Wells’ Pitch to Friedson’s Voters, and the Numbers Behind It

By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews | Election Coverage

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Esther Wells wants Andrew Friedson’s voters, and she’s making her case with a scorecard, a livestream, and a stack of numbers pulled straight from the county’s own budget votes.

The Montgomery County executive race is down to two names on the November ballot. A graphic her campaign committee has circulated this month argues that anyone who backed Friedson in the Democratic primary belongs with her, not with Will Jawando. She’s since laid out the substance of that pitch in detail, in a virtual meet-and-greet posted to YouTube, and the numbers behind it mostly hold up.

How the race got here

Friedson ran in June as the fiscally cautious option in a crowded Democratic field, telling Bethesda Magazine he was the only candidate who had consistently voted against tax increases. He lost. Jawando, the council’s at-large member, won the nomination with 52,738 votes, somewhere between 7.5 and 7.7 percent of registered voters depending on whose math you use, a reminder of how few people typically decide these races under Montgomery’s closed primary. Friedson finished second with roughly a third of the vote, ahead of Evan Glass, Mithun Banerjee, and Peter James. Wells beat Shelly Skolnick for the Republican nomination, roughly 60-40.

That leaves Wells and Jawando as the only two names Montgomery County voters will see in November.

Her case for herself

Wells is a certified public accountant with a master’s in taxation, and she leans on that credential hard. Her argument is that the county’s finances are in worse shape than officials are letting on, and that she’s the only candidate in the race who actually reads the balance sheet before voting on it.

Start with the deficit. Wells says the county is carrying a $293 million structural deficit heading into next year, built from one-time money covering ongoing costs. She didn’t invent that number for a stump speech. It’s the same figure Friedson used in his own official statement explaining his vote against the FY27 budget, and it’s been independently reported by the Baltimore Banner. Her framing that the gap amounts to roughly an 11 percent property tax hike waiting to happen tracks Friedson’s own language almost exactly.

“Wells’ argument isn’t built on invented numbers.”

She points to Montgomery County Public Schools’ widely reported $3 billion maintenance backlog, confirmed this August by MCPS’s own Board of Education and covered independently by half a dozen outlets, as proof the county has let buildings decay while spending elsewhere. And she names names: she says Jawando personally moved $36 million out of the county’s six-year capital plan and into MCPS’s operating budget, and that the move cost the county a matching state grant on top of it. The $36 million part checks out in detail. Bethesda Magazine reported in May that Jawando proposed exactly that shift, in two $18 million tranches, and that it passed 7-4 with Friedson voting no. The dollar figure on the lost state match is harder to pin down. Maryland does run a real cost-share program for school construction, so the mechanism she describes is real, but we couldn’t find a document tying a specific number to this particular cut.

“The $36 million part checks out in detail.”

Then there’s the fee list. The elimination of the $692 Income Tax Offset Credit, used by more than 201,000 households according to County Executive Marc Elrich’s own newsletter. A 911 fee that rose from $1.47 to $1.93 a month, a 31 percent jump, which is exactly the figure she cites. A bag tax that doubled from 5 cents to 10 cents, with half the money now funding the county’s water quality program, exactly the mechanism she describes. On Vision Zero, she puts total spending at $439 million over six years and calls the program a failure given how little traffic safety has actually improved. The county’s own FY26 budget shows $134.7 million in combined Vision Zero spending in a single year, which makes her six-year total plausible, though we couldn’t verify the exact figure independently.

Beyond the numbers, her pitch runs on a few consistent threads:

• Restore school resource officers to MCPS high schools, a position she says she’s held since running for school board four years ago as the mother of a child with autism
• Fully staff and fund the police department, which she argues has been demoralized by council rhetoric and defunding proposals
• Roll back the tax and fee increases she attributes to one-party rule at the council level
• Position herself as the choice for Democrats and unaffiliated voters who feel left behind by their own party

That last point is the strategic logic behind courting Friedson’s coalition specifically. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans roughly four to one in the county, and Marc Elrich won reelection with 75 percent of the vote in 2022. There’s no path to a competitive November for a Republican nominee built on Republicans alone. In an interview with WTOP after the primary, Wells said she’s counting on disaffected Democrats and the roughly 200,000 unaffiliated voters shut out of the closed primary, a figure that lines up with MDBayNews’ own reporting, which put the number at more than 170,000.

“There’s no path to a competitive November for a Republican nominee built on Republicans alone.”

The bottom line

“Several of the numbers come almost directly from Friedson’s own explanation of why he voted no.”

Wells’ argument isn’t built on invented numbers. The deficit figure, the capital-to-operating shift, the fee increases, the maintenance backlog, all of it traces back to real votes and real budget documents, several of them lifted almost directly from Friedson’s own explanation of why he voted no on the same budget. That overlap is likely why her campaign sees his voters as reachable rather than a lost cause. Whether Montgomery County reads those facts as mismanagement or as a council doing its best in a hard budget year is the actual choice voters face in November.

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Sources: Maryland Bay News’ own election tracker, “Montgomery County Races” (mdbaynews.com), and its July 16, 2026 report on Jawando’s 52,738-vote primary win and the unaffiliated-voter figure. The Daily Record’s July 28, 2026 turnout analysis. Patch.com and MoCoShow.com election-night coverage (June 24, 2026) for primary vote totals. Bethesda Magazine’s May 28, 2026 candidate Q&A and its May 2026 budget coverage of the council’s straw vote and Jawando’s $36 million motion. WTOP’s June 30, 2026 report on Wells’ general-election strategy. An automated transcript of Wells’ Aug. 25, 2026 virtual campaign meet-and-greet, posted to YouTube. Montgomery County’s official May 21, 2026 FY27 budget announcements for the operating budget, CIP, and ITOC elimination figures. The Baltimore Banner, Fox5 DC, WJLA, NBC4, and WTOP’s August 2026 coverage of the MCPS $3 billion maintenance backlog. Friedson’s official statement on the FY27 budget for the $293 million structural deficit and 11 percent tax-hike framing. Elrich’s official newsletter for ITOC usage figures. Montgomery County Council committee documents (May 2026) for the 911 fee increase. Montgomery County government pages on the Bring Your Own Bag Law. Conduit Street (Maryland Association of Counties) for background on the state’s school-construction cost-share program.