The Senate race where a Republican is winning over Democrats

Thursday was the perfect weather to do some last-minute voter canvassing. Larry Hogan said he might just do that.

Maryland’s former two-term governor is in the home stretch of a Senate campaign which began only in February — a run, he says, that was born out of frustration over the inaction just a short drive away in Washington, particularly as the Senate this year failed to reach a compromise (once again) on border security and immigration reform.

He was outside of the Odenton library on Thursday with less than a week to go in the election, revving up a small crowd of volunteers who were greeting early voters. Hogan spoke to a handful of supporters and journalists on scene and projected confidence, remarking that in every race he’d run, “everyone has always counted us out, and we’ve always come out on top”.

A line for early voting stretched out the door and around the corner of the library behind him as he spoke.

Tuesday may be the sharpest challenge to that attitude yet. Hogan is facing Angela Alsobrooks, county executive of Prince George’s County, in a highly unique race for the US Senate defined in many ways by the ex-governor’s rejection of former President Donald Trump and the “MAGA” brand. Months of campaigning on both sides have focused on efforts to define his image — Hogan’s team painting him as an independent, John McCain-style maverick unafraid to stand up to party and willing to work across the aisle; Democrats writing him off as as willing to hand the Senate gavel over under a possible second Trump presidency.

Recent polling of the race from the University of Maryland and Washington Post has the governor trailing his opponent by 12 points. Rhetoric from both candidates suggests that the margin may be slimmer, though Alsobrooks still heads into Election Day with a clear advantage. She was in Annapolis on Wednesday, speaking with her campaign’s volunteers in a nearly identical setting outside of a rec center, where voters were shuffling in to cast ballots.

“I love the energy. I feel really good about the turnout. We've received a lot of very positive feedback at the polling places,” the county executive told reporters on Wednesday outside of the voting center.

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Adding that she was not “taking anything for granted”, Alsobrooks called the race “competitive” while explaining the issues she was finding resonated the loudest with suburbanites.

“What I can tell you is that we do all want the same thing,” said Alsobrooks. “I am feeling convinced, I've been able to talk to families all over the state, and most are concerned about economic opportunity… tax cuts for the middle class, want to bring down the cost of goods. Choice is a huge issue. I'm seeing cross-generational voters who are coming out, from the youngest voters to the oldest voters, and fathers and uncles and grandfathers who are very concerned about choice.”

Alsobrooks’ allies have hammered the former governor over reporting in Time claiming that Hogan’s family benefited from state programs to convert properties into affordable housing complexes, and separately claiming that he used the powers of his office to enrich his real estate firm. Hogan has said the claims reported by Time are false.

One Hogan campaign ally who spoke to The Independent on Thursday noted the appearance of Barack Obama at a New Carrollton phone bank for Alsobrooks, following President Joe Biden’s visit to an ice cream parlor in the city — all within the past few days.

“They’re running scared, and completely desperate,” said the GOP operative.

Alsobrooks, meanwhile, faces her own gauntlet on the issue of crime. Prince George’s County has struggled with waves of crimes, including armed carjackings. Republican groups are attacking her over this issue, as well as a tax issue where she was found to have improperly claimed some deductions — which she has since promised to repay.

On Wednesday, the county executive followed up her meet-and-greet with early voters with a visit to First Baptist Church, a historic place of worship open since the late 1800s, and gave her stump speech. The crowd, a group of a few dozen mostly Black residents of Annapolis, indicated that most of them had already cast ballots, but were still excited for her visit.

Maryland’s Senate race is coming down to a turnout battle, and it’s being fought in the final days in the state’s mazelike suburban neighborhoods. For Alsobrooks, it will mean turning out voters in and around Annapolis, Baltimore, and around the DC beltway. Her opponent, meanwhile, is hoping places like the red-purple suburb of Severna Park and other communities separating those three cities will push him over the top.

The state’s hyperpolitical atmosphere is a residual symptom of Maryland’s cessation of territory to create the District of Columbia in 1790. It’s still home to a sizable and seemingly ever-growing contingent of federal employees, a trend that is continuing with the relocation of the FBI’s headquarters to Greenbelt, down the road from NASA’s Goddard Space Center.

In 2024, that raises a peculiar dynamic. While the state is heavily Democratic in its congressional delegation, it often flirts with Republicans in the governor’s mansion, including with Hogan for two terms and Bob Ehrlich in the 2000s. Nowhere else in the country sees a Republican candidate running competitively in a blue state with the backing of many Democrats, particularly given the MAGA bent of the GOP. And none of the other 2024 Republican Senate candidates were vocal supporters of the effort to impeach Donald Trump after the 2021 insurrection.

But many residents — especially including Democrats who may have supported Hogan when he was governor — are squeamish about the idea of a Republican majority in the Senate, and are being bombarded with ads claiming that electing Hogan will be a vote for Trump’s agenda in the upper chamber.

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One older Democratic voter named Janet who left her polling place in Annapolis on Wednesday as Alsobrooks was out front told The Independent that she was having “nightmares” over the idea of Rick Scott or another Republican senator in control of the upper chamber’s agenda.

The former governor has sought to belay these concerns by tying himself to McCain and other politicians known for being decisive votes on key legislation — a prospect, he says, that is more valuable to Maryland than a party-line vote. He also stressed in a brief interview on Thursday, as he has in the past, that he does not believe the path to a GOP Senate majority runs through his state. That fate is sealed, he argues, by the dynamics of races in West Virginia, Montana, and possibly even Ohio.

A Hogan campaign volunteer outside the Odenton polling place, Vickie Calhoun, confirmed that the argument over the specter of a Republican Senate majority was the toughest (and most frequent) sell that canvassers were making to voters.

Retired from the Army, Calhoun added that she was supporting the governor in part due to her frustration with Maryland’s Democratic establishment and the mismanagement of resources by local and state agencies.

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The former governor, asked by The Independent on Thursday to grade the success of his work to convince suburban Democrats to back him, responded: “My opponent is running her entire campaign based on [the idea that] ‘you have to vote Democrat because we have to have control’.”

Noting that he had “seven different commercials” running with Marylanders — including Democrats —voicing them, Hogan went on to say that he was confident that he had been successful in persuading voters of the value of an independent vote.

“I think we're convincing a lot of folks,” he said. “I think we have more crossover votes than any Senate candidate in America. I think I'm the only one that's running ahead of the top of the ticket, and it's a close race, but I believe next Tuesday, we're going to surprise a lot of people and pull off another big upset.”