This story, originally published at 12:13 a.m. Nov. 6, 2024, was updated at 9:40 a.m. to include the latest results.
After an expensive, sometimes acrimonious campaign that stretched over 18 months, Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks on Tuesday won Maryland’s open U.S. Senate seat – and made history.
In defeating former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, Democrat Alsobrooks will become the first Black person to represent Maryland in the Senate. Nationally, she will join U.S. Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester, who won an open Senate seat from neighboring Delaware on Tuesday, as they become only the third and fourth Black women in U.S. history to be elected a U.S. senator.
With nearly all precincts reporting as of Wednesday morning, Alsobrooks had captured about 52% of the vote to 45% for Hogan, who had been recruited by national Republicans in the hope the GOP could pick off a Maryland Senate seat for the first time in nearly four decades. The last Republican senator from Maryland, the late Charles Mathias, retired in 1986.
Hogan conceded the race in a phone call to Alsobrooks on Tuesday night, and publicly congratulated her on her victory.
Spirits were high Tuesday night at the Alsobrooks watch party in The Hotel at the University of Maryland in College Park, with supporters donning the candidate’s signature green T-shirts.
Around 10 p.m. Maryland Democratic Party Vice President Charlene Dukes announced that Alsobrooks had won and the crowd erupted into cheers, hoots and hollers. Some supporters held hands and jumped with joy while others wiped tears from their eyes.
“It’s remarkable to think that in two years, America will celebrate its 250th birthday, and in all those years, there have been more than 2,000 people who have served in the United States Senate, and only three who that looked like me,” Alsobrooks told the crowd. “To each and every Marylander, I say this: I will make your care my concern, your hope my focus and your dreams my work in the days and years to come.”
“And to the people who did not vote in this election, I want you to know that I see you too, and that I would never stop working to prove that public service, that the work we do, can and must change the lives of people for the better,” she added.
Prior to being elected to the first of two terms as executive of Prince George’s County in 2018, Alsobrooks served two terms as Prince George’s County state’s attorney. She announced her Senate bid in May 2024, just days after Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Baltimore) had announced he would not seek a fourth term after a career in public office that spanned almost 60 years.
Before facing Hogan in the general election, Alsobrooks had to turn back a stiff challenge in the Democratic primary from U.S. Rep. David Trone of Potomac – a multi-millionaire businessman whose lavishly funded campaign came close to setting a national record for a self-financed Senate candidacy.
From the outset of this year’s general election, Alsobrooks sought to tap into Maryland’s heavily Democratic tilt by contending that a victory for Hogan could be enough to flip the Senate – now narrowly in Democratic control – to a Republican majority, enabling the latter party to set the legislative agenda.
At the center of this debate was abortion rights, reflecting the national battle over this issue since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision two years ago. Alsobrooks, who throughout this year’s Democratic primary advocated that Roe v. Wade be codified into federal law, argued that a Republican Senate majority facilitated by a Hogan win could instead open the way for enactment of a national abortion ban.
In response, Hogan, who throughout much of his political career had been an abortion opponent, this year sought to position himself as a full-throated abortion rights advocate – notwithstanding a drumbeat of criticism from abortion rights proponents that as governor he had vetoed a bill designed to provide increased access to abortion services.
As he entered the Senate race, Hogan vowed to oppose a national abortion ban favored by several Senate Republicans — but nevertheless found himself in a politically awkward position, as he sought to straddle his Republican base and the state’s heavily Democratic electorate.
He declined to say whether he would support a codification of Roe v. Wade until a couple of days after emerging as the winner of the Republican Senate primary in May, when he endorsed such a move in an interview with the New York Times. During the general election campaign, the Alsobrooks campaign was the beneficiary of a battery of TV ads sponsored by Women Vote!, a political action committee that backs pro-abortion rights Democratic women.
As of mid-October, that group had spent nearly $8 million to take aim at Hogan on that issue.
Hotly contested race defied state’s political norms
This year’s hotly contested race was the exception to the political norm in Maryland — a solidly blue jurisdiction where general election faceoffs for the Senate have usually been one-sided affairs of late.
That’s the way the 2024 contest appeared to be headed until Hogan announced that he was getting in on the last day prior to the February filing deadline for the May primary.
The relative novelty of a highly competitive Senate race in Maryland brought a torrent of campaign money, much of it coming from donors outside the state via independent expenditure political action committees – so-called “super PACs.”
As of mid-October, Open Secrets – a non-partisan, Washington-based group that tracks money raised and spent in federal elections – put Maryland among the 10 most expensive Senate races in the country during the 2024 general election cycle.
Based on available public disclosure reports as the campaign entered its final three-week homestretch, the candidates’ personal campaign committees already had spent a total of $34.7 million since announcing their candidacies: Alsobrooks in May 2023, and Hogan in February.
But the amount spent by the candidates’ committees was outdistanced by the roughly $48.1 million spent by outside groups — many of them underwriting saturation TV ad efforts to promote or criticize one of the two major candidates.
According to Open Secrets, more than half of this outside spending came from one pro-Hogan super PAC: Maryland’s Future, which drew from a group of Republican megadonors seeking to restore a majority for their party in the Senate. Through mid-October, Maryland’s Future reported spending stood at $25.7 million — largely for TV ads taking aim at a controversy involving the taxes owed on a couple of real estate properties owned by Alsobrooks.
The primary: Alsobrooks vs. Trone
Alsobrooks, who entered the contest to succeed Cardin in mid-2023 with widespread backing from the state’s Democratic political establishment, was initially seen as a heavy favorite to win her party’s nomination in the May 2024 primary.
But she was put on the political defensive when her major intraparty rival, Trone — co-owner of Total Wine & More, a nationwide chain of alcohol beverage retail outlets – began funneling his personal fortune into the campaign.
By the end of the primary, Trone had directed nearly $62.8 million of his own assets – just short of a national record for a self-financed Senate race — into the contest. It allowed him to mount a TV and digital ad campaign that started in the fall of 2023 and ran continuously for nearly eight months until the May primary.
In a primary contest in which the policy differences of Alsobrooks and Trone were largely imperceptible, the race nonetheless became heated in its final months – as a series of polls showed Trone taking the lead. Alsobrooks sought to make an issue of her opponent’s near-record self-financing, and, after Hogan’s surprise entry into the Senate battle in early 2024, Alsobrooks and Trone jousted over who was in the better position to defeat the popular former governor.
Ultimately, as Democratic voters began to focus on the primary contest in the closing weeks, Alsobrooks pulled ahead. She defeated Trone, 53% to 43%, aided by the solid support of leading state Democrats such as Gov. Wes Moore and U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Kensington – along with some ill-timed verbal gaffes by Trone in the closing weeks.
On the Republican side, Hogan had little trouble earning his party’s nomination — winning two-thirds of the primary vote to defeat a half-dozen political novices and perennial candidates.
Alsobrooks takes lead in general election’s closing days
Heading into the general election, polling showed a tight race, with Alsobrooks increasing her margin throughout the fall against Hogan. The former governor had enjoyed extremely high approval ratings throughout his two terms, despite his status as a Republican in a state with a 2-1 Democratic registration edge.
Rather than seeking to put a dent in Hogan’s still-high personal popularity among voters, Alsobrooks and her allies adopted a strategy of tying Hogan to some leading Democratic bete noires, including former President Donald Trump and outgoing U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. It dovetailed with Democratic warnings that electing Hogan could return the Senate – currently with a 51-49 Democratic majority – to Republican control.
Democrats played up McConnell’s public boast that he had recruited Hogan to run for the seat, even as Hogan sought to downplay such comments – insisting it was his wife, Yumi Hogan, who convinced him to get into the Senate race.
Hogan – a frequent critic of Trump going back to when he was governor – found himself in an uncomfortable position when Trump issued a lukewarm endorsement of him in June. “I’m about the party and I’m about the country. And I would like to see him win,” Trump told reporters when asked about Hogan’s Senate candidacy. A Hogan campaign spokesperson issued a statement saying Hogan “has been clear he is not supporting Donald Trump just as he didn’t in 2016 and 2020.”
But Hogan gave the Democrats a rhetorical target on this matter in the closing days of the campaign, after CNN reported that Hogan had touted the Trump endorsement in a private call with donors, while suggesting that it helped him with Trump’s “hard core” supporters.
Hogan said Tuesday that he had left the presidential line on his ballot blank this year.
“I’m going to be a maverick. … I’m gonna be a guy down there in the middle of everything,” Hogan vowed during a radio interview in late summer, even as the Alsobrooks campaign ran ads with a video clip showing Hogan saying he was a “lifelong Republican” who would caucus with the GOP if elected.
Hogan’s allies were given a political opening in late September, when CNN reported that, for more than a decade, Alsobrooks had improperly taken homestead credits on properties she owned in Maryland and the District of Columbia but in which she did not reside. Alsobrooks promised to pay back taxes forgiven as a result of the credits, with an Alsobrooks spokesperson saying she had not applied for the credits on either residence – and not been aware previously of the problem.
In the case of the D.C. property – which was transferred to Alsobrooks by her grandmother more than two decades ago – Alsobrooks in October made a nearly $18,000 payment to cover property taxes she owed. However, D.C. officials told WJLA-TV that another $29,900 – representing a penalty and a portion of the interest on what she owed – had been “abated.” It prompted the Maryland’s Future super PAC to air negative ads – whose veracity was challenged by the Alsobrooks campaign – targeting the Democrat for not paying this portion of the tax debt.
Meanwhile, Hogan last month found himself again under scrutiny for an issue that had been raised during his tenure as governor – whether he had sufficiently shielded himself from conflicts-of-interest arising from his ownership of a large real estate brokerage firm. When Hogan became governor, the Maryland State Ethics Commission – rather than insisting his real estate holdings be placed in a blind trust – approved a trust agreement that the governor said would prevent conflicts-of-interest but allow him to remain apprised of matters relating to the real estate firm.
Time magazine reported last month that, during Hogan’s two terms, nearly 40% of the competitive affordable housing awards overseen by the governor went to developers listed as clients on the Hogan firm’s website. In addition, as a member of the Maryland Board of Public Works, Hogan voted on five occasions to issue additional loans or grants to four of those developers, according to public records examined by the publication.
The Hogan campaign denied any wrongdoing, telling Time that Hogan was not involved in the projects and followed all ethics laws. But Maryland Democratic leaders announced plans to consider legislation in next year’s General Assembly session requiring future governors to put their assets in a blind trust in such instances, while a super PAC with ties to Moore, Hogan’s successor, began running TV ads highlighting the reporting in the Time story.
