MD-SEN 2024: Cardin retiring, Hogan IN

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Jason Kander who's hopefuly recovered and willing to renter the political game.

Why would he run in Maryland?

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Mfume will be 76 years old by 2024, so it's hard to imagine him running for Senate for the first time at that age.

Anthony Brown is a strong possibility.  John Sarbanes would certainly have some legacy support, but I don't know if he really has a strong constituency within the Democratic electorate.

Raskin would also be very strong, but he probably should stay in the House.  I honestly believe Chris Van Hollen would be Speaker of the House right now if he hadn't run for Senate. 

I wonder if Delaney will run, not that he would get anywhere.

Considering that he managed to blow a 28-3 lead in 2014, I can imagine the state Democratic establishment probably doesn't love him. I know a Senate race will be different, but I still think they'd prefer someone else.

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Trone officially in:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/04/total-wine-trone-maryland-senate-campaign-00095218?nname=playbook&nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&nrid=0000014c-2414-d9dd-a5ec-34bc650e0000&nlid=630318

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https://twitter.com/LiaOffLeash/status/1658103839772364800

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Btw, I can already tell that this primary is going to be absolutely unbearable.

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https://twitter.com/maxpcohen/status/1664291262105567233?cxt=HHwWgoC2ibmF4JguAAA...

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Wowowow. Obviously no chance he actually wins, but he will force Democrats to divert a lot of money into this race.

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Wowowow. Obviously no chance he actually wins, but he will force Democrats to divert a lot of money into this race.

I think there is a chance, purely because it's an open seat. If he was running against the incumbent Cardin, he would be DOA, but the dynamic of elections without one are a bit different. Besides, the Dem nominee is either going to be Trone or the leftist person.

As happy as I'd be to see him in the Senate, Trump will lose MD by well over 30 points. I believe in ticket-splitting, but right now, I don't think that it can happen to that degree in a federal race.

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Seems like the NRSC is backing him.

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https://twitter.com/VoteMarsha/status/1755996250992750932
I actually don't think he'll have so much trouble in the primary.

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https://twitter.com/NRSC/status/1756007614989717626

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https://twitter.com/VoteMarsha/status/1755996250992750932
I actually don't think he'll have so much trouble in the primary.

I mean its Maryland, whatever Kari Lake knockoff alternative they have doesn't even have a shot of winning. At least with Hogan they have a small chance.

You'd think so, but in the 2022 gubernatorial primary, Hogan's endorsed candidate lost to a Trump-backed MAGA nut.

The key difference here is that Schultz wasn't that well-known statewide, while all of the non-Hogan Republicans are nobodies. Plus the national GOP is clearly going all-in on him.

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Likely does not mean Tossup.

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Anyone writing him off this early is either delusional or has zero exposure to Maryland politics. This is not Bredesen vs. Blackburn. He is exorbitantly popular, moreso among Democrats and independents than Republicans, and the Maryland Democratic party -- arguably one of the most pathetic in the nation -- has run screaming in terror from him every chance they have had to put an end to this nonsense. I have complete faith in my party to utterly drop the ball on this one.

Look at the Massachusetts Senate race in 1996. Bill Weld was a straight-up liberal who was also super popular with Democrats and independents and had just won reelection with 70% of the vote. Despite that, he still lost the Senate race, and ticket splitting happened a lot more in 1996 than it does now. Trump will lose Maryland by at least 33 points, and as broadly popular as Hogan may be, he's not going to make up that gap.

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https://twitter.com/axios/status/1760826947104305499?t=2zzxweHaqwnEkAnZSdiNRw&am...

Good. Kelly Schultz almost certainly wouldn't have won, but the gubernatorial race would have been considerably closer and the MD GOP would have done much better downballot.

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Endorsements usually don't mean much to actual voters, but have we ever seen an entire party apparatus back one candidate so hard when another candidate who is an incumbent Congressman is also running? Feels like the deck is stacked against Trone at this point.

And despite all that, Trone was still leading in the last independent poll that we got.

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I imagine Hogan would rather run against Alsobrooks than Trone but I don’t know enough about her or about Maryland swing voters to say for sure.

I read a single Politico article on the situation so I'm now basically an expert. Gonna go out on a limb and declare this race only lean D if Alsobrooks wins the D nomination, moving to lean R if Hogan can capture some moderate Murkowski energy instead of seeming as much of a generic R as he has been.

There is no reason aside from Trone’s self-funding to assume Alsobrooks is weaker than Trone. Alsobrooks does not present like a #Squad member at all if that’s the insinuation. She’s very much part of the Dem establishment.

Atlas users, from what I've observed, tend to have a bias against black women politicians and often view them as weaker candidates. For what reasons, I'm not quite sure.

In this case, I think it is about Trone's money.

If Alsobrooks is the nominee, the DSCC will probably end up having to spend a significant amount in one of the country's bluest states despite having multiple seats to defend in red and purple states.

If it's Trone, they can let him self-fund while they can focus on Tester, Brown, Rosen, Baldwin, Gallego, Casey and Slotkin, not to mention putting a bit towards offense in Texas and maybe Florida.

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Another school of thought is that Alsobrooks may actually be the stronger candidate against Hogan because she can run on the prospect of being the state's first black Senator and one of the few black women in the Senate, while Trone would just be another rich old white guy in a Senate that already has a lot of them.

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https://twitter.com/dlippman/status/1778116018344255623?s=46
Solid, especially since he only entered the race halfway through the quarter.

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This is such devastating ad that attacked Representative Trone's business practices and also compared Trone to Donald Trump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCqQp11O6QM

If you told me this ad was made by a Republican group to meddle in the primary, I'd totally believe you.

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If Hogan wasn’t running, how would that have changed the dynamic of the primary?

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Is there a reason the dem establishment is backing Alsobrooks besides “muh white man bad”?

I think a lot of it is the sense that Trone is a bored rich guy who effectively bought himself a congressional seat and is now trying to buy a promotion to the Senate in the same way. There is a grain of truth to that, especially considering that he first ran for MD-08 in 2016, lost that primary and then ran in MD-06 when it came open in the next cycle.

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https://twitter.com/GovLarryHogan/status/1791065074041291206
Say what you want about his chances (I strongly support him and still think it's very unlikely he actually wins), but this is a great ad.