“I don’t think I’m going to be the 51st vote.”
As political pitches go, Larry Hogan’s chief argument for being Maryland’s next U.S. senator is pretty far from “hope and change”-style uplift. Talking with reporters after a recent campaign event, Mr. Hogan, a former governor and a moderate Republican, was presenting himself essentially as an agent of damage control, a bulwark against partisan dysfunction and his own party’s MAGA excesses. As he tells it, the G.O.P. this year will win a 51-vote Senate majority — or larger! — with or without him, so traditionally blue Maryland has nothing to lose.
“You’ve got West Virginia,” he told the reporters, citing a state where Republicans seem almost certain to pick up a seat. And, he added, Montana, where the Democratic incumbent is struggling. “There are 10 other states more likely than mine!” he insisted. “But I think I will be the one standing up in the middle to work together.”
A few days earlier, Mr. Hogan had given me the “10 other states” line during an interview on his campaign bus, which was emblazoned with the motto “Strong Independent Leadership.” I was struck by the tricky balancing act he is attempting: to get voters to focus not on their loyalty to political parties but on their disgust with partisan toxicity — and on the need for leaders willing to rise above all that. “I can be that critical, independent swing vote that will be a roadblock to the crazy and the extremes from both sides of the aisle,” Mr. Hogan said at a recent event hosted by Principles First, a conservative group founded as a haven for non-Trumpists like Mr. Hogan.
At the same time, his theory of the political case depends on assuring savvy Democrats and independents, of which Maryland has an abundance — especially in the suburbs of Washington — that the partisan balance of the chamber does not depend on him. With a Republican majority, he mused to me, “how much of an impact can you have, having somebody inside that caucus, calling them out and standing up?”
Clearly, he wants voters to see him and answer, “A lot.”
But disabusing voters of precisely that notion is the chief goal of Angela Alsobrooks, Mr. Hogan’s Democratic opponent. Ms. Alsobrooks, the county executive of Prince George’s County — one of those savvy, vote-rich Washington suburbs — and has built her campaign on being a reliable member of Team Democrat, focusing less on her particular credentials or goals than on the urgent need to keep the Senate blue. “Defend Our Majority” is the theme of her new campaign bus tour. Her core message is that serving in the chamber is a team sport and that Maryland cannot afford to send in another player for the red team to replace Ben Cardin, the retiring Democrat.
“This race is about something so much bigger than me or Larry Hogan,” she told me repeatedly in a phone interview.