PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY and FREDERICK, Md. — Angela Alsobrooks starts off her stump speech with an anecdote about her grandmother Sarah, whose dream was to go to Washington to work for the federal government. Lacking a keyboard, she learned to type with a piece of paper taped to her fridge.
It’s a story about striving and the value of work, Alsobrooks says, that is familiar to many Marylanders, many Americans. Other parts of her story are familiar, too: how she is juggling the care of her aging relatives, including her mother, who has dementia. How she is worried about the fate of her daughters’ reproductive rights.
Alsobrooks, who leads Maryland’s second-largest county, is running for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat on the message that she is uniquely qualified to deliver for Marylanders because she understands what they need from their government — because she can relate. Her message takes direct aim at her closest primary rival, Rep. David Trone, a wealthy businessman whose self-funding campaign has outspent Alsobrooks $41.6 million to $3.9 million.
No Democratic Senate primary in the nation is more hotly contested than this one, and its winner will face popular former Gov. Larry Hogan, the presumptive Republican nominee, in one of the most competitive Senate battles this year. The outcome of the primary will also help shape the face of the party heading into the November elections and define who exactly will be represented in the upper chamber.
Alsobrooks, a Black woman whose family fled the Jim Crow South for Maryland, could help address the lack of representation of Black women in the Senate, where only three Black women have ever served. The lone Black woman in the Senate right now, Democratic Sen. Laphonza Butler of California, will exit the chamber when her temporary appointment ends later this year. Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware is also mounting a Senate bid; if both women are elected, it would mark the first time in U.S. history that two Black women have served in the Senate at the same time.
Alsobrooks’ candidacy is also meaningful for Maryland’s congressional delegation, which right now is made up only of men; the state has never elected a person of color to the Senate. In Alsobrooks, the Senate would gain the voice of a mother a decade younger than the Senate average, and a local government official who won’t be among the roughly-two thirds of senators who are millionaires.
Hogan’s entry into the race came with new considerations for voters, making what was a safe blue seat into a competitive race with national implications. Which candidate can form the strongest coalition of Marylanders to counter Hogan, including the supermajority of the Black voters who viewed him favorably when he left office? For Alsobrooks, Hogan’s entry has also spurred questions about her ability to fundraise what’s needed to beat Hogan in the face of Trone’s open wallet, even as she posts record fundraising.
Alsobrooks and her supporters are hanging their hopes on a slew of TV ads airing in the final weeks of the election that will introduce voters to a candidate who really gets it — their hopes, their challenges — and who will animate voters come November. Trone, who has been pelting the Maryland airwaves months longer than Alsobrooks, has been shown ahead in every public poll in the race going back to at least…
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