Ben Jealous, Maryland’s Democratic nominee for governor, is running an unconventional campaign in several ways. One of the most notable of these is that he is running as an underdog, which no Democrat has done in a statewide race in 38 years. Since Charles Mathias, a moderate Republican, in an era when those actually existed, won reelection to his US Senate seat in 1980, Democrats have won all but two statewide races since (plus Mondale ‘84 and Dukakis ‘88 also lost here). Barbara Mikulski, Paul Sarbanes, Ben Cardin, and Chris Van Hollen have won their Senate races comfortably every time. Democrats have held the Attorney General’s office for more than half a century. They have held the Comptroller’s office for twice that long. In both cases where they lost, they combined an unpopular term-limited incumbent governor (Parris Glendening/Martin O’Malley), a lackluster campaigner in the form of the unpopular governor’s lieutenant governor seeking to succeed him and nominated by the state party without much of a primary contest (Kathleen Kennedy Townsend/Anthony Brown), and a Republican wave year nationally (less so in 2002, though it did go against historical trends, but certainly in 2014), to lose the race for governor by a narrow margin both times. Townsend lost by 66,000 votes (a <4% margin), while Brown lost by 65,000 votes (a <4% margin). This gives a sense of how heavily the numbers favor Democrats running in Maryland. Most candidates can weather a lot of vote-splitting, and those who’ve lost have lost close races. The last Republican governor, Bob Ehrlich, was not unpopular when he ran for reelection in 2006, and still lost (by 116,000 votes, a 6.5% margin).
Many local pundits are declaring that the current Republican governor, Larry Hogan, is guaranteed to win reelection, and can point to several polls that say he has a large lead. If these polls are accurate (and I have serious doubts that they are), they suggest that many registered Democrats in the state who voted for Brown in 2014 will react to Hogan’s first term and to 2 years of the Trump administration by switching their vote to Hogan, and that substantial left-leaning nonvoters from 2014 will react to the same by continuing not to vote. Neither of which feels very logical. Hogan will need both of these things to happen to win. He cannot replicate his vote total from 2014 (880k) and win if straight-ticket-voting Democratic turnout increases in the way common sense would suggest it should with Donald Trump in the White House (as Hogan himself expects it to: he declared in an interview with the NY Times’ Frank Bruni in August that he anticipates a “somewhat of a blue wave”). It’s also notable that Sen. Cardin will be on the 2018 ballot, favored to win big, and both 2002 and 2014 were years with no U.S. Senate election in Maryland. If there are voters in Maryland turning out to send a message to Trump, the only statewide Republican incumbent they can target is Hogan. At smaller scales, there is one unpleasant representative in Congress, Andy Harris, and a handful of county executives.
If I were merely looking at the history of the state, I’d go bet a bunch of money on a Jealous win. But history isn’t a guarantee of an upset, and of course as I’ve said his candidacy is unconventional. Anything is possible, but Hogan is not acting as though the race is in the bag. He has fundraised and spent heavily, and the Republican Governor’s Association and other entities have spent a lot on his behalf as well. Perhaps this is in anticipation that his will be one of their few wins on the night. Perhaps it reflects that the right is awash in campaign money and can spare it on him, whether he needs it or not, though reports that they are giving up on House races with a month to go suggest that this is not the case.
In a dustup with the state teacher’s union, Hogan has mimicked their “apple logo” on signs that say “Teachers for Hogan”, despite the union’s repeated attempts to copyright and enforce their “Apple Ballots” indicating who the union has endorsed (the union has endorsed Jealous). If you’re waltzing to reelection, why pick a fight with (or “troll”) a union you intend to work with over the next four years? Why try to mislead voters (if he merely wanted to suggest that “some teachers” support him he could just as easily have had a logo with a ruler or a pencil)? I suspect this could reflect that his contempt for teachers is so strong (in 2016, he called them “thugs” on his Facebook page) that he can’t tamp it down for a few months just to help his reelection, but also it goes along with the general perception I have that the race is closer than many let on, and small battles like this are worth it to him. However, I suspect that irritating a politically powerful state union may backfire on him.
Episodes like this have shown cracks in Hogan’s facade of sunny bipartisanship and moderate Republicanism, even though it is an anachronism the likes of the Washington Post wants to wish into reality. (Likewise, the Republican primary for Baltimore County Executive was portrayed as a contest between a “moderate” favored by Hogan, Al Redmer, and a blustering, Trump-loving jackass, Pat McDonough. After Redmer won, his general election campaign has consisted largely of racist fear mongering about public housing. No amount of wish-thinking will make this man a moderate.) The friendly press environment (Tribune, Sinclair, Bezos) has helped Hogan largely succeed at hiding his parallels with Trump (Hogan, like Trump, made his fortune in real estate, and is currently profiting from his office through a less than robust “blind trust” — i.e., it is being run by a close family member).
Jealous, meanwhile, has lagged in fundraising, but is making up for it by crisscrossing the state, not limiting himself to the state’s population centers in Central Maryland, and is the beneficiary of a lot of grassroots energy, with many volunteers canvassing, phone banking, and writing postcards on his behalf, with many more campaign offices than Brown had, and what is sure to be a more robust GOTV operation with a week of early voting and finally on election day.
Jealous is not in the mold of Townsend or Brown (or Glendening or O’Malley for that matter). He was not “next in line” from another political office. His primary campaign succeeded for several reasons. One of which is that the race for the nomination was already wide open in a way that the state party typically has not allowed it to be. The two most notable establishment candidates, the county executives of Baltimore and Prince George’s, split party and donor support. Then with a month and a half to go before the primary, Baltimore County’s executive, Kevin Kamenetz, died suddenly and unexpectedly, and state law did not allow his lieutenant governor to run in his place with the funds he had raised (the most in the race). Many of these conditions, obviously, were outside of Jealous’s control, and one can speculate about how the rest of the primary would have played out had Kamenetz lived, or had his lieutenant, Valerie Ervin, been able to spend the campaign’s money (instead, it was donated by his widow and sons to several charities). Support in the Baltimore area certainly coalesced around Jealous in the final month, but Jealous ultimately won in all corners of the state, including Montgomery and Howard counties, the state’s wealthiest, and he also kept things close in Prince George’s.
Ultimately, however, what won it for Jealous is that he, through policy papers and rhetoric, represents a bolder liberalism of solving problems rather than one of an austerity-minded management of inevitable decline that led us straight to Hogan and Trump. He is emphatically not a DSA candidate, and somewhat gratingly is frequent to mention his most recent job as a venture capitalist, I guess thinking that this may appeal to the state’s voters more than his work at the NAACP. Instead, he speaks of being an “FDR Democrat.” A sensible comparison to reach for: the most successful Democratic leader in our country’s history. When Democrats don’t solve problems, people look at their tax rates and think, why am I paying for *this*? This is central to the 2014 backlash that ushered Hogan into office (his number one campaign issue was a modest environmental fee, spun as “a tax on the rain”). Jealous doesn’t even necessarily stand for higher taxes, but for better priorities. A substantial plurality of Democratic voters in the state were primed for this sort of message. (And it’s notable that this is not as simple as a Sanders vs. Clinton divide: Sanders was not competitive in the Maryland primary. Jealous, who supported Sanders, brought onto his ticket a party insider and Clinton supporter, Susan Turnbull.) And this should be the sort of message that will be a model for success in 2020 at reclaiming the White House. Not just “Trump is Terrible” (voters already knew this in 2016). A message that suggests a positive reason, or several, for the Democratic party to return to power, whether it’s the Maryland governor’s mansion or anywhere else. It has proven over and over again to not be enough for Democrats to occupy power solely to keep Republicans away from it; this does not motivate enough people for continuous FDR-esque dominance. Do positively good things. When you do those things, keep it simple and take credit.
The state-level support within the party since the primary has been occasionally lukewarm for Jealous, though nearly every Democrat of prominence has formally endorsed him, and Hogan’s attempt to whip together a list of “Democrats for Hogan” consists predominantly of irrelevant, retired octogenarians (exemplified by former Baltimore City councilwoman Rikki Spector, who endorsed Hogan in a bizarre statement praising him for “standing against the BDS movement”) and a handful of smaller-town mayors whose towns could benefit from some positive attention in a second term. More relevant is that Jealous’s fundraising has suffered from many of the state party’s donors sitting on the sidelines. This is a mix of ideology, trying to pick winners (if they think, incorrectly, that Jealous has no chance), and reflects that a lot was already spent in the primary, which was more contested and wide open than any before. Ideologically: they are happy enough with the “moderate” results of a supermajority Democratic legislature and a first-term Republican governor obsessed with his approval ratings (a bill for paid sick leave overrode a veto); it is unclear to them that a Democratic governor with concrete policy goals would be better. I’d only note that this supermajority is fragile, and likely not to persist alongside a Hogan reelection, and he is actively campaigning for Republican state senate candidates in targeted districts to break it up. (Bipartisanship, here and so often, is a crank that only turns one direction.) So the second term has potential to be a lot uglier than the first. And of course, for many of us, the first term has been plenty ugly.
And Donald Trump is the president! Completely wild things are possible! Why is this the extent of our ambition? Are we comfortable with losing sometimes because it lowers voter expectations and allows us more time to go to galas? Or every time we lose does it hurt all kinds of people? For anyone who does not agree with particular progressive stances Jealous has taken, it’s clear that the legislatures, currently led by the two men shown in the photo above, will be a moderating influence on their own in a Jealous administration. Obviously Medicare For All will not happen at the snap of his fingers. It will take years if he succeeds at all. By the time various commissions have studied what it should look like, we might have a new president in 2021 and focus for reforming health care can return to the national level.
This election is an area where Democrats nationwide with an interest in the party’s future success could make a serious difference. Prominent among them President Obama, who added Jealous to his endorsement slate earlier this month, but could make a big impact here if he did a campaign event or two. Senators such as Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand have lent a hand in stopping by.
And you can have a major effect with your own support. The race is winnable. Go to benjealous.com and donate, or volunteer. This Baltimore Democrat thanks you.