Editor’s Note: Welcome to “MoCo Politics,” a column by MoCo360 contributing editor Louis Peck providing behind-the-scenes perspectives on the political scene in Montgomery County and Maryland at large.
In early April, the Baltimore Banner released an independent poll–conducted by Goucher College–that found U.S. Rep. David Trone of Potomac ahead of Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks by 9 points in the Democratic primary for the seat of retiring U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Baltimore).
It was not the only independent poll during that period with a similar finding: Two weeks later, a survey conducted for the Baltimore Sun and the University of Baltimore put Trone ahead by double digits.
But on Tuesday night, two hours after the polls closed for the 2024 primary, the Associated Press declared Alsobrooks the winner, and Trone conceded. The latest results give Alsobrooks a 54-42% lead for a margin of about 55,000 votes statewide, pending resumption of the counting of mail ballots Thursday.
“I think it is very clear from the polling–not just what we released, but everything subsequently–that Alsobrooks put it away in the last weeks,” said Goucher College professor Mileah Kromer, who oversaw conducting of the poll that ran in the Banner. “There’s no doubt in my mind that David Trone was ahead for most of this race.”
So what changed in the weeks leading up to the primary? Kromer, director of Goucher’s Sarah T. Hughes Center for Politics, pointed to the dynamics of low-turnout primaries, which preliminary returns indicate that this year’s was.
“When it’s low turnout like that, it often means people aren’t paying any attention” until the closing weeks, Kromer noted in a phone interview Wednesday, adding, “So Alsobrooks smartly saved the money that she had to do the push in the last four weeks, when people were finally starting to pay attention.”
In the process, Alsobrooks appears to have outmaneuvered Trone, whose self-funded campaign had been on television since early last fall, supplemented by digital ads and glossy mailers.
Final spending figures on the primary won’t be filed with the Federal Election Commission until mid-July, but recent disclosure forms show Trone funneling $61.75 million of his fortune–derived from a nationwide chain of alcohol beverage retail outlets, Total Wine & More–into the campaign. With just under 189,000 votes counted in Trone’s favor as of early Wednesday, that works out to a hefty $326 per vote.
The cost-per-vote calculation will change as the remaining mail-in ballots are counted over the next week. Just short of 100,000 mail-ins have been counted statewide in the Democratic primary. However, State Board of Elections data indicates that as many as another 330,000 mail-ins either have been already received–or are on their way to local boards of election around Maryland, after being mailed prior to the 8 p.m. close of the polls Tuesday.
Despite the large number of outstanding ballots, what prompted the Associated Press to call the race Tuesday night–according to the news service’s explanation to readers–was due in large part due to trends in the home counties of Trone and Alsobrooks, the two largest in the state.
According to the latest available vote counts, Trone is currently trailing Alsobrooks in his home jurisdiction of Montgomery County by about 2,500 votes, while Alsobrooks has a nearly 40,000-vote lead in Prince George’s County–a nearly 3-1 advantage, despite Trone’s successfully picking off the endorsements of several prominent elected officials in Alsobrooks’ home base.
Trone’s 6th Congressional District contains about one-quarter of Montgomery County voters–with virtually all other Montgomery voters residing in the neighboring 8th District held by Rep. Jamie Raskin of Takoma Park. This year, Raskin–after considering running for Senate himself last summer–formally endorsed Alsobrooks in March, after several weeks of appearing at events on behalf of her candidacy without offering a formal endorsement.
The moves by Raskin–who appeared in TV ads with Alsobrooks–were illustrative of the efforts of the many state elected officials who lined up behind Alsobrooks, as she vied to become Maryland’s first Black senator. “I have to give the elected officials who endorsed her credit,” Kromer said. “Often when you’re going to get an endorsement from an elected official … that’s it. But it was really clear that some of these electeds came out for her in the [final] weeks, did events, and had their political networks on the campaign trail for her.”
Kromer also suggested that a series of verbal stumbles by Trone in the closing weeks of the campaign–including a much-criticized remark in which he dismissed Prince George’s County elected officials who had endorsed Alsobrooks as “low-level folks”–had taken a political toll.
So did a Trone ad in which Prince George’s Councilmember Edward Burroughs was quoted as saying, “The U.S. Senate is not a place for training wheels,” triggering an aggressive counterattack from Alsobrooks supporters in her home county. The ad was subsequently modified to remove that quote.
“That was certainly a mistake, especially about a woman who is running a county that is almost as big as some states,” Kromer observed, noting that “the worst time to do these things are toward the end” of a campaign.
“You can’t make mistakes when people don’t have time to forget about those mistakes,” Kromer added. “People were just tuning in and starting to pay attention. They may have gotten your mailers and maybe they were leaning toward you–and then, all of a sudden when they are tuned in, these gaffes are happening.”
Alsobrooks must now pivot her attention to the Republican nominee, former Gov. Larry Hogan, in a race that has the potential to determine if the Democrats can hold onto control of the Senate–in which they now have a bare 51-49 majority.
Kromer–whose book on Hogan, Blue State Republican, was published in 2022, when Hogan was widely seen as eyeing a bid for the presidency–suggested that Alsobrooks goes into the race with some significant advantages, in the wake of debate during the Democratic primary over who would make the stronger general election candidate against the personally popular Hogan.
“I think Hogan’s main challenge is going to be facing a unified Democratic Party,” Kromer said. “I can tell already by looking at social media today–they’re going to move on from the Trone/Alsobrooks [primary], however nasty people say it was. I think it got a little bit nasty towards the end, but all elections do.
“Hogan’s challenge is that I think this will be the first time he is going to face unified pressure across the board from Democratic elected officials.”
In contrast, when Hogan sought a second term as governor in 2018 against Democratic nominee Ben Jealous, the Democratic Party “was really divided, and you didn’t see its full-scale support being thrown behind Jealous,” Kromer said. “Angela Alsobrooks is a candidate that almost every Democrat can get behind. She’s not on the ideological fringe–she holds sort of center-left policy views.”
But funding the general election campaign could be a challenge for the Democrats with Alsobrooks as the nominee, with the national Republican Party said to have committed tens of millions to entice Hogan into the Senate race in February.
“The benefit for Democrats nationally if Trone had won is that no outside groups would have had to come in to help–because he would just self-fund,” Kromer suggested. “That being said there will be money for Alsobrooks: There are certainly groups that have a vested interest in finally increasing diversity in the Democratic Party.
“It’s going to make things for the national Democrats a little bit more challenging perhaps, but the money is out there somewhere.”
In a state in which the Democrats enjoy a 2-1 majority registration, Kromer said Hogan’s path to victory is contingent on picking off 25%-30% of the Democratic vote. That, too, could pose a challenge for Alsobrooks.
“Chipping away at those Democratic votes all across the state is certainly what he is going to do. It’s what he did in 2014 and 2018,” Kromer said, as Hogan on Wednesday announced a “Democrats for Hogan” coalition chaired by former state Sen. Robert “Bobby” Zirkin of Baltimore County.
A month after announcing his candidacy, Hogan appeared at a synagogue in Potomac–appealing to Jewish voters on U.S. policy toward Israel, while taking sharp jabs at U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Kensington Democrat who has been a high-profile backer of Alsobrooks.
Van Hollen has received major blowback from some segments of the Jewish community over his advocacy of withholding offensive weapons from Israel over its conduct of the war in Gaza; Alsobrooks recently indicated support for President Joe Biden’s decision to withhold a shipment of such weapons.
Hogan might also target more moderate Democrats outside of the Baltimore-Washington corridor who Trone—representing a district that includes western Maryland–boasted of his ability to carry while seeking the Senate nod. And in 2018, Hogan carried about 30% of the Black vote and did very well among Hispanic voters–a demographic group with whom Alsobrooks has had problems in her home county, amid complaints that she has failed to move aggressively to bring Latinos into her administration.
However, Kromer contended that it will be a very different situation for Hogan from when he was running in 2014 and 2018 and was something of a political free agent.
“I believe Trone and Alsobrooks had the same argument to make,” she said. “The most powerful argument against Larry Hogan is not about him as an individual. It’s about his membership in a political party.”
Kromer added: “…The message from Alsobrooks, especially if it’s pretty clear that she can’t really move the [high favorability] numbers on Hogan–which Democrats have not been able to do for 10 years–is that you can like Larry Hogan all you want, but it’s the Republican majority that you don’t want. Even some of them who don’t hate Larry Hogan–they don’t want a Republican majority.”
Hogan is already grappling with this political juggling act as he faces questions on abortion–of which he has been a long-time opponent. Hogan, after weeks of declining to say whether he supports codification of the Roe v. Wade decision overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022, told the New York Times on Thursday that he now supports such codification–a move that Alsobrooks has advocated throughout the campaign.
“Republicans in general will do something between now and November that will make it really uncomfortable for Hogan to run as a Republican,” Kromer predicted. ”I sincerely believe there is a very real chance, given what I know about the contours of public opinion toward Larry Hogan, that he could walk into Election Day in November with a 60-something percent favorability rating–and lose.”
