Editor’s note: This story, published at 11 p.m. May 14, was updated at 10:56 a.m. May 15 to include the latest election results.
Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks on Tuesday night won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate, overcoming record spending by her chief rival, U.S. Rep. David Trone of Potomac.
In November, Alsobrooks will face former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, who easily captured his party’s nomination in Tuesday’s primary election.
In her victory speech, Alsobrooks said she had spoken to Trone. “We are united in our focus to keep the Senate Blue,” she said, adding that she was grateful to have Trone’s support.
“… I hope that in these next few months, I have the opportunity to earn the support of those who did not vote for me in this primary and others who haven’t made a decision on their ballot for the fall,” she said.
The Associated Press called the race for Alsobrooks about two hours after the polls closed. With about two-thirds of the primary day results from precincts around the state reporting in, Alsobrooks had opened up a 53% to 43% lead over Trone, who as co-owner of Total Wine & More–a nationwide chain of alcohol beverage retail outlets–had poured more than $60 million of his personal assets into a campaign that was almost entirely self-funded.
By Wednesday morning, Alsobrooks’ lead had increased to 54% to about 42% for Trone, with nearly all precincts reporting, according to results posted by the State Board of Elections.
The atmosphere was nothing short of electric when Alsobrooks took the stage shortly after 11 p.m. Tuesday at a campaign watch party at Martin’s Crossroads in Greenbelt that was packed with supporters—many of whom sported green “Angela Alsobrooks for U.S. Senate” T-shirts.
Throughout her speech, Alsobrooks received a continuous stream of cheers, affirmations and applause from the crowd. She thanked her backers, recounted her journey to victory and asserted that she and her supporters have a lot of work to do moving forward.
The competition between Alsobrooks and Trone became increasingly nasty in its closing days, causing some Democrats to fret about uniting the party against the popular Hogan. The Associated Press declared Hogan the winner shortly after the polls closed; results late Tuesday night showed him with about 62% in a seven-way primary field.
Robin Ficker of Boyds, a long-time Montgomery County political gadfly, was running second with about 30%, after using about $2 million of his own money to saturate Washington, D.C., television with ads in the closing days of the campaign.
Alsobrooks–elected executive of Prince George’s, the state’s second largest county, in 2018 after two terms as state’s attorney–will now vie to become Maryland’s first Black senator, and only the third Black woman elected to the Senate in U.S. history.
Alsobrooks and Trone declared their candidacies a year ago, within days after Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) announced he would not seek a fourth term. For the next nine months, the two were engaged in a primary battle in which the winner was seen as a slam dunk to ultimately become the state’s next U.S. senator.
Then Hogan announced on Feb. 9—hours before the 2024 election filing deadline and after months of disavowing interest in serving in the Senate–that he would run.
Early polling showed Hogan, a popular two-term governor despite the state’s more than 2-1 Democratic registration edge, with an early lead over either Alsobrooks or Trone in November–although an Emerson College poll released late last week showed both Democrats ahead of Hogan by a margin in the low double-digits.
Varying poll results aside, Hogan’s entry into the race unexpectedly turned solid blue Maryland into a battleground state in the national contest in November for control of the Senate–where Democrats hold a slim 51-49 majority. And, in the absence of perceptible policy differences between Alsobrooks and Trone, a significant portion of the rhetorical battle in the latter part of the primary campaign centered on which of the two candidates was better positioned to defeat Hogan.
Another major bone of contention between the two Democrats was how their campaigns were financed–given Trone’s stated willingness to spend “what it takes” from his personal fortune to win.
Even before the polls opened on primary day, this year’s Senate election had not only become the most expensive statewide contest ever in Maryland; it was on track to equal or exceed the record for the most expensive self-funded Senate race in U.S. history.
As of late last week, required disclosures by Trone filed with the Federal Election Commission showed him funneling more than $61.75 million of his personal fortune into his campaign treasury.
That brought Trone within $2 million of the all-time record for a self-funding Senate candidate, according to Open Secrets, an independent organization that tracks money in politics: $63.57 million, set by now-Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott in his 2018 race. And Scott’s funding covered the primary as well as the general election in a state with a population well over three times that of Maryland.
Trone argued repeatedly that his reliance on his own assets–while refusing donations from political action committees (PACs) and corporate lobbyists–provided him with independence from moneyed interests seeking to influence him, as he highlighted donations that Alsobrooks had received from energy and utility companies, along with contributions from groups representing the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
In turn, Alsobrooks—whose campaign relied entirely on outside contributions from individuals, along with PACs and other political committees–suggested that many of the federal and state elected officials who endorsed Trone had been influenced by donations he had made to their campaigns. “He’s a one-man super PAC; he doesn’t take money, he gives it,” Alsobrooks complained at one candidate forum. “He gives it trying to buy an election here, over and over again.”
The latest comprehensive disclosure report that the candidates were required to submit to the FEC–filed in early May–showed Trone spending nearly $51.7 million as of April 24 since announcing his candidacy, nearly 10 times the $5.72 million spent by Alsobrooks during a similar period.
Alsobrooks, however, was aided in the closing days of the primary by an additional $2.5 million independent TV ad effort by Women Vote!–a so-called “super PAC” affiliated with EMILY’s List, a pro-abortion rights Democratic group that had previously endorsed Alsobrooks.
Although both boasted of their records in support of abortion rights–accompanied by vows to push for codification of the Roe v. Wade decision overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022–the Women Vote! ad buy was emblematic of the two candidates’ efforts to poke holes in each other’s record on abortion as well as several other hot-button social issues.
The Women Vote! ads doubled down on Alsobrooks’ repeated criticisms of nearly $500,000 that Trone–personally and through the business he co-owns, Total Wine & More–contributed to anti-abortion Republican candidates in states such as Georgia and Texas over more than two decades. Trone defended these contributions as necessary to protect the jobs of employees of Total Wine & More in those states, while pointing to a total of $20 million he donated to Democrats at the federal level over the same period.
For his part, Trone on numerous occasions recounted his helping to set up a reproductive services clinic in western Maryland, to increase access to abortion in the wake of the 2022 Supreme Court ruling, while questioning what Alsobrooks did in Prince George’s County to facilitate abortion access during that period.
Abortion is expected to be a key issue in November in the Maryland race, with Alsobrooks and Trone taking turns during the primary criticizing Hogan–who, since announcing his Senate candidacy, has said he would oppose a federal abortion ban advocated by many Republicans, but has declined to say whether he would vote to codify Roe v. Wade into law.
For much of 2023, Alsobrooks was seen as the clear frontrunner in the Democratic primary, with the bulk of the state’s top Democratic elected officials–led by Gov. Wes Moore and Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Montgomery County resident–endorsing her. Cardin, however, chose to remain neutral in the primary to choose his successor.
But the political dynamic of the race was altered by Trone’s willingness to utilize his personal fortune to boost his familiarity among the primary electorate.
Trone went on television statewide beginning in September and remained there until primary day. All told, his campaign reported spending nearly $22 million on TV advertising as of late April, about 40% of his total campaign expenditures to date.
Alsobrooks did not begin running ads in the pricey Washington, D.C., television market until early April, although she began a TV campaign in the Baltimore area several weeks prior to that. Her ads in the closing days emphasized the number of endorsements she had racked up from elected officials–which also included six of Trone’s seven Democratic colleagues in Maryland’s U.S. House delegation.
Among the Alsobrooks backers: Rep. Jamie Raskin of Takoma Park, who endorsed her in March after flirting for weeks last summer with running for Senate himself. Raskin opted to seek re-election to the House, where he is in line to become a committee chair if the Democrats retake the majority in November.
At the same time, Trone picked up endorsements from a number of high-profile elected officials in Alsobrooks’ home base of Prince George’s County. They were featured in a Trone TV ad that ran frequently in the closing days of the primary campaign, in which several of the officials questioned Alsobrooks’ record of accomplishment.
Hogan, meanwhile, chose to ignore his six Republican primary opponents–most of them political novices and perennial candidates who aligned themselves with former President Donald Trump, the party’s presumptive 2024 presidential nominee of whom Hogan has been sharply critical in the past.
While Hogan avoided Republican candidate forums and was notably absent from the TV ad blitz in the closing days of the primary, Robin Ficker–a real estate broker and disbarred attorney making his 22nd run for elected office–spent more than $2 million, virtually all of it out of his own pocket, as he ran TV ads tying himself to Trump while attacking President Joe Biden’s border control policies.
Alsobrooks and Trone were among 10 Democratic contenders who appeared on the primary ballot–with the eight remaining candidates in the field reporting spending little or no money, while waging barely visible campaigns.
MoCo360 reporter Noah Johnson contributed to this story.
