THE CONTRAST could not be more stark between the campaigns of the two leading candidates for Prince George’s County executive on the June 26 Democratic primary ballot. One, Angela D. Alsobrooks, the county’s top prosecutor since 2008, has raised money from thousands of county residents and is running a no- nonsense, substantive, grass-roots effort. The other, Donna F. Edwards, a former member of Congress, has mainly outsourced her campaign to a coalition of special interests that has injected nearly $1 million since March into getting her elected.
Ms. Alsobrooks has advanced a detailed, serious and deeply researched platform. Ms. Edwards’s website features a handful of vague declarations. Ms. Alsobrooks devotes a couple thousand words to a thoughtful action plan for improving public schools. On her site, Ms. Edwards dispenses with the subject in a couple of sentences and a few bullet points.
Ms. Edwards’s campaign is striking not just for its superficiality but also for the fact that she’s not the driving force behind it. Labor unions are. Under the guise of a super PAC, they have spent more than three times as much to get her elected than she has raised on her own behalf, excluding a loan she made to herself. What’s more, most of the money Ms. Edwards has managed to raise does not come from people who live in Prince George’s.
The super PAC, called We Are Prince George’s, has so far allocated $960,000 to get Ms. Edwards elected, a sum that dwarfs any previous intervention on behalf of a candidate for local office in the county. Its funding comes from labor interests opposed to nonunion businesses that have lately arrived in the county, such as Whole Foods, which opened its first store in Prince George’s last year, Wegmans and the Hotel at the University of Maryland. All of those have helped put Prince George’s on the map as an up-and-coming locality. (Disclosure: Whole Foods is owned by Amazon. Jeffrey P. Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon, owns The Post.)
The PAC organizers include a union that prioritizes project labor agreements, which would limit bidding on county construction projects to unionized companies.
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