By DAVID LANDERMAN
Capital News Service
Candidates whose elections were largely financed by small donations and county matching funds now hold the majority of Montgomery County council seats and the powerful county executive position – a significant milestone in limiting corporate money in Maryland campaigns.
Montgomery was the first local jurisdiction in Maryland to implement an alternative to private campaign funding eight years ago. The experiment, now in its third election cycle, has made progress in pushing big money out of local politics, according to interviews and a recent report by the non-profit Maryland Public Interest Research Group.
Publicly funded candidates in Montgomery County received 96% of their contributions from small donors giving less than $250 in the last council election in 2022, the report said. Candidates who only relied on private donors, corporations and special interest groups raised 2% from small donors.
The Maryland General Assembly voted in 2013 to allow counties and the city of Baltimore to pay for part of local candidates’ campaigns from their budgets, in lieu of having to raise money only from private donors. Since the program is voluntary, publicly funded candidates, who must agree to many restrictions, may find themselves competing with privately financed opponents, who have fewer restrictions.
The option was implemented out of concern that the current campaign financing system often favors candidates who can attract wealthy donors and corporations, whose interests don’t always align with residents’ priorities. The public financing option is meant to increase the impact of small donors who live in the county and to help unlikely candidates who might have a fundraising disadvantage to be more competitive.
Emily Scarr, a longtime advocate for these programs from Maryland PIRG, said the goal is to ensure “that access to money or independent wealth or name recognition, none of those things are a barrier to someone.”
In the 13 years since it became state law, five of Maryland’s 23 counties and Baltimore have adopted a publicly funded campaign option.
In Montgomery County, the option “has kind of limited a lot of corporate interest in what we’re doing,” said Cecily Thorne, chief of staff for District 4 Councilmember Kate Stewart, who used the public finance option to win her seat in 2022.
Its success cost the county $3.7 million in the last election cycle in 2022, according to a report by the Montgomery County Office of Legislative Oversight.
In Howard County, which first adopted the option for its 2022 election, three of its five council members were elected using it. Candidates using public funding received 97% of their donations from small donors, while those who used the traditional system received 8%, the report noted.
In Baltimore, only one of the 15 city councilmembers, Zac Blanchard, was elected using public financing.
Publicly financed candidates are running for the first time this year in Prince George’s, Anne Arundel and Baltimore counties.
At the state level, the legislature has enacted a voluntary public option only for candidates for governor and lieutenant governor. The law was passed in 1974, in the midst of a Maryland financial scandal that ended with the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew, a former Maryland governor, as well as the Watergate investigation, which forced President Richard Nixon from office.
The General Assembly has never passed legislation to give candidates for the House of Delegates and the state Senate the public financing option. Monied special interests play a large role in many state races today.
“The leadership just didn’t want it,” said Paul Pinsky, a former Democratic state senator representing Prince George’s and a longtime advocate for public financing. “If you’re an incumbent, why give an opportunity to the challengers?”
Instead, all candidates for state Senate and delegate seats use the traditional system that, in Maryland, allows an individual, political action committee, corporation and other groups to donate up to $6,000 per candidate.
How it works
Not just anyone who files the required paperwork can instantly start receiving public money. Candidates first have to declare their intent to use public funds and then obtain a certain amount of money from a certain number of donors to qualify.
For instance, a candidate for county executive in Montgomery County needs to raise $40,000 from at least 500 county residents to qualify.
Candidates also have to agree to other restrictions. They cannot accept donations from individuals over a cap set by the county. In Montgomery County, the cap is $500. They also cannot accept money from political action committees, labor unions or corporations.
Qualifying for the program is no small task. “It’s very stressful,” said Stewart, who is again using public financing for her reelection campaign.
Publicly funded candidates also can’t receive county funds if there isn’t a challenger. In Montgomery County, money can’t be distributed until one year before the primary.
Once qualified, a tiered matching-fund mechanism, set by each county, kicks in. It gives an advantage to candidates who solicit many small donations rather than a few large ones by progressively lowering the matching ratio as a donation amount increases.
In Montgomery County, donors can give up to $500 to a candidate, but the match equation stops at $150. Any money given between $150 and $500 by the individual is not matched. Also, the match equation differs depending on which office the candidate is running for.
Oversight is carried out by the Maryland State Board of Elections.
Hogan elected governor with public funds
Republican Larry Hogan is the only candidate for governor in Maryland to have successfully run using the public option.
The program allowed Hogan to be competitive as a challenger when confidence was low that a Republican could win Maryland, said Steve Crim, who was his campaign manager.
Crim said he believed that if the campaign could “aggressively raise enough small-dollar donors to guarantee to have a certain amount of money in the general election, we can really focus our efforts on talking and listening and advocating for the silent majority in Maryland that was really upset and sick and tired of the politics as usual at Annapolis.”
But immediately after he was elected, in the 2 ½ months before he was even sworn in, Hogan took $1.4 million in private donations for his reelection campaign four years down the road, according to CNS analysis of board of election data.
“Donors who had given millions of dollars to the majority party were now wanting to give money to the new governor,” said Crim.
At the time, this was legal, but would not be for long. “That was fixed,” said Jared DeMarinis, who then was director of the elections board, as he referred to the loophole. DeMarinis is now the state administrator of elections.
“Winding down a campaign and then, you know, ramping up another campaign simultaneously is not in the spirit of public financing,” said DeMarinis. Hogan, as governor, signed the bill closing the loophole.
Hogan declined requests for an interview. He did not use public financing for his successful reelection campaign in 2018, for which he and his running mate raised about $20 million.
The next governor, Wes Moore, and his running mate, Aruna Miller, are not using public financing either. Moore collected about $16.3 million in private donations during his first run. He has more than $8 million in the bank for his reelection campaign as of March 17, according to elections board data. Andy Ellis, a challenger running in 2026 has pledged to use public campaign funds if he qualifies.
To see the code and data for this story see the linked github repo.
