[Baltimore Sun] Sun/FOX45/UB Poll: Cohen holds sizable lead over Mosby in council president race
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Baltimore Councilman Zeke Cohen holds a sizable lead in the race for City Council president, leading nearly all demographics of Democratic voters as he challenges incumbent President Nick Mosby, according to a new poll for The Baltimore Sun, the University of Baltimore and FOX45.
The poll gauging interest for the Democratic primary, released Monday, shows Cohen with 40% of the vote to Mosby’s 21% among likely primary voters surveyed. Former Councilwoman Shannon Sneed, who is making her second bid for the office, had 17%. Another 19% said they remained undecided.
The poll of 508 likely Baltimore Democratic primary voters was conducted April 7-11. It has a margin of error of 4.3 percentage points. The Democratic primary typically decides the outcome of elections in heavily Democratic Baltimore.
Steve Raabe, president of OpinionWorks, the Annapolis-based firm that conducted the poll, said Cohen, a sophomore councilman representing Canton, Fells Point and Highlandtown since 2016, appeared to be winning among women and men. He had a narrow lead among the city’s Black Democratic voters surveyed and he’s “crushing it” among white Democratic voters, Raabe said.
There are almost no significant areas of strength for Mosby, except for Democratic voters who reported being less likely to participate in the May 14 primary, Raabe said.
“I just don’t really see a path for Mosby,” he said. “It stands to reason that he has latent support from a broad share of the electorate, but those people are a lot less likely to actually vote in a primary.”
OpinionWorks has conducted polls for The Sun since 2007.
Mosby, a former state delegate who was sworn in as council president in December 2020, has had a challenging first term. Shortly before he was sworn in, The Sun reported the IRS had placed a tax lien on Mosby’s Reservoir Hill home as a result of three years’ worth of unpaid federal taxes. By the spring of 2021, it was revealed a federal investigation was underway into the finances of Mosby and his then-wife, Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. Officials with the FBI visited Mosby at his City Hall office in March of that year.
The council president was not charged with a crime, but he took a damaging turn on the witness stand during his former wife’s federal trial earlier this year. Mosby detailed how he fell behind on his home’s mortgage and his taxes. His car was repossessed and his wages were garnished to pay student loan debt. Under oath, he said he didn’t tell his wife about his financial struggles, and he acknowledged lying to the public during a 2020 news conference about his tax obligations. Government attorneys at the trial accused him of falsely claiming thousands of dollars of charitable deductions on his taxes.
Likely Democratic voters were not surveyed about Mosby’s financial woes, but several who spoke to The Sun pointed to his well-publicized testimony as the issue driving their vote.
2024 voter guide: Candidates for Baltimore City Council president
Phyllis Ajayi, a 47-year-old resident of Howard Park in West Baltimore, said she hadn’t decided whether she’ll vote for Cohen or Sneed, but she’s firmly against voting for Mosby. The council president’s intentions seem to be good, but he has “too much going on right now,” she said.
“Life has happened to him, and as a citizen, I would prefer for him to deal with his life,” she said.
Ajayi said she found Mosby’s testimony troubling. She questioned how she could trust someone who admitted to misleading his wife.
“You played a part in her not knowing and possibly hiding information from her, but I’m supposed to trust you with the city’s finances and doing things on the up and up?” Ajayi said.
Before the February filing deadline to run in the primary, some people questioned whether Mosby would press on with a campaign amid the tumult. For most of the last year, he had no operational campaign website and had next to no money in his campaign account.
Cohen, on the other hand, began his campaign early and has led the way in fundraising. Cohen reported having $480,900 on hand this month, having raised $92,000 since January.
Mosby reported raising $71,000 during the same span, but his report includes glaring errors, including tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from Paragon Solutions, a payment handler. His campaign said last week that an amended report would be filed, but that had not happened as of Sunday.
Sneed, who is using public campaign financing to augment her campaign, reported having $241,230 available. Sneed came in second to Mosby in the 2020 race for council president, receiving 29% of the vote to Mosby’s 40%. She has since worked for Democratic U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and ran alongside Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Perez in 2022.
Alma Bell, 79, a retired city government worker, said she doesn’t know Cohen well, but has a good general impression of him. Bell said she thought Cohen’s response to the controversy over Baltimore Gas & Electric Co.’s installation of external gas meters was “thoughtful and considerate.”
She also said she doesn’t feel comfortable with Mosby in office after some of his personal “missteps.”
Diane Sutton, a 65-year-old medical assistant, said she’s backing Sneed because of Mosby’s testimony during his ex-wife’s trial.
“Nick lied. He got up there and he lied. He didn’t support his wife,” Sutton said.
Raabe said his poll uses a tight voter turnout model. Democratic voters were asked to rank their likelihood of participating in the election on a scale of 1 to 10, and only those who chose a 5 or higher were included in the sample, Raabe said.
Cohen polled even higher among Democratic voters who ranked themselves a 10, the most likely to vote, Raabe said. Of those, 46% said they favored Cohen compared with 19% for Mosby. Of lower-likelihood Democratic voters, Mosby commanded 31% to Cohen’s 13%.
“If you’re Nick Mosby, the game plan is to really to work those soft voters and try to boost turnout and make this race a lot closer than it probably is,” Raabe said.
John Willis, a former secretary of state under Democratic Gov. Parris Glendening and executive in residence at UB’s School of Public and International Affairs, said candidates will have to carefully target their spending in the last days of the race to motivate specific turnout. Willis questioned how reachable less motivated voters will be through traditional media.
Undecided Democratic voters remain a factor in the party’s council president primary. The Sun’s poll for the Baltimore mayoral race showed just 7% of Democratic voters had not made up their minds, but 19% remained undecided when it came to the council presidency.
The poll also found a strong correlation between likely Cohen voters and supporters of Democratic Mayor Brandon Scott, Raabe said. Over half of respondents who said they would support Scott also said they were backing Cohen, compared with one-third of Democratic voters likely to support former Mayor Sheila Dixon. The Sun poll found Scott and Dixon to be locked in a close race with 38% backing Scott and 35% supporting Dixon.
Ayana Bass-Myers, 50, said she sees both Mosby and Cohen out in the community frequently and likes each of them. Split on who to vote for, she said she appreciated Mosby’s work to give people who were previously convicted of crimes more chances to find work, and his early support of a new Baltimore dollar house program, though she didn’t like how he ultimately voted against it.
Mosby championed his own program to offer city vacant homes for $1 that deadlocked in committee. He recently voted against a similar policy enacted by Scott’s administration, arguing officials had not put guardrails in place to ensure city residents were given first rights to properties.
Asked if they supported Scott’s Buy Into Bmore dollar house program, a commanding 72% of Democratic voters surveyed said they approved.
“It’s such a hard one,” said Bass-Myers of Cohen and Mosby. “They’re both awesome people, and I see them working very hard for the city.”
Raabe said the backdrop for all city races in 2024 is a quiet, but growing, sense that things in Baltimore are getting on the right track. The poll showed equal numbers of city residents — 40% — viewed the city as moving in the right direction versus the wrong one. That’s a marked shift from The Sun’s poll four years ago, when just 17% believed the city was on the right course.
Of poll respondents who said they believe Baltimore is currently on the wrong path, 58% cited violence, crime and drug abuse as their reason. Thirty-one percent said inefficient government and leaders were the problem.
Likely Democratic voters were also divided on their confidence-level in city government officials to solve major problems facing the city. Of those surveyed, 52% said they had at least some confidence in city leaders, while 46% said they have little or no confidence.
Coming Tuesday: Poll results in the U.S. Senate primaries
About this poll
Results are based on a survey of 508 likely Democratic primary voters in Baltimore City. The poll was conducted April 7-11 by OpinionWorks of Annapolis. City voters were randomly selected from the Board of Elections’ voter file and from databases known as consumer panels and contacted by trained interviewers by cellphone and online. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.3 percentage points.
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