A small business owner and first-time politician unseated Republican incumbent Mike Pantelides last night as mayor of Annapolis.
Tag: mayoral race
Annapolis Elects Local Restaurateur as Mayor, Replacing Republican Mike Pantelides
Pugh Plots Changes in City Hall After Winning Mayor’s Race
The morning after securing victory in the Baltimore mayor’s race, Catherine Pugh once again sounded the theme of community development.
Mayoral Race Poll Brings High Number of Candidates, Undecided Voters into Focus
You’ve probably heard by now that the first publicly-released poll for next year’s mayor’s race says Sheila Dixon is the early front-runner in the race. But several other data points in the Baltimore Sun/University of Baltimore poll of nearly 400 voters tell a story about how far the race has to go before April 26. Here are three:
Despite Inordinate Coverage, Dixon Not Actually Running for Mayor
In the background of Baltimore’s mayoral campaign looms resigned former mayor Sheila Dixon, well, at least in the coverage of the race, if not so much in actuality. She has donated moderate sums to at least two of Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s challengers, and, according to local news outlets, she has also offered certain candidates “advice.” What her involvement in the race really amounts to is anyone’s guess.
The number of headlines given to Dixon during the Democratic primary strikes me as so ordinate, that I wouldn’t be surprised if a minority of voters believes she is actually running. Her picture seems to appear on local news sites more often than any of the candidates’. Will she run in 2015? Who is she backing? What did she say about Rawlings-Blake? Have Baltimoreans forgiven her?
I could see why it’s appealing to spend one’s political coverage on Dixon. She has that scandal, and scandals are useful when you are looking to form an opinion on a politician. Depending upon your point-of-view, her gift-card theft was either an inexcusable abuse of power, or an overpunished ethical gaffe. Either way, you think something. The top candidates on the other hand, Rawlings-Blake, Pugh, Rolley, Landers: to form opinions on them you’d really have to bone up on where they stand on the issues. Sounds like homework.
Or maybe it’s that Rawlings-Blake leads by a boringly huge margin in the polls. Or maybe the prospect of choosing the next leader of a city that has been struggling for so long to turn things around with limited success is just too stressful and we’d rather not think about it.
Or maybe I just have amnesia, and it’s really 2015, and it’s Dixon versus Rawlings-Blake.
Mommy, Where Do Campaign Funds Come From?
A recent article in The Examiner compared the sources and sizes of Baltimore’s Democratic mayoral candidates’ campaign funds.
In terms of cash on hand, incumbent Stephanie Rawlings-Blake finds herself in an almost luxuriously comfortable lead with $1.4 million. Compare that to the funds of Catherine Pugh or Otis Rolley, the mayor’s stiffest competition, who have each raised around $250,000 over the course of the entire campaign.
Rawlings-Blake’s money tends to come from unions and businesses; Rolley’s from individuals; Pugh’s from elected officials, loans, and one Scott Donahoo, a car dealer who donated $75,000 to the Pugh campaign.
Perhaps hoping that distancing himself from our disgraced former mayor was worth $1,000, Rolley returned the grand donated to his campaign by Sheila Dixon. Pugh took it.
What do you think? Do the sources of campaign funds give us important information about the candidates? Or is it just another distraction from the real issues?
Despite the misprint on the sample ballot sent out by the state board of elections, the Democratic primary (which nearly all news outlets are calling “election day”) is September 13.
