Living in Maryland means recognizing that Maryland is one of the bluest of blue states. It is a state with a large population of federal government workers and has not voted for a Republican for president since 1988. Maryland has not had a Republican senator since the liberal Republican Charles Mathias retired in 1987.
Even more to the left than the state as a whole is Montgomery County, Maryland's most populous county, and one of America's most progressive. Kamala Harris won 74 percent of the vote there, eleven points higher than her statewide score. Montgomery County has never had a Republican city council president in its history. Republicans have not had a majority on the city council since Lyndon Johnson was president in the 1960s.
"MoCo," as it is known by locals, is filled with government workers, rainbow flags, and "hate has no home here" signs. Like most of the counties surrounding Washington, D.C., it is a wealthy suburb, with a median household income of over $125,000 and a low poverty rate, of 7.2 percent. Average home values exceed $600,000, and residents, for all their performative progressivism, tend to want to preserve those home values. Unfortunately, sometimes their progressivism and their personal interests come into conflict.
The county has recently released the "University Boulevard Corridor Draft Plan," which emphasizes how out of touch its leaders are from what voters want and have indeed recently called for in the 2024 election. The plan is a master class in expanding government even when citizens don't want it or need it. One of the county's biggest problems is traffic, and the plan seems designed to exacerbate rather than alleviate matters.
For one thing, the plan calls for the creation of additional bus lanes on the high-traffic streets of University Boulevard and Colesville Road. The impact of this would be to increase traffic in the fewer available lanes, pretty much the opposite of what is needed. As Manhattan Institute transportation expert Nicole Gelinas notes in her new book Movement, bus lanes can reduce traffic in heavily urbanized areas like Manhattan by encouraging commuters to take the bus instead of driving. Yet Montgomery County lacks the population density of Manhattan, and its buses are frequently empty. One acquaintance of mine who does take the Montgomery County buses calls it his "limo service," as he and the bus driver are often the only two people on the bus.
To make traffic matters worse, the plan pushes what it calls "major speed limit reductions" on University Boulevard and Colesville Road as well as other busy streets. Drivers would be forced to go slower, and the new impositions would be enforced by additional speed cameras to catch you if you dare go over. In addition, to annoy drivers even further, the plan calls for an end to merge lanes and right turns on red lights. This unwise policy brings to mind Woody Allen's legendary comment, in Annie Hall, about the differences between New York and L.A.: "I don't want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light." Montgomery County lacks the cultural advantages of either locale and would lose this advantage as well if the time-saving right turn on red were eliminated. Overall, the plan is reminiscent of another government-heavy central plan already implemented in Rockville, another part of Montgomery County, that residents say has exacerbated rather than alleviated congestion problems.
As bad as the traffic-snarling interventions are, the county did not stop there. It also calls for "mixed use" and "higher density" housing in certain quiet suburban areas. While the plan is light on the details, those who follow planning-commission discussions know that these phrases are often Newspeak for bringing low-income housing to leafy well-off suburbs. Objectors to these concepts typically get accused of NIMBY-ism, but the reason they object is that those types of housing often lead to increased crime, additional traffic, and reduced housing values.
Overall, the document reeks of central planning and government interventionism in the wake of an election in which the message from voters in many parts of the country seemed to be We don't want what the government is selling. Voters want government that works for citizens. In the recent elections, Republicans nationwide improved in nearly every demographic category, including with blacks, Hispanics, women, and both young men and young women. These GOP gains appeared to derive from a perception that government officials were more concerned with demonstrating fealty to progressivism than in making citizens' lives better or easier. Even progressive Montgomery County saw some evidence of this pushback in 2024. While Harris won the county convincingly, she garnered 5 percent less of the vote than Joe Biden did in 2020.
Still, given its overwhelming progressivism, Montgomery County has made clear in multiple ways that it wants to resist the national trend. Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) recently pledged to "use all legal means necessary" on behalf of its values. So far, these means include calling to resist efforts to end DEI education in its schools and criticizing potential cuts in education funding, calling them "catastrophic." In addition, a group of parents unhappy with MCPS's use of LGBTQ+ books have sued the county for the chance to let their children "opt out" from those materials. The case is headed to the Supreme Court.
Residents are also pushing back against the draft traffic plan. The Kemp Mill Civic Association, the civic association in one of the most affected areas, has organized in opposition to much of the plan. At a special meeting on February 5 to discuss the plan, 62 members showed, nearly double the attendance of a normal meeting. They are submitting a letter outlining their concerns. While it may seem like an uphill battle, they recall the example of a previous organizing effort that defeated another misbegotten county overreach, the North Central Freeway plan
Beyond Montgomery County itself, across the country, voters have made clear that they want the government to intervene less in their daily lives, experiment on them less, and get out of the way more. Montgomery County consistently moves in the opposite direction of those sentiments in a variety of ways. MoCo's leaders apparently feel that the overwhelming progressivism of the county protects them at the ballot box. What the 2024 election results show is that Montgomery County remains considerably out of step with the rest of the country, but that at least some Montgomery County voters are paying attention.