400,000 from small donors. His campaign has also drawn scrutiny on that front: MDBayNews reported in April that Jawando’s Senate campaign committee — left over from his unsuccessful 2023–24 bid for the U.S. Senate seat Angela Alsobrooks eventually won — gave $115,000 to the Working Families Party’s PAC roughly five months before that group’s endorsement of his county executive bid — money that moved through a federal committee outside the constraints of the county’s small-donor program he frequently cites on the trail.
Because Jawando has spent nearly eight years on the council, he arrives at the general election with something Wells doesn’t have: an actual voting record for opponents and voters alike to examine, line by line.
Because Jawando has spent nearly eight years on the council, he arrives at the general election with something Wells doesn’t have: an actual voting record for opponents and voters alike to examine, line by line.
The clearest example is this spring’s fight over the county budget. In an April framework, Jawando publicly pledged no property tax rate increase and vowed to preserve the county’s Income Tax Offset Credit — a flat $692 credit that lowers the tax bill for roughly 192,000 owner-occupied homes. In an early May straw vote, he stuck to that position, joining Friedson, Kristin Mink, Glass and Laurie-Anne Sayles in voting down a package that paired a new progressive income tax structure with elimination of the credit. But when the full fiscal 2027 operating budget came up for a final straw vote on May 15, Jawando voted yes on a 9-2 margin — and that budget did what his April framework said it wouldn’t: it zeroed out the ITOC for the coming year, adding $692 to affected homeowners’ tax bills even though the headline property tax rate didn’t move. Only Friedson and Dawn Luedtke voted no. Elrich himself, in his final year in office, publicly called the ITOC repeal “a tax increase no matter what the county said.”
It zeroed out the ITOC for the coming year, adding $692 to affected homeowners’ tax bills even though the headline property tax rate didn’t move.
Jawando has also broken with the county’s pro-density housing coalition on at least one high-profile vote. In December 2025, he was the lone “no” vote on the council’s Planning, Housing and Parks Committee against advancing the University Boulevard Corridor Plan — a rezoning package covering more than 170 properties along a 3.5-mile Silver Spring-area corridor that supporters, including several planning and housing advocacy groups, said was needed to expand the area’s housing stock. When the full council passed the plan 7-3 the following week, Jawando voted no again, alongside Mink and Sidney Katz, citing concerns that rezoning could eventually displace renters and homeowners in lower-income, majority-minority neighborhoods. Elrich, an outspoken opponent of the plan who has called it “an effort to give stuff away to developers,” publicly thanked the three no votes before endorsing Jawando as his successor.
Taken together, the tax and housing votes are the closest thing Montgomery County has to an early read on how a Jawando administration would govern: skeptical of the county’s recent push toward market-driven density, willing to let a marquee tax-relief promise lapse under budget pressure, and closely aligned — on the two issues that have generated the most council friction this term — with the outgoing executive who endorsed him.
How Far Left Is Will Jawando?
Jawando sits firmly on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. His 2026 platform calls for expanded guaranteed income, Baby Bonds, stronger renter protections, expanded legal defense for immigrants facing deportation, union-focused economic policy and a public-safety approach centered on accountability and community-based solutions. On housing, immigration and redistribution, his agenda overlaps significantly with priorities championed by the organized socialist left.
But that does not make Jawando a Democratic Socialist. Metro DC DSA specifically described him as a “non-endorsed” candidate after the 2026 primary, even while praising his work on rent stabilization, tenant protections and ICE-related legislation. The more accurate description is progressive Democrat with substantial policy overlap with the democratic-socialist left.
For voters, the distinction may matter less than the direction of his agenda. A Jawando administration would likely push Montgomery County further toward renter protections, redistribution-oriented programs and progressive approaches to policing, immigration and development — leaving voters to decide whether that is the county’s next step or a step too far left.
Esther Wells: the case for an upset
Wells is not a career politician, and her campaign has leaned into that as a selling point. As a CPA and president of the Montgomery County Taxpayers League, she has built her candidacy almost entirely around the county’s cost of living — testifying against the council’s “bring your own bag” fee, campaigning on restoring the $692 ITOC credit Jawando let lapse, and pitching herself as the only candidate explicitly promising lower taxes for seniors and residents on fixed incomes. On public safety, she has called for restoring School Resource Officers to Montgomery County Public Schools and for strengthening the county’s response to repeat juvenile offenders — a position she put in writing well before the Aug. 4 Germantown crash put the issue back in the headlines. That crash killed 58-year-old NIST engineer William Vance Payne II after a stolen car driven by a 13-year-old, with six other children as young as 12 aboard, ran an intersection in Germantown.
Wells is to the right of Montgomery County’s political center, but not obviously far right by national Republican standards. In Montgomery County, proposals to cut government spending, restore tax credits and return police to schools can read as sharply conservative because the county’s political baseline is so heavily Democratic. Nationally, however, those positions fit comfortably within mainstream Republican politics.
The obstacle for Wells
The obstacle for Wells is structural, not rhetorical.
The obstacle for Wells is structural, not rhetorical. Only one Republican has ever won the Montgomery County executive’s office in the 56 years since the position was created — James Gleason, the county’s first executive, who left in 1978. No GOP nominee has come close since. Wells’s own primary win drew barely 5,100 votes.
Her path, to the extent one exists, runs through the roughly 189,000 voters who don’t belong to either party plus whatever share of the county’s Democrats are genuinely frustrated with this year’s tax fight, the schools budget, and rising utility bills — a case her supporters have been making aggressively on Nextdoor and social media, including public pitches from self-described Democrats crossing over for Wells specifically because they view Jawando as too far left. Whether that crossover coalition is large enough to overcome a roughly 4-to-1 registration disadvantage is the central question of the general election. Montgomery County hasn’t tested that math in a genuinely competitive executive race in decades, which makes the size of the coalition — not just its existence — the thing worth watching between now and November.
What an actual upset would require
It’s worth being precise about how big that crossover would have to be, because the primary’s low turnout is easy to misread as a sign the county is more persuadable than it actually is. Jawando’s winning total of 52,738 votes amounts to only about 5 percent of Montgomery’s roughly 1.05 million residents — a number MDBayNews has highlighted before in the context of who actually elected this year’s Democratic nominee. But primary turnout and general-election turnout are different animals. Most of the roughly 554,000 registered voters who sat out the June primary weren’t necessarily rejecting Jawando; plenty of them simply don’t vote in low-salience primaries for an office that, this year, drew far less attention than the county’s crowded council races.
The county’s last genuinely comparable general election — 2006, also a non-presidential year with a governor’s race on the same ballot — drew roughly 300,000 votes for county executive. Scaled to Montgomery’s larger current voter rolls, a November 2026 turnout somewhere in the 350,000-to-420,000 range is a reasonable expectation, roughly four times what the primary produced.
Run the numbers on a turnout of that size, split along the county’s registration shares — 58 percent Democratic, 27 percent unaffiliated, 15 percent Republican — and a straight party-line vote with unaffiliated voters splitting evenly puts Wells in the high-20s percentage-wise. That’s not competitive. To get into range of an actual upset, on a turnout base of roughly 350,000, Wells would need something close to unanimous Republican turnout, somewhere around 60 percent of unaffiliated voters, and roughly a third of Democratic turnout — on the order of 60,000 to 70,000 Democratic votes — to cross over. No Montgomery County Republican has come close to a defection of that size in the 48 years since the office was last held by a member of Wells’s party.
None of that makes an upset impossible. The ITOC repeal, the bag-tax fight, and now the Germantown crash all give Wells real material with a real slice of the electorate. But it does mean her campaign needs a multi-precinct Democratic defection, not a fringe protest vote, to have any realistic shot — and as of this writing, no independent general-election poll has been released to say whether that defection is materializing.
Her campaign needs a multi-precinct Democratic defection, not a fringe protest vote, to have any realistic shot.
What’s still unresolved
The broader question hanging over the race isn’t really about Jawando or Wells individually.
Both campaigns have unfinished business heading into the fall. Jawando’s campaign still hasn’t responded to questions about the Aug. 4 Germantown crash and where he stands on the county’s handling of repeat juvenile offenders — a contrast MDBayNews has covered in detail separately. And the broader question hanging over the race isn’t really about Jawando or Wells individually: it’s whether a county where the Democratic primary alone drew more than fifteen times as many votes as the Republican primary, and where the roughly 189,000 unaffiliated voters were shut out of the primary entirely, produces a genuinely different outcome when the full electorate finally gets to weigh in on Nov. 3.
Sources: Primary and certification results, candidate filings, and voter registration figures are drawn from the Maryland State Board of Elections and reporting by NBC4 Washington, WTOP, WJLA/7News, and Maryland Matters. Jawando’s 2014 and 2016 primary results are drawn from Ballotpedia and Wikipedia; his 2023-24 U.S. Senate run is drawn from Maryland Matters and NPR reporting on the race to succeed Sen. Ben Cardin. Council voting records on the FY27 budget and Income Tax Offset Credit are drawn from Bethesda Magazine’s May 2026 reporting and Montgomery Community Media. The University Boulevard Corridor Plan vote is drawn from The Baltimore Banner, Bethesda Magazine, Montgomery Community Media, and Montgomery County government’s official statement, cross-referenced with Greater Greater Washington and the Coalition for Smarter Growth. Background on Jawando’s campaign finance activity and the Working Families Party PAC donation is drawn from MDBayNews’s April 2026 reporting. Background on Esther Wells’s platform and candidacy is drawn from Bethesda Magazine candidate forum coverage and Wells’s campaign materials. Historical context on Montgomery County executives, including the 2006 general-election turnout figure used in the swing-math scenario, is drawn from Montgomery County government’s official archive, Wikipedia’s entries on James P. Gleason and Charles W. Gilchrist, and Wikipedia’s summary of the 2006 Maryland county executive elections. The November 2026 turnout scenario itself is MDBayNews’s own estimate, built from these historical and registration figures, and should be read as an illustrative model rather than a forecast.
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