I'm becoming more and more worried about the Maryland gubernatorial election. Anthony Brown has run an absolutely dreadful campaign, the worst I've seen in this state since Kathleen Kennedy Townsend snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and lost to Robert Ehrlich. Brown went negative very early, and he went very negative. This has turned off a lot of people. I live in what is a slightly Republican neighborhood that is surrounded by heavily Democratic neighborhoods. But normally the lawn signs are pretty evenly divided, even in my neighborhood, and during a hotly contested primary for the House of Delegates, there were lawn signs for one or more of the Democrats all over the place.
Now, the Hogan signs outnumber the Brown signs probably 2 or 3 to one, and there aren't even many Brown signs in the surrounding neighborhoods where he should be doing very well. What's more, the lawn signs for the Republican ticket for the state legislature greatly outnumber the ones for the excellent Democratic ticket. There seems to be zero enthusiasm among Democrats for Brown -- to the point that there was an online movement to write in Heather Mizeur, a progressive Democrat who is openly lesbian and who lost to Brown in the primary. It was getting serious enough that she felt compelled to write an op-ed piece in the Baltimore Sun begging people not to write her in, and to vote for Brown on the basis that his election was the only chance for getting anything progressive enacted in Maryland over the next four years.
The polls, while most of them still showing Brown leading, have tightened greatly, both national parties are dumping money into a state that shouldn't even be close, and Brown has taken out a $500,000 loan from the Laborers Union to tide him over a "cash flow problem." There was even a leaked GOP poll done for the Hogan that shows him with a 5% lead. I don't believe that, but it wouldn't shock me, either. What I'm really afraid of is a very poor turnout among Democrats that may take a lot of good Democrats down along with Brown. Even among some very strong Democrats who have already voted for him, the attitude has been strictly that of voting against Hogan, rather than for Brown and, as one such Democrat put it, having to hold their noses to do it.
Not only did Brown go way too negative way too early, but he hasn't effectively responded to attacks from Hogan that he should be hitting out of the ballpark, such as the Hogan claim that Maryland's economy "is ranked 49th in the nation." In some alternative universe, perhaps, but not in the one we live in. In this universe, Maryland is ranked at or near the top in per capita and per household income, in the percentage of the population making above $200,000 per year, and well below the national average in unemployment. Yet Hogan made this claim in the opening statement of their first debate, and Brown failed to address it at all. Hogan has repeated the claim, and still the Brown campaign hasn't responded to it, at least from anything I've seen.
I hope I'm wrong, but I wouldn't be at all surprised to wake up next Wednesday morning to find that we're going to have a Republican Governor for the next four years, and there's no way that should even be a significant possibility in a State with a 2-1 Democratic registration advantage and which Barack Obama carried twice by big margins.