Standing at 6 feet, 7 inches, Harry Dunn is used to towering over the crowd. His imposing size served him well during his 15 years on the Capitol Police force.
“He’s quite the presence,” said Melissa Marshall, a former Capitol Police officer who worked alongside him.
Now he’s hoping to stand out again. Dunn instantly had a leg up when he decided to run for Congress, thanks to the national profile he built after defending the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He wrote a book about what he went through that day, like rioters hurling racial slurs at him, and has spoken out forcefully against Republicans who try to downplay the violence.
But the field in Maryland’s 3rd District primary is especially packed, with more than a dozen other Democrats competing for the open seat. The race had already attracted a number of strong candidates, including two state senators and three state delegates, when Dunn tossed his police cap into the ring in January, and a win for him is hardly guaranteed.
As they vie to replace retiring Rep. John Sarbanes in a solidly Democratic district, the candidates are dealing with a spike of interest in the race — and a test of how potent Dunn’s message about protecting democracy can be.
“When I saw Harry Dunn getting in … I said, ‘Oh, boy that’s gonna throw monkey wrench in the whole thing,’” said Corynne Courpas, chair of the Carroll County Democratic Central Committee. “It’s definitely going to be a crapshoot.”
While Courpas lives in the neighboring 2nd District, she’s watching the race closely: the 3rd District includes a chunk of Carroll County, plus all of Howard County and about half of Anne Arundel County. It’s a swath of suburbia located between Baltimore and D.C. that’s populated by mostly wealthy, educated voters who have become reliable Democrats in recent years as much in reaction to the GOP’s increasingly authoritarian bent under Donald Trump’s control as anything their own party has done.
Dunn hopes these voters will agree with him that the most important issue heading into the 2024 elections isn’t something as pedestrian as transportation funding or quotidian as the economy, but instead is the existential threat from the GOP’s MAGA wing. It’s a danger he quite literally fought on Jan. 6, which makes him uniquely qualified to continue fighting in Congress.
In his campaign launch video, actors recreate the mayhem that enveloped the Capitol’s corridors that day as Dunn calmly walks toward the camera, explaining why he’s running for office. “Some of the same people who stood behind us when we protected them, went back on the floor of Congress and stood behind Trump,” he says in the video, which has been viewed 6.3 million times on X.
In his book and in congressional testimony, Dunn described the flood of racist vitriol he faced on Jan. 6, being called the n-word repeatedly by rioters emblazoned in MAGA-wear.
Dunn said he’d long thought about running for office, thinking he would semi-retire and pursue a political career. But when he saw Sarbanes’ announcement, he decided to act, even though that meant leaving the force before he qualified for his pension. “I don’t believe that we have the luxury of sitting around and waiting to see what the next election cycle will bring us,” he said, pointing to Trump’s dominance in the GOP presidential primaries despite his repetition of disproven claims about the 2020 election.
“Individuals in Congress are parroting those lies. Not just talking points — those blatant, disproven lies,” Dunn said. “We need individuals that will fight back against them.”
Considerate Dunn
During his time on the Hill, Dunn was known as much for his warmth as his stature.
He made friends in both parties as he played in the annual charity football game that pits Capitol Police against members of Congress, drawing on his days as a…
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