Americana

Democrats never expected this Senate primary to have such high stakes

THE SCENE

SILVER SPRING, Md. – On Wednesday afternoon, nine Latino Democrats gathered outside the Veterans Plaza polling place here to explain how a 68-year-old white congressman had won their vote.

They trusted Rep. David Trone, the wealthy founder of Total Wine; they didn’t trust Angela Alsobrooks, the Prince George’s County executive. She took Latinos “for granted,” protected “racist police,” and didn’t work quickly to end “racist” immigration enforcement policies. Alsobrooks, who if elected would be Maryland’s first Black female senator, didn’t celebrate diversity like Trone did.

“It’s important to him,” said Celina Benitez, the mayor of Mount Rainier. “Why else would you have so many elected officials, of varied diversity, here supporting him?”

Two hours later, four former state Democratic Party chairs came to the same plaza, warning that Trone had gone too negative and that non-white Democrats might struggle to support him.

“It’s really difficult,” said former chair Susie Turnbull, referring to an incident when Trone meant to use the word “bugaboo” but said a racial slur instead, apologizing immediately. “His excuses for things have been apologies with a ‘but.’ Using a term that is horrendous, and then you say ‘I’d never used that word before?’ He’s my age. I know he’s heard that word before.”

DAVID’S VIEW

Maryland’s Democratic primary is the most expensive in the country, thanks almost entirely to Trone; he’s sunk $61.8 million into this race, after spending tens of millions of dollars on four House campaigns, blanketing airwaves and YouTube with his Horatio Alger story. Alsobrooks, who went on the air in February, has spent a tenth as much.

At a Tuesday night rally at Silver Spring’s AFI movie theater, where California Rep. Adam Schiff praised Trone’s “understanding of our economy” and ability to “defend our democracy,” Trone’s ads played on the big screen while a few dozen voters took their seats — so many that over 15 minutes of “I approved this message”-ing, no ad was played twice.

Yet the race remains close. Its final weeks have become an increasingly personal, tense contest between candidates battling over intertwined issues around race and who is best positioned to defend what until recently had been considered a safe seat.

Republicans haven’t won here since 1980, and the Donald Trump-led GOP is practically designed to lose in Maryland: Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, D.C. suburbs that cast nearly a million votes in 2020, gave less than 150,000 of them to Trump.

But the surprise decision by popular former Gov. Larry Hogan, a moderate anti-Trump Republican, has turned the general into a tossup. For the Democrats, that’s exponentially increased the stakes of their primary.

“Hogan’s entrance ended our complacency about the fall election,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, who has endorsed Alsobrooks, and beat Trone in 2016 to win his safe Montgomery County seat. (Trone got to Congress by spending $18 million in the neighboring, competitive 8th District.)

Since Hogan’s entrance in February, Trone has made his personal fortune a centerpiece of his pitch: If he wins the nomination, Democrats won’t have to spend cash in Maryland that they’d earmarked for Ohio, Montana, or other competitive states.

“It will give them a lot more flexibility to spend money elsewhere,” Trone told Semafor on Tuesday. “I’m sure that will appeal to Leader Schumer.”

The deep-pockets argument, along with Trone’s years of party donations and go-everywhere campaigning, helped him win over many Democrats who repeat his argument: He has more relevant experience than Alsobrooks, and he can win. But most of the state’s congressional delegation has stuck with Alsobrooks, confident that Hogan’s support will fade by November and wary of once again telling Black voters — who make up a third of the state’s electorate — that it’s not their turn yet.

Maryland Democrats previously rejected Black candidates when Senate seats opened up 2006 and 2016 — agonizing about it the whole time, then winning the general anyway. Neither of those races divided elected Democrats like this; Ben Cardon and Chris Van Hollen, the winners in those years, had most of the establishment behind them. But Gov. Wes Moore, the first Black Marylander to hold that office, endorsed Alsobrooks six months ago; Adrienne Jones, the first Black female state House Speaker, beat him to it.

Moore told Semafor that the electability concerns about Alsobrooks, who has out-raised Hogan, were misplaced: “Regardless of what happens in a primary, every single one of us are going to be all in to make sure that our nominee” wins the race.

Alsobrooks goes further, suggesting she may be better positioned to unite the party’s diverse wings come the general.

“What’s going to be needed is a coalition of people from all backgrounds who will come together to defeat Larry Hogan,” Alsobrooks told Semafor after stopping to talk to voters at an early voting site in Bowie. “I’m the person who has the experience of doing that.” The evidence that Trone’s wealth wasn’t insurance against a Hogan win, she said, was that Trone had outspent her all year, and she’d closed the gap.

Trone, for his part, has consistently highlighted support from non-white and female Democrats in his omnipresent TV spots; Black men who’d benefited from his investments in criminal justice reform, women of all races who were helped by his support for family planning. He could even get to the county executive’s left on some issues. Trone had always opposed the death penalty; Alsobrooks would only say, passively, that Maryland had banned it.

The candidates didn’t disagree on much else, so Alsobrooks’s supporters homed in on how Trone — and his surrogates — talked. In March, after Prince George’s County Council Member Ed Burroughs said in one Trone ad that the Senate was not a job for people with “training wheels,” more than 600 Black women co-signed a letter that denounced its “tones of misogyny and racism.”

That comment was struck from the ad, but the attention hurt Trone. In Silver Spring, pressed on the “training wheels” quote, Trone noted that he didn’t say it in the ad; when a reporter pointed out that Trone had used the same phrase, the candidate said that “we stand by the fact that Burroughs made the comment, and, frankly, she doesn’t have the experience at the federal level.” What mattered, he explained, was what he was going to do with the Senate seat.

“I have supported wonderful women and diverse candidates all over this country, and will continue to do so,” Trone said. “But what the voters keep saying, time and time again, is look at what I can do for you.”

But as early voting wrapped up, Trone’s non-white surrogates kept saying what he’d been told not to say: Alsobrooks wasn’t ready for the job, or sensitive enough to other non-white Democrats. “We need someone who can be effective from day one,” Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Aisha Braveboy said on Thursday, when pro-Trone Democrats gathered at a union hall to support him to argue that voters needed to look past the candidates’ race.

“I wouldn’t vote for Candace Owens, no matter what she was running for,” said Krystal Oriadha, another county council member who’d rejected Alsobrooks. “The idea that we just have to vote for someone because of their gender, because of their color, negating any other issues, is insulting to us as a community.” (Owens is a high-profile Black conservative pundit.)

On the stump, Alsobrooks didn’t lead with her race or gender — and didn’t really need to. “She would certainly make history, but more importantly, she will make a difference,” Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock told reporters after a meeting with the candidate and Black pastors, redirecting a question about race to talk about the investments made by the Democratic Senate.

“My basic thought is positive politics, high road politics is what wins in Maryland,” Raskin said, asked about the challenges of facing the self-funding Trone. “I’ve told that to all the candidates. I think that that is the way to go.”

THE VIEW FROM VOTERS

Pat Moran, a Democrat who voted for Alsobrooks this week, said she was drawn to the candidate because of her experience fighting crime in the county. “You know what the crime is like; it’s off the chain,” she said. But the candidate’s identity mattered, too. “We need an African American in the Senate. We do need a balance of power in the Senate.”

Nagender Madavaram, an engineer who was supporting Trone, said that he made his mind up after watching the Democrat bring money back to Maryland and make his own charitable donations to good causes. “He’s allocated $300,000 to protect the rights of Muslims,” Madavaram said, “even though he married a Jewish lady. He’s a great guy. He never hesitated.”

THE VIEW FROM REPUBLICANS

“The Trone-Alsobrooks primary has quickly become the nastiest in the country,” said NRSC Spokesman Tate Mitchell. “Meanwhile, Governor Hogan has been traveling Maryland with a positive vision for bringing change to Washington. Larry Hogan remains overwhelmingly popular in the state, and it’s clear Marylanders are eager to see him represent them in the Senate.”

NOTABLE

• In Politico, Ally Mutnik looked at how Democrats’ “commitment to diversity” was being tested by the Hogan threat.

Ohio. Democrats balked at a Republican proposal to put Biden on the November ballot only if they agreed to ban any foreign money being spent on ballot initiatives. The GOP-led legislature had changed its ballot deadline in prior elections, with little debate and no conditions. This year, Republicans attached a rider that would have moved back the deadline — currently before Biden will be nominated at the Democratic National Convention — only if it prevented state campaigns from taking dark money from groups with non-American donors. “Democrats would rather protect Hansjörg Wyss than get Joe Biden on the statewide ballot,” said Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who campaigned against a successful abortion rights measure last year that got some support from groups tied to the Swiss billionaire. Democrats have told Semafor that they could sue to put Biden on the ballot, or hold a vote to officially nominate Biden before the ceremonial mid-August vote in Chicago.

Alsobrooks for Senate, “A Champion.” The newspaper endorsement ad still exists, but only for Democrats. (In Ohio’s GOP Senate primary, Bernie Moreno skipped a Cleveland Plain-Dealer interview and made fun of an opponent when the paper endorsed him.) On April 18, the Washington Post’s board backed Alsobrooks, and her campaign immediately cycled that into TV ads and stamped it on her lawn signs, independent proof of her credibility on the economy and “public safety.”

Black Bear PAC, “True Colors.” Two topics have dominated paid messaging in West Virginia’s GOP gubernatorial primary — which candidate is most supportive of Trump, and which can be trusted to fight “the transgender agenda.” This PAC, supporting Kia dealership owner Chris Miller, has now accused both Attorney Gen. Patrick Morrissey and ex-state Rep. Moore Capito of supporting gender medicine for minors. The evidence here is Capito’s vote for a ban on conversion therapy, which the ad calls a ploy to “protect woke counselors who push young children into gender transitions.”

Restoration PAC, “Tammy Baldwin: Senator for Madison, Not Wisconsin.” Funded largely by GOP billionaire Richard Uihlein, this PAC has tried twice to claim that the Democratic senator robbed Medicare to fund electric cars. Its first ad accused Baldwin of voting “to cut Medicare and use that money for electric vehicle subsidies.” Democrats filed a complaint — she had never voted to cut Medicare. That line was pulled down, replaced with a claim that Baldwin will “use Medicare money for electric vehicle subsidies,” which Democrats also dispute, because Medicare spending isn’t being redirected to anything.

We’re starting to get the first polling on how the electorate views campus pro-Palestine protests. In a good set of results for Joe Biden — he leads Trump by 6 points with this sample — Democrats (64%), non-white voters (54%), and voters under 35 (63%) support the protests. Every other demographic opposes them. That pattern holds up when voters are asked about encampments in particular, and when asked if the participants should be arrested, as close to 3,000 have been. (More than 1200 people were charged for taking some part in the Jan. 6 insurrection.) Three out of four Republican voters support arresting the protestors.

The most widely-circulated story about Kennedy this week was a New York Times report on a divorce document in which he claimed to have suffered memory loss from a worm dying in his brain. That went out after this poll was completed, but there’s more evidence here of how Kennedy, no matter the news, benefits from voter angst about their choices. Pennsylvanians approve of Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, and are narrowly in favor of re-electing Sen. Bob Casey, but they support Donald Trump — unless Kennedy’s an option, in which case more Trump voters than Biden voters defect to him. Trump has stepped up his criticism of Kennedy, saying in a video this week that the independent, who for 18 years has promoted dubious warnings about vaccines, can’t be trusted as an “anti-vaxxer.”

White House. The Libertarian Party invited two more non-Libertarians to its national convention, scheduled to be held in D.C. over Memorial Day weekend: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Vivek Ramaswamy. Kennedy challenged Trump, who’ll appear on a different day of the event, to debate him; Ramaswamy will debate the winner of the LIbertarians’ vice presidential nomination. “It’s going to be a new alliance of pro-American libertarians & nationalists who will save this country,” he wrote on X.

Mike Ter Maat, an Libertarian presidential candidate who’s challenged Kennedy to debate him at the convention, said he was a little worried about the optics. “My concern is that some people will look at the presence of Trump or Kennedy or Ramaswamy and say: ‘Gee, it seems as though there’s a lot of overlap there,’” he explained. “I’m afraid that some people might jump to the conclusion that Libertarians are warm to the policy prescriptions of these individuals, despite the fact that this is not the case.”

Who loves political parties? Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld do. In “The Hollow Parties,” the two academics defend the tradition of official party-building in America, tracing the rise and fall of different factions and crediting partisan organizing with social cohesion. When parties are weak — as many people want them to be now — Americans aren’t very happy with the disorganized politics that floods into the gap. The authors talked with Americana about their research this week, and this is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Americana: You write that it’s “better to build robust parties than to leave to hollow shells and unaccountable actors the task of containing the furies of the age.”

Sam Rosenfeld: One answer is that it was a hollow party, the pre-Trump Republican Party, that left the wolf in the barn in 2016. The bigger picture defense of parties is that there is no substitute for them as institutions attempting to mobilize people, to get people into power, and then to organize collectively so that the choices people make at the ballot box are meaningful.

Americana: You write about the celebrations and fraternity of the early parties, and I’ve encountered a lot of that with the MAGA movement — boat parades, flag-waving, caravans. Hasn’t Trump imbued Republicans with the sense of belonging and accomplishment that strong parties should have?

Daniel Schlozman: This is the monkey’s paw of our time. I don’t think that anybody who’s serious about democratic revival can ignore that. Parties ought to be grounded in distinctive civic commitments. Republicans have done a better job, in the Trump Era, in making politics fun for partisans. But they’ve done nothing whatsoever to make those into civic commitments.

Americana: How much is the health of parties limited by campaign finance law and precedent — by decades of decisions that have created super PACs, created nonprofits that can build their own organizations outside parties?

Sam Rosenfeld: Buckley v. Valeo sets in motion this channeling of money and resources outside of the formal parties, which gets accelerated with Citizens United. At the same time, you have the explosion of small dollar donations through the internet — you have a surge of both soft money outside of the parties and hard money for them. It’s an era of abundance for political donations.

Daniel Schlozman: There are a lot of lawyers whose take on the campaign finance guts of the party system is the same as ours. But they can miss the forest for the trees. What are the civic roles of parties? What are the possibilities for projects that inspire meaningful democratic passion? Just fixing the sluicegate so that money goes to the right place seems rather myopic.

Americana: One thing I hear from people who want to blow up the party system is that the next generation wants out of it. Look at how few people under 40 want to identify with either party. You cover all of American history here, so I’m wondering; is that new? Is that a significant trend?

Daniel Schlozman: That people develop their party identification, and it thickens through life, is a standard story. Thirty years ago, you saw Rock the Vote people making essentially the same argument — young people weren’t going to be affiliated with the parties, they’re done with that. And here we are, living with heightened polarization.

Sam Rosenfeld: There’s a rise in non-party identification from the late 1960s, but the standard retort is: Look at actual voting behavior. The vast majority of self-identified independents are reliable partisans. They’re polarized as much as everybody else. But even as they’re motivated by intensely negative feelings about the other side, they don’t have a real sense of legitimacy or commitment or loyalty to their own side.

Americana: You write about the role newspaper editors had in party politics in the 19th century, and I wonder where you see that — the media’s influence on parties — going now. We’ve basically got a mainstream media that bemoans polarization, and ideological media, set against that, that has big influence in what the parties do.

Daniel Schlozman: In the 19th century, the media, the partisan press, is enmeshed in other parts of the political system. They’re taking messages that are given to them by politicians and sending them out. They are more like press secretaries than like what contemporary ideological media think of itself as doing.

Sam Rosenfeld: Right-wing media now is partisan in a way that looks like the 19th century, but it’s motivated by its own incentives that aren’t about building an electoral project for the Republican Party to take power and do specific things with it. At the start of the party system, it would have been inconceivable to see what you’ve seen a fair amount of in the Republican Party recently — politicians deciding that being in elected office is boring, not where the action is, and becoming media celebrities instead.

Americana: One of the Trump campaign’s premises is that, if it wins, he’ll replace thousands of civil servants with partisans; it might be in some peoples’ interest to show their colors in conservative media. If that’s successful, what does it mean for the relevance of parties, which were stronger when there was a “spoils system?”

Daniel Schlozman: Most 19th century patronage jobs, at the customs house or the post office, are less ideologically charged than the EPA of the 2020s. The rolling back of the federal civil service is not about expanding party power; it’s in the service of a kind of presidentialism, saying that the president gets to decide his own people.

I don’t think that’s a great idea. But for liberals who have been clutching on to the idea that the deep state is our friend, I think this book might be a bit of a provocation. If you believe that democratic majorities should govern, and parties should be able to enact their visions, that the decline of that has real deleterious consequences. Look at the rise of the security state during and after the Cold War.

Sam Rosenfeld: We don’t endorse Project 2025, but the answer to it has to be a more robust, small d, Democratic Party politics. There’s something democratically impoverished about seeking redress in the deep state civil service. That’s a fundamental abdication of what a party project ought to be.

• four days until primaries in Maryland, Nebraska, and West Virginia
• 11 days until primaries in Idaho, Kentucky, and Oregon
• 66 days until the Republican National Convention
• 101 days until the Democratic National Convention
• 179 days until the 2024 presidential election