Exactly a year and a day after Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Baltimore) announced on May 1, 2023, that he would not seek another term–ending an 18-year tenure in the Senate and 58 consecutive years in public office–early voting gets underway Thursday in both parties to choose his successor.
The focus is on the 10-candidate Democratic primary, which is effectively a contest between Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks and U.S. Rep. David Trone of Potomac. The political fortunes of the two have shifted over the past 12 months in a race that has become increasingly nasty as voters go to the polls over the next week in advance of the May 14 primary.
Alsobrooks and Trone declared their candidacies within days after Cardin announced he would not seek a fourth Senate term, and–for the next nine months–the two were engaged in a primary election battle in which the winner was seen as a slam dunk to ultimately become the state’s next U.S. senator.
Then, on Feb. 9 of this year–hours before the filing deadline–former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, after months of disavowing interest in serving in the Senate, shifted course and announced he would run. Hogan is considered the favorite to win his party’s nomination in a field of seven primary candidates, a group consisting largely of political novices and perennial contenders.
Early polling shows 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 a general election contest. His entry into the race has turned Maryland into a battleground state in the fall election, with whomever emerges as the Democratic nominee expected to relentlessly remind voters in this blue state that control of the Senate–where Democrats now hold a slim 51-49 edge–could be at stake.
In the closing weeks of a Democratic primary in which there have been no major differences between the two candidates on policy, the contest has in part become a debate over who is best positioned to defeat Hogan in November. Alsobrooks and Trone also have found themselves repeatedly arguing over whose resume is better suited for success in the Senate–along with the manner in which they are financing their respective campaigns.
Alsobrooks–elected executive of Prince George’s, the state’s second largest county, in 2018 after two terms as state’s attorney–is vying to become Maryland’s first Black senator. For much of 2023, she was seen as the clear frontrunner, with the bulk of the state’s top Democratic elected officials–led by Gov. Wes Moore and U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Montgomery County resident–endorsing her. Cardin has chosen to remain neutral in the Democratic primary to choose his successor.
There was even speculation for a time that Trone might opt to drop out of the Senate race and instead seek re-election in western Maryland-based District 6, which he has represented since 2018. “The insiders all thought this would be a coronation. It’s not,” Trone observed wryly during the only televised debate of the primary campaign late last month. “I’ve been the underdog from Day One.”
The driving factor in changing the political dynamic of the race was Trone’s willingness to utilize his personal fortune to largely self-finance his campaign–and boost his familiarity among the statewide electorate. Trone, co-owner of Total Wine & More–a nationwide chain of alcohol beverage retail outlets–went on television beginning in September with an advertising campaign in markets across Maryland and has remained on the air since.
Recent independent polls have given Trone the lead going into the homestretch of the primary contest, although the Alsobrooks campaign recently released a poll it commissioned that showed the race to be a statistical tie.
As of the end of March, Trone had spent $41.7 million out of his own pocket, making him the fourth largest self-funding Senate candidate in U.S. history–and counting. (Updated campaign disclosure reports, covering the most of April, are due to be filed by the candidates with the Federal Election Commission by late Thursday).
Alsobrooks, whose campaign has relied entirely on outside donors, has been outspent by Trone by a ratio of more than 10-1, according to the latest available figures. She did not go on television in the pricey Washington, D.C., market until about a month ago, although she began a TV ad campaign in the Baltimore area several weeks prior to that.
Her ads in the closing days of the primary campaign have emphasized the number of endorsements she has racked up from elected officials, which she has touted as a significant advantage in her ability to go head-to-head with Hogan in the fall. Besides Moore and Van Hollen, her endorsements encompass six of Trone’s seven Democratic colleagues in Maryland’s U.S. House delegation–including Rep. Jamie Raskin of Takoma Park, who last summer flirted for weeks with getting into the Senate contest himself before deciding to seek re-election to the House.
At the same time, Trone has increasingly picked up endorsements among state and local officials as his campaign has gained momentum–notably from a number of officeholders in Alsobrooks’ home base of Prince George’s County. They have been featured in a Trone ad that has run frequently in recent days, in which several of the officials question Alsobrooks’ record of accomplishment.
An early version of the ad featured a clip from Prince George’s County Councilmember Edward Burroughs declaring, “The U.S. Senate is not a place for training wheels”–triggering an aggressive counterattack from supporters of Alsbrooks within her home county. Subsequent versions of the ad being aired have dropped the “training wheels” comment.
Despite three terms in the House, Trone has sought to portray himself as a political outsider. “The biggest thing that distinguishes my candidacy is that I’m not a career politician who just goes from one job to the next job to the next job. I’m a public servant,” Trone declared in a swipe at Alsobrooks during a recent debate.
Alsobrooks, who has spent her entire career in government, has responded with assertions that her time in public administration has given her resume a dimension that Trone lacks. She also has increasingly taken aim at the use of his personal largesse to underwrite his candidacy.
After Trone again boasted of not accepting political contributions from political action committees (PACs) and corporate lobbyist, Alsobrooks–at a Democratic candidate forum in Silver Spring in March–shot back: “He’s a one-man super PAC: He doesn’t take money, he gives it. He gives it trying to buy an election here, over and over again.”
Her campaign has sought to call attention to Trone’s donations to numerous elected officials who have endorsed his campaign; a recent search of federal and state campaign records by The Baltimore Sun identified more than 50 elected officials to whom Trone has donated who, in turn, are backing him. Included are a number of the more than 60 House members outside of Maryland who have endorsed his Senate bid.
To be sure, most of Trone’s contributions to those endorsing him have been relatively modest, although Trone and his wife, June, in 2022 donated $350,000 to an independent ad campaign boosting the candidacy of now-Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown. Brown recently became the only statewide elected official to endorse Trone, who has described Brown as a friend since the latter was lieutenant governor under then-Gov. Martin O’Malley.
For his part, Trone has sought to highlight Alsobrooks’ acceptance of contributions from various interest groups. During their televised debate last month, Trone’s campaign issued a press released pointing to “more than $230,000” that Alsobrooks had received from energy and utility firms, along with another $50,000 in donations to her campaign from groups representing the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
A call by Alsobrooks during that debate to increase corporate taxes to deal with the ballooning federal debt prompted Trone to swipe, “It’s going to be tough to raise taxes on those big companies when you’re taking all their dollars: That’s a challenge.”
Abortion rights have been a repeated flash point during the Alsobrooks-Trone contest, even though both candidates are united in advocating that provisions of the Roe v. Wade decision overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022 be codified into law. Trone has pointed to helping to set up a reproductive services clinic in western Maryland, to increase access to abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, while questioning what Alsobrooks did in Prince George’s County to facilitate abortion access during that period.
Alsobrooks, meanwhile, has frequently cited contributions that Trone–personally and through Total Wine & More–made to anti-abortion candidates for state office in states such as Georgia and Texas over more than two decades. EMILY’s List, a pro-abortion Democratic PAC that has endorsed Alsobrooks, puts the total of these donations at around $500,000.
Trone has characterized 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 has donated to Democrats at the federal level over the same period.
Alsobrooks and Trone are on the same page in taking aim at Hogan on the abortion issue: Since announcing his Senate candidacy, Hogan 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. The Democratic candidates also have pointed to Hogan’s veto of legislation passed in 2022 by the Maryland General Assembly intended to increase abortion access by lifting a restriction that only physicians could perform abortions.
A recent Baltimore Sun/University of Baltimore poll showed Hogan with about two-thirds of the vote in the May 14 Republican primary, despite his pointed past criticisms of former President Donald Trump, the party’s presumptive 2024 presidential nominee–who, by all indications, remains popular among rank-and-file Republicans in Maryland.
Hogan has been campaigning around the state while ignoring his six Republican primary opponents, who include 2022 Senate nominee Chris Chaffee and long-time gadfly and Boyds resident Robin Ficker–who has spent more than $1.6 million out of his own pocket in his latest bid for elected office. Although the Hogan campaign has not responded to multiple requests from MoCo360 regarding his campaign schedule, it appears that Hogan has not appeared at any of a number of Republican candidate forums held around the state in the runup to the primary.