By Adam Pagnucco.
The 2024 U.S. Senate race to fill retiring Senator Ben Cardin’s seat has three prominent Democrats in it: Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, Congressman David Trone and Montgomery County Council Member Will Jawando. Virtually all of my sources see this as a race between Alsobrooks and Trone, pitting one of the state’s highest profile county executives against Maryland’s biggest self-funder. (Senator Ben Kramer, who has endorsed Alsobrooks, has said this openly.) But we would be foolish to dismiss the potential impact of Jawando. He may not get elected, but his candidacy may have a different effect:
Jawando could deprive Alsobrooks of the votes she needs to win, thereby delivering victory to Trone.
This series will explore the geography and demographics of Maryland’s Democratic presidential primary voters through two lenses.
First, we examine the last time Maryland saw an open U.S. Senate seat race: 2016, which featured Congresswoman Donna Edwards. Like Alsobrooks, Edwards was an experienced and successful elected official from Prince George’s County who stirred hopes for a rare Senate win by a Black woman. (There have only been two Black women in the Senate: Carol Moseley Braun from Illinois and Kamala Harris from California.)
And second, we examine the impact of the Black vote in presidential primaries, both statewide and in Montgomery County. The latter jurisdiction is critical to this year’s Senate race because it is home to Jawando and Trone and contains many voters who might find Alsobrooks appealing.
Before we get to the data (you know there will be lots of it!), let’s talk about the candidates. Alsobrooks has been a star in waiting for a while. She represents the jurisdiction that has more Democrats than any other place in the state. She has tons of endorsements, including a few from Montgomery County. And while she can never equal Trone in campaign money, she is an able fundraiser and has raised $1.7 million so far.
Trone is the leading self-funder in Maryland history and has fought hard to hold off Republicans in his competitive Western Maryland House seat. State Democrats will miss him if his old House seat one day turns red. I have met Trone a couple times and profiled him in March 2016 and January 2023. Money is not Trone’s only asset. His many endorsements from inside his district speak well of his performance in the House. And his never-say-die personality, the key reason for his business success, will serve him well in this race.
Trone is blowing away his rivals in campaign money as the charts below show.
As for Jawando, whether one agrees with his policy agenda of defunding police and rent control, he deserves respect as a politician. In five years, he has gone from losing his first two elections (2014 for state delegate and 2016 for U.S. House District 8) to being one of the leading progressives in the state’s largest county. If this election were for a vacancy in Congressman Jamie Raskin’s House seat, Jawando might be the favorite. But he may not be ready to share the stage with all-star Alsobrooks or the hard-charging Trone quite yet.
So why might Jawando cost Alsobrooks the election? We will start crunching data in Part Two.