By Adam Pagnucco.
O’Malley vs Brown. It has an odd ring to it, yeah? After all, for eight years, we heard lots about the O’Malley-Brown administration in Annapolis. And when the hyphen turned into a vs, that turn was all about race.
Just look at the jurisdiction-level results of the attorney general race between Congressman Anthony Brown and former judge Katie Curran O’Malley. In Maryland’s three Black-majority jurisdictions – Baltimore City and Prince George’s and Charles counties – Brown pulled a net 105,427 votes. In the rest of the state, O’Malley pulled a net 38,728 votes. Brown’s net take of 83,872 votes from his home county of Prince George’s, which he has represented in both the General Assembly and the U.S. House, was by itself enough to win this year’s election. It would be interesting to see a gender voting breakdown, but since the state has no all-male or all-female jurisdictions, we may never see it.
Now to MoCo, where O’Malley led Brown by 58%-42%, her best performance among the state’s large jurisdictions. O’Malley outpolled Brown in every MoCo state legislative district except 39 and every MoCo council district except 5. But that conceals other differences by geography. The chart below shows her performance by local area and region. (See my methodology post for definitions.)
O’Malley won every local area in the county except Montgomery Village, Germantown, Silver Spring East County, Clarksburg, Glenmont/Norbeck and Burtonsville. What do those areas have in common? You guessed it – large Black and brown populations. As for her best areas, they tend to have high White percentages.
Now let’s look at the results for O’Malley and Brown in the top 25 precincts for each of the four largest racial groups – Asian, Black, Latino and White. (Again, see the methodology post for how those precincts were identified and where they are located.) Brown’s percentages appear in green and O’Malley’s appear in yellow.
Brown defeated O’Malley by 9 points in the 25 precincts with the highest Black percentages. He also led her by 5 points in the Latino precincts. But O’Malley led Brown by 14 points in the Asian precincts and 38 points in the White precincts. Who wants to say that this is a coincidence?
Geography and race can mean a lot in voting, and of course, the two are often related. The attorney general race in MoCo is one of the prime examples of this phenomenon in this year’s primaries. But it’s far from the only example as we shall see. More to come soon!