Image by Montgomery County for Nancy Floreen.

Nancy Floreen submitted an abundance of petition signatures to get her on the MoCo Executive ballot, there are echoes of Chris Christie in Larry Hogan, why Dems are slow to embrace Ben Jealous, DC ponders what to do about its low voter turnout, and more in our election link roundup.

Floreen gets her signatures (and then some)
Nancy Floreen, Marc Elrich’s Democratic colleague on the Montgomery County council, submitted over 20,000 petition signatures to the Montgomery County Board of Elections on Monday. Floreen needed just 7,255 signatures to be included on the ballot as a candidate for Montgomery County Executive. Floreen backed former Rockville mayor Rose Krasnow in the Democratic primary and is expected to run a campaign as a more business- and development-friendly alternative to Elrich. (Bruce DePuyt / Maryland Matters)

Hogan as Christie
In 2013, nearly three-quarters of blue-state New Jersey voters approved of Republican governor Chris Christie. While Christie had a reputation as a moderate, he spent his first term gutting public transportation investments, cutting public education spending, and de-prioritizing green energy investments. By the end of his second term, as the costs of these decisions continued to mount, Christie had only a 16% approval rating. Hogan is nearly as popular as 2013 Christie and has made similar decisions on public transportation, education, and green energy that are likely to cost Marylanders dearly. (Less partisan alternative: Hogan is similarly popular and has a similar record as 2013 Chris Christie, and some fear that Maryland is on the verge of making the same mistake as New Jersey.) (Larry Ottinger / Baltimore Sun)

What’s with establishment Democrats and Jealous?
It’s no surprise that Larry Hogan and his Republican allies are painting Jealous as an out-of-control “socialist” who wants to tax and spend the state into oblivion (Hogan even drew equivalence between Jealous and Trumpism in a revealing New York Times interview). But it is surprising that the Democratic establishment has been so slow to embrace Jealous. Montgomery County Executive and former chair of the Maryland Democratic Party Ike Leggett, for example, is not yet ready to endorse Jealous. Leggett is concerned with Jealous’ plan to increase taxes on the top 1% of Maryland earners. (Robert McCartney / Post)

Will Comstock survive the expected blue wave?
FiveThirtyEight rates Barbara Comstock as the runner up house member in terms of how ideologically out of touch she is with her constituents. Yet due to her work ethic, her strength in retail politics, and her ability to avoid open confrontation she outperformed Trump in VA-10 by 16 points in 2016. While the conventional wisdom seems to be that it is foolish to count Comstock out, the results from special elections, generic ballot polling, and polling in VA-10 all point to a Comstock loss in November. (Matthew Cooper / Washingtonian)

DC’s turnout problem
Turnout was down across the district in the 2018 primaries, sparking calls for “an election reform agenda.” This agenda includes universal vote by mail where ballots would be sent along with voter guides that are already sent to registered DC voters. Other ideas include lowering the voting age to 16 and “exploring the use of mobile technology to vote” which sounds like a very bad idea to this Luddite given all the hacking going on these days. (Charles Wilson / Post)

Cheh calls for compromise on Initiative 77
A hearing on the potential repeal of Initiative 77, which raises the tipped minimum wage to match the general minimum wage, has been scheduled for September 17. Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh, who supported the initiative, believes that a compromise that lengthens the implementation period to 15 years could address many of the concerns of restaurant workers and owners while respecting the will of the majority of voters that supported the initiative. (Mary Cheh / DC Line)

Bekesha’s chances
Michael Bekesha, who is running against Charles Allen for DC’s Ward 6 council seat, makes the case that a Republican could win in the district, pointing out that Bowser received fewer votes than Independent David Catania and Republican Carol Schwartz in Ward 6 in 2014. Bekesha also defends the DC streetcar to a conservative audience and supports plans to extend the line across the river. Bizarrely, the author of this article seem to suggest that DC’s lack of Congressional representation is a frivolous issue and not “pressing,” and suggests that DC could not “afford” to become a state given its reliance on federal funding. (Allice Lloyd / The Weekly Standard)