Maryland has not elected a Republican to the Senate since 1980. In fact, they haven’t even come particularly close in the last four decades, their best result was in 2006 when then-Lieutenant Governor (and future RNC chair) Michael Steele notched 44% of the vote to Democratic Congressman Ben Cardin’s 54%. 

So, how did Steele manage such an overperformance in what was an otherwise abysmal year for Republicans? High name ID from his role as Lieutenant Governor likely helped, but so did the fact that he was vying to become the first Black senator from the fourth Blackest state in the country. In fact, depending on how you slice it, Maryland is the Blackest state in the country to never elect a Black senator (Georgia is currently represented by Raphael Warnock; Mississippi’s Reconstruction era state legislature elected Hirman Rhodes Revels and Blanche Bruce to the Senate in the 1870s; Louisiana’s Republican state legislators elected P.B.S. Pinchback in 1872, but his credentials were never accepted), a distinction that Democratic nominee Angela Alsobrooks hopes to rectify in 2024. 

The one person standing in her way? Republican nominee Larry Hogan, who hopes to succeed where Steele failed and parlay his statewide notoriety into an unlikely Republican win in the home of Old Bay and Under Armour. A two-term governor, Hogan proved popular among Marylanders of all parties, even winning six of the state’s heavily gerrymandered eight Congressional districts in his 2018 reelection bid in a year when swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania experienced a blue wave. 

The idea that a popular governor from one party could flip a Senate seat in a state that typically votes for the opposite party is not a new one. Republicans tried it with Hawaii’s Linda Lingle in 2012, while Democrats tried it with Tennessee’s Phil Bredesen in 2018 and Montana’s Steve Bullock in 2020. Unfortunately for Hogan, none of these candidates came particularly close to winning (the most successful was Bredesen, who came within just under ten points of then-Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn), and while early polls showed Hogan beating the lesser know Alsobrooks, survey results have reverted to their bluer hue as the campaign has played out. 

It probably doesn’t help that Hogan has had to walk something of a rhetorical tight rope when it comes to his party’s presidential nominee. One of the most prominent anti-Trump voices within the Republican Party, Hogan reportedly considered primarying the then-president in 2020, and even endorsed his impeachment and conviction following January 6th. The former governor was also floated as a potential member of a No Labels ticket (remember them?) in 2024 before ultimately deciding to run for Senate and endorsing Nikkiy Haley for president; after Haley suspended her campaign Hogan pledged not to vote for Trump or Joe Biden, putting him at odds with the national party. He further drew the ire of Trumpworld when he called on Republicans to respect the results of Trump’s Manhattan fraud trial, with Trump adviser Chris LaCivita claiming that the statement “ended” Hogan’s campaign. Ironically, what came next was probably the definitive nail in the coffin: an endorsement of Hogan by Trump, which may have reminded many Hogan-curious Marylanders why they tended to vote for Democrats in the Senate in the first place, and may have reduced the efficacy of Hogan’s candidacy as a ploy by Republicans to get Democrats to devote resources to Maryland that would otherwise be spent in more competitive states like Ohio, Michigan, or Montana.

All of the drama surrounding Hogan shouldn’t distract from Alsobrooks, who, as we mentioned, is primed to become Maryland’s first Black senator and only its second female senator. Her election would also signal something of a geographic powershift in Maryland politics. For most of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Maryland was represented in the Senate by Cardin, Paul Sarbanes, and Barbara Mikulski, descendants of white ethnic immigrants whose primary base of support came from Baltimore and its suburbs. By contrast, Alsobrooks and her likely colleague Chris Van Hollen both hail from counties that border Washington, DC, which have grown at a faster rate than those closer to Baltimore. It’s unlikely to affect Democrats’ dominance in Maryland, but could have implications for the party’s internal politics within the state. Either way, no matter how much Marylanders seem to like Larry Hogan’s particular brand of Republican politics, it remains unlikely that they’ll choose to empower the national party by electing him to the Senate.