Edgewater County Council member Jessica Haire won a clear victory in a five-way primary race in July to claim the Republican nomination for Anne Arundel County executive earning margins in nearly all corners of the county.
Haire, a first-term legislator, defeated her closest competitor, former Annapolis Del. Herb McMillan, by more than 2,000 votes, 44.4% to 38.8%. The other Republican candidates, John Grasso, Fernando Berra III and Chris Jahn, finished with 11.8%, 3.1% and 2% of the vote, respectively.
Haire’s victory pits her against incumbent County Executive Steuart Pittman, a Davidsonville Democrat seeking to win a second term, in the Nov. 8 general election. Polls show the race in a dead heat ahead of the start of early voting, which begins Oct. 27. The pair will face off in a debate Tuesday at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts.
But before Anne Arundel County voters head to the polls or return mailed ballots, The Capital and Baltimore Sun analyzed precinct-level data from the July 19 primary to understand how Haire won the Republican nomination over a seasoned politician in McMillan.
The data published by the Maryland State Board of Elections shows Haire won six of seven council districts, each by at least 100 votes and one by as many as 1,000 votes. The map above is color-coded to show the candidate who won each precinct. The size of the bubble denotes how wide their margin of victory was.
Zooming in slightly, Haire won 134, or more than two-thirds, of the county’s 196 voting precincts where on average she netted about 40 votes more than McMillan. The runner-up took the remaining precincts, with his support concentrated around Annapolis near McMillan’s home base, but on average he gained only about 15 votes on Haire in these areas.
Haire’s widest margin of victory came in northeastern District 3, which includes Republican bastions of Pasadena and Riviera Beach, where she won by 1,056 votes, more than half of her 2,066-vote margin over McMillan. She ran up particularly wide margins of at least 20 percentage points in the District 3 neighborhoods of Linwood Village, Gibson Island, Venice on the Bay, Chelsea Beach and Lake Shore.
Haire’s second widest margin of victory, 535 votes, came in her native District 7 in the southern portion of the county, including Crofton, Edgewater, Lothian, Shady Side and Deale. The district also had the second-highest turnout at 32.3%. Haire won by tighter margins in Districts 1, 2, 4 and 5, all of which she won by a few hundred votes.
McMillan, meanwhile, was victorious in his home turf, District 6, which includes Annapolis, Crownsville and Millersville, by just under 400 votes. The district featured the highest GOP turnout of 32.4% but McMillan, who served one term on the Annapolis City Council and represented the area for three terms in the House of Delegates, was unable to run up a big enough lead there to overcome Haire’s strong performance in other parts of the county.
McMillan’s widest precinct victory margins — all 20 percentage points or more — came from the Annapolis neighborhood Eastport and the community of Herald Harbor.
