By Adam Pagnucco.

As with voter turnout, I originally wanted to analyze precinct results for the 2024 school primaries. After all, I have all of that data in the same file. But here’s the truth: No one in this election had a significant campaign in hard, measurable numbers. No one had any real money, and I’d only heard of a single mailing and a few robocalls and text messages sent by all the candidates combined. So what’s the point of analyzing a campaign that wasn’t a campaign?

And then it occurred to me: There was actually a campaign, just one. It wasn’t run by a candidate. It was run by an organization – the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA), holder of the powerful Apple Ballot.

The Apple Ballot, which contains the MCEA’s recommendations, has been one of the most influential ballot endorsements in MoCo since the 1990s. Check out this 2010 post in which local politicians debated the relative merits of the Washington Post’s ballot endorsement and the Apple Ballot—all off the record, of course. The MCEA trademarked both the Apple design and the phrase “teacher-recommended” in 2009. Years ago, the MCEA mailed customized Apple Ballots to voters to supplement its election coverage, a significant expense given the unusual shape. Today, they are distributed at polling places and through social media.

An Apple ballot from the 1998 primary.

The challenge in assessing the effectiveness of the Apple ballot is that it does not occur in a vacuum. Numerous other factors—candidate fundraising, work ethic, other expressions of support, campaign strategy, controversial issues, and more—influence elections, making it difficult to isolate the Apple as an independent factor. In the 2024 school primary, however, these external factors were largely insignificant or nonexistent, aside from general dissatisfaction with elements of the school system. This primary was as close as we could get to an election in which the Apple was the only important factor.

When assessing Apple’s impact, one thing immediately struck me in the data: The performances of the three candidates – Rita Montoya (At-Large), Natalie Zimmerman (District 2), and Laura Stewart (District 4) – were correlated. I could see this in both the scatter plots and the correlation coefficients of the precinct results.

Let’s look at Zimmerman and Stewart first. The scatter plot below shows the percentage by district for each candidate.

See how the regression line slopes upward? The correlation coefficient of these two values ​​is +0.59, a moderate to strong positive correlation.

Now let’s look at Montoya and Stewart.

Here, too, the line of best fit runs upwards. The correlation coefficient of these two values ​​is again +0.59, a moderate to strong positive correlation.

And finally, here are Montoya and Zimmerman.

The line of best fit points upward and the correlation coefficient of these two is +0.72, a strong positive correlation.

It’s no coincidence that all three have similar performance. All three were on the apple ballot. Every apple given to voters was an asset to each of them, a huge advantage that no other school board candidate has.

Next we will look at geography.