The Senate Race the Democrats Absolutely, Totally, Utterly Have to Win

It’s an overcast Saturday morning at what outwardly appears to be a rural county fairground in Maryland. But it’s not. It may have once been rural, but Howard County Fairgrounds is now in the middle of the sprawling Baltimore-Washington metroplex, and no livestock is being shown off today. Instead, a large shed on the fairground is the site of the annual Festival of India. There are long rows of booths selling saris and samosas with a stage being prepped for a performance of Bhangra dance. 

And, in the middle of all of it, being greeted like a celebrity, is Larry Hogan. The former Maryland governor is hoping to be the first Republican to win a Senate election in the Old Line State in generations. Emerging from a black SUV, surrounded by a cadre of aides in campaign polo shirts, Hogan works the crowd in the manner of a practiced retail politician. He takes a photo with attendees in Team India cricket jerseys, insisting, “I’m an honorary member of Team India” while commiserating with a business owner complaining about the state of affairs in Baltimore City. “It’s taken 50 years to get that way, it’ll take 50 years to turn it around,” Hogan says grimly. 

But the moment that says the most about the race is not any of his retail politicking as he poses for pictures in a turban and sips a mango lassi. Instead, it comes as Hogan greets a volunteer at a booth for the Maryland Democratic Party. “Keep Maryland Blue?” he says as he reads the sign. “I just want you all to make it purple.”

Even making Maryland purple would be a hard task. The state has become a Democratic stronghold in recent decades, one that Joe Biden won by nearly 2-to-1 margin in 2020. It is by far the least competitive state at the presidential level to have a contested Senate race this year. But this race is competitive, with tens of millions of dollars being spent on television either on Hogan’s behalf or that of his Democratic opponent, Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks. Recent polls in the race show Alsobrooks pulling ahead of her Republican opponent, but Hogan will benefit from a huge influx of money in the final weeks of the campaign as an allied super PAC is dumping nearly $20 million on television on his behalf.

The hope for Republicans is that Hogan’s unique status as the rare Republican to win statewide here will translate into success in a federal election. Hogan, a successful real estate developer and Republican political scion, narrowly won election in 2014 against a lackluster and overconfident opponent. He then won reelection four years later against an even weaker Democrat whose poorly run campaign was openly scoffed at by party insiders. Yet the key to Hogan’s electoral success wasn’t just dumb luck. A talented retail campaigner, Hogan carefully cultivated an image of a Republican moderate enough to appeal to suburban Democrats while trying to avoid overly antagonizing the party’s right-wing base. He’s never supported Donald Trump. Instead, he’s always written in a noncandidate. (In 2020, Hogan cast his presidential vote for Ronald Reagan, who was ineligible both because of the Twenty-Second Amendment and because of his death in 2004.)

Hogan also benefited from the fact that he always had to deal with Democratic supermajorities in the state legislature. This meant that there was never any significant public pressure forcing him to embrace progressive political priorities since he could not block them. The legislature would repeatedly pass progressive legislation, Hogan would then veto the bill, and it would become law anyway after his veto was quickly overridden. He did deal with several flashpoints, though, including using his authority as governor to block nearly a billion dollars in federal funding for a light rail scheme, the Red Line, through Baltimore that had been decades in the planning, as well as facing ethics scrutiny over allegations that he instead advanced road projects near properties owned by his family real estate company.

One of those vetoes has taken on an extra life in this campaign. In 2022, Hogan vetoed a bill to expand abortion access in Maryland. The veto was promptly overridden, but it’s taken on huge political significance. It came only months before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was released, overturning Roe v. Wade. 

The decision made abortion a key electoral issue in a way that it hadn’t been for decades. Maryland is a state where abortion rights have constitutional protections, but the issue has still dominated the race. Ads on abortion are inescapable in Maryland. Alsobrooks attacks her Republican opponent as a foe of abortion rights who would vote to confirm more Trump judges, while Hogan has insisted that he is pro-choice and would support legislation to codify Roe v. Wade into law.   

Speaking to The New Republic, Hogan cast himself as an independent who would make decisions on judicial nominations solely on the merits. “If I think judges are not qualified that are put up by President Kamala Harris or President Donald Trump, I’ll stand up to them. But if I think they’re qualified, then I’ll support them,” he said. Hogan simply refused to answer whether he thought all nine of the current justices on the Supreme Court from Ketanji Brown Jackson to Clarence Thomas would have earned his support and if he felt comfortable with them on the court. “I’m just not gonna answer that question,” he said snippily. “I’m not going to go back in time if I were in the Senate.”

He also shared his resentment at Alsobrooks attacking him on abortion. “It’s frankly one of the most disgraceful things I’ve seen,” he said, “and I think it’s hurting her really badly, because people are fed up with that kind of toxic politics, particularly, you know, dirty smear campaigns that are false.”

Instead, Hogan tried to paint himself as a bipartisan figure, touting polling numbers that showed his strong support from independents and high approval rating in the state after two terms in office. “There’s no one in America who has stood up to Trump more than me,” he boasted, adding, “I’m currently the only candidate in the country that’s running ahead of him in any race, and even with Republicans.”

The former Maryland governor insisted he would be an independent voice, touting Joe Manchin and John McCain as role models and citing his work for No Labels, where “for three and a half years, I was co-chair with Joe Lieberman.” He sought to cast himself as a figure beyond partisanship.

“I’m only running because I’m concerned about the country, and if people simply want to vote party line, I’m going to lose 2-to-1,” said Hogan. “I think if they want to change Washington, and they feel like, I think, the exhausted majority of Marylanders and Americans, that Washington’s completely broken and nothing but divisiveness and dysfunction, maybe they’re willing to try something different.”

In contrast, Alsobrooks did not hesitate to cast the race as a simple matter of partisanship. On a warm late-summer night, the Senate candidate made a brief appearance at a bar in South Baltimore. It was a gathering of Democratic regulars in a gentrified neighborhood of row houses only blocks from the Inner Harbor. The bar had various fishing memorabilia on the wall and had regulars glued to a baseball game on television, along with a table where one could get $10 tarot card readings and the flag of a Brazilian soccer team drooping from the ceiling.

The Democratic hopeful showed up to make a quick appearance, get some earned media in the state’s largest city, and recite her stump speech to emphasize the key point: Larry Hogan is a Republican. Angela Alsobrooks is not.

After a raucous introduction from a local state legislator, Alsobrooks went into her 10-minute stump speech. “Mitch McConnell handpicked my opponent and believes he would give their party the best chance to be in control of the Senate, and to be clear, whoever has the majority in the Senate of the United States decides the agenda for our country,” she said. And, she added, there are two parties and two agendas: “One is led by Kamala Harris, and the other is led by Donald Trump.”

Not that Hogan’s personal popularity was an issue for Alsobrooks in a crowd in which attendees swapped tales of their activism or service on the Democratic State Central Committee, but she addressed it anyway. “This election is not about whether we like my opponent, whether he is a nice guy, whether he should be elected as governor, but who would have the fifty-first vote” in the United States Senate. 

Afterward, when asked by The New Republic about why the most important issue for Marylanders should be abortion laws in other states, Alsobrooks answered this way: “Prior to Roe, we were told that Roe was well-settled law and that we could just trust that this was a settled issue and that it was safe until it wasn’t.… And so we need the security of having it enshrined in the Constitution.” When pressed on why that should be a priority, she insisted, “Marylanders are voting again to ensure that their daughters and granddaughters have full autonomy over their bodies. That’s what this vote is about.”

In a longer phone interview, Alsobrooks again emphasized these points, saying that Hogan was on the same side as Lindsey Graham and Donald Trump and citing the former governor’s praise of the Supreme Court justices nominated during Trump’s term in the White House. 

She could not bring herself to offer any criticism of Harris and Biden though. “I don’t know that anybody agrees with 100 percent of what anyone does, but I can tell you this, I do agree that President Biden and Kamala Harris have the best interests of our country in mind. They did a really tremendous job as president and vice president, and I agree with the job they’ve done,” she said.

The Senate also deals with foreign policy. Like Hogan, Alsobrooks has taken conventional foreign policy stances as a strong supporter of both Ukraine and Israel. She’s less adept when moving to foreign policy topics that aren’t dominating the headlines. When asked what the U.S. response should be in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Alsobrooks offered nonspecific clichés about the need to “work with our allies and continuing to support and grow the relationships in NATO.”

However, while being a senator requires knowing foreign policy, the cliché “all politics is local” still holds some import, and Alsobrooks took a shot at Hogan for his cancellation of the Red Line. “Larry Hogan turned his back on Baltimore, that he uses the style of politics, which pits one part of the state against the other.”

This criticism was echoed by one of Alsobrooks’s top surrogates, Wes Moore, Hogan’s successor as governor. Moore, a Baltimore resident before taking office, expressed his concern in an interview about whether Hogan would work to deliver federal money to the state’s largest city. “I think all Baltimoreans and everybody who lives in the Baltimore region should be typically concerned,” he said. When asked if how Hogan talked about the largest city of the state was racially coded, Moore agreed. “It was certainly a lot of that,” said the state’s first African American governor. “Because it was almost like when he was speaking about Baltimore, he was never speaking to Baltimore. He was speaking to everybody else, and everybody knew exactly what that dog whistle was.” 

Hogan, though, has overperformed in Baltimore as he has throughout the state. In 2018, the Republican got 30 percent of the vote in the city, which seems meager until one realizes that Trump barely cracked 10 percent there. The key for Hogan in this race is to pick up votes in the suburbs of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. This includes a broad coalition of centrist Democrats who supported Hogan’s stewardship of the state, Jewish voters anxious about the rising prominence of anti-Israel Democrats in recent years, and independents and moderate Republicans for whom Trump is anathema but who are by no means instinctively Democratic. Hogan also needs to make real gains compared to Trump among Black and Hispanic voters in a majority-minority state where over a third of residents are Black.

Democrats vastly outnumber the competition in this state. They made up a majority of the state’s registered voters according to the most recent data from the state Board of Elections. The Old Line State had 2.2 million Democrats, with just over a million Republicans and another 925,000 voters without any party affiliation. This means Hogan has to win a significant number of the opposition party. He also has to face a presidential-year electorate with many voters who don’t vote in off-year races. More than three million votes were cast in Maryland in the 2020 presidential election. This figure was 700,000 greater than the number of votes cast in the governor’s race just two years before, and 1.4 million more than in Hogan’s first election in 2014. 

Despite all these structural advantages for Democrats, the race will remain close and, at the very least, Hogan will have forced Democrats to divert resources from other races in order to play defense in a state that has not elected a Republican senator since 1980, when incumbent Republican Charles “Mac” Mathias was a solid progressive—one of the last of a now-extinct breed of liberal Republican—who faced political threats only from his right.

It’s not an easy path for the former governor but, then again, he’s not trying to make Maryland red, he’s just trying to turn it purple. And that’s the nightmare for national Democrats, because a purple Maryland means a safely Republican-controlled Senate.