Opinion | The Senate May Come Down to a Blue State Surprise

“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.

And so the fault lines in Maryland are not so much between the combatants’ ideologies as between their competing conceptions of political service: the party maverick versus the party loyalist. The fierce conflict between these two models reflects the awkward rigidity of our politics, in which partisanship makes it hard for voters in a blue state to take a risk even on an independent-minded, Trump-averse Republican they previously elected statewide — twice.

In a different time, in a less divided political landscape, Mr. Hogan would be precisely the sort of Republican whom plenty of independents and moderates — even Democratic moderates — would want in the senatorial mix.

His political inclinations are pragmatic. His record is centrist. He has repeatedly spoken out against the excesses of his political allies. When he left the governor’s office in January of last year because of term limits — the only Republican to serve two terms in the job since the 1950s — he enjoyed an approval rating of 77 percent. Even now he has solid favorability numbers across party lines.

Of course, bipartisan pragmatism is not all that surprising from the Republican governors of blue states (or their Democratic counterparts in red ones). What really juiced Mr. Hogan’s profile and gave him an extra gloss of statesmanship was his role as an early and enduring Trump antagonist.

His notable disloyalty includes refusing to back Mr. Trump’s presidential runs in 2016, 2020 or 2024. In 2019, he supported the first impeachment inquiry of Mr. Trump. He clashed repeatedly with the administration over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic. After the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, he said Mr. Trump should “resign or be removed from office.” In the 2022 midterms, he defended Republican incumbents targeted for removal by Mr. Trump in the primary elections, even as he asserted the G.O.P. was “desperately in need of a course correction” and would not “win back the White House by nominating Donald Trump or a cheap impersonation of him.” You get the gist.

And unlike most Republican electeds, Mr. Hogan has not lost his nerve and begun licking Mr. Trump’s golf shoes in apology and terror. One of his Senate ads brags: “An early critic of Donald Trump. One of the few Republicans who never caved.”

Mr. Hogan’s criticism extends to Republican leaders who have sold their souls to Mr. Trump. He says his 11th-hour decision to enter the Senate race was prompted by the decision of some Republican lawmakers to tank a bipartisan border-security bill simply because Mr. Trump told them to.

And in an op-ed essay for The Washington Post in July, he asserted that “there is no clearer example of the threat to American values than Project 2025.”

Does such heresy draw threats from the MAGA faithful? “You get some of that,” Mr. Hogan told me during our sit-down on his bus. “But I battled life-threatening cancer when I first became governor. You’re not going to scare me with a few mean tweets from Trump or somebody yelling something at me at an event.”

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It is a testament to how hungry Republicans are for control of the Senate that party officials have largely let Mr. Hogan’s effrontery slide. Indeed, when Senate Republicans recruited him to run in February, just a couple of days before the filing deadline, he was considered one of the 2024 election’s hottest “gets” — maybe the hottest. Since then, there have been shaky moments, such as when some Trumpword minions lashed out at him in May for urging Americans to accept whatever verdict emerged from Mr. Trump’s criminal trial in New York. But that did not stop Mr. Trump himself from endorsing Mr. Hogan the following month — an endorsement Mr. Hogan rejected.

“A lot of Democrats are like: ‘He’s not going to be part of the MAGA agenda. He’s going to be the guy in the middle standing up to all of that,’” Mr. Hogan told me.

In fact, as the former governor spins it, Ms. Alsobrooks should be ashamed of her team mentality. “My opponent in this race for the U.S. Senate only wants to spew partisan rhetoric about red versus blue,” he said at the Principles First event. “I think it’s time to get back to focusing on the red, white and blue!”

Team Alsobrooks, as you would imagine, has a very different take.

The vision of the two parties “could not be any more stark or more different,” Ms. Alsobrooks declared at an auditorium filled with supporters on hand to celebrate the start of her bus tour this month. “So holding the majority in the Senate of the United States is going to be most important. And I’ll tell you who understood that. Mitch McConnell understood that when he stuck his hand in” to recruit Mr. Hogan. (Mr. Hogan has denied that Mr. McConnell pursued him for this race, though the party establishment certainly worked to woo him.)

Ms. Alsobrooks and her supporters liberally invoke Republican hard-liners like Mr. McConnell, Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton — lest anyone forget the sort of characters her opponent would be hanging with in the chamber.

Many people “are confused about what the question is that we are answering in this election. The question is not whether or not we like Larry Hogan,” she continued. “It’s not even whether or not it was a good idea to vote for him for governor. The question we are answering is: Who should have the 51st vote?”

Senators are a different kind of political animal than governors, driven more by team dynamics, Ms. Alsobrooks likes to explain. Even lawmakers who build a brand on bucking their team fundamentally advance its interests simply by virtue of the math. If Mr. Hogan wound up the chamber’s 51st Republican, his maverick self-conception would matter far less than that he had given his party the majority.

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To be clear, Ms. Alsobrooks has plenty to offer Maryland voters on her own, as she proved during a rough primary race against a wealthy, self-funding House member who outspent her by about 10-to-1. She has a solid record of leadership in her state’s second-most populous county. In its primary endorsement of her, The Washington Post cheered her work on economic development and public safety. More personally, she would add a shot of diversity to the Senate, to which only two Black women have been elected — ever — and to Maryland’s congressional delegation, which consists of all men. And her general policy aims fit comfortably with the state’s Democratic tilt, including investing in affordable housing, lowering the cost prescription drugs and combating gun violence.

Not that policy particulars have been a major part of the race so far. Except in one area: abortion.

Marylanders take women’s reproductive rights seriously, and laws are already on the books protecting abortion access and contraception. So this might not seem like the most pressing concern for its voters compared to, say, crime or the economy. This is, notably, also an issue on which Mr. Hogan is more moderate than much of his party. He has said that he is personally opposed to abortion but vowed as governor to uphold the state’s protections. In this race, he has characterized himself as “pro-choice” and vowed to support federal legislation to codify the protections of Roe v. Wade.

The Alsobrooks camp is having none of it. They contend Mr. Hogan cannot be trusted, pointing to his veto in 2022 of a bill making it legal for trained professionals other than doctors to perform abortions. (The governor cited safety concerns.) When the State Legislature overrode the veto, he then refused to release the funding set aside for training new providers.

They are also knocking him for praising Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court appointees as “incredible” in a speech in November 2022 — after the conservative court had overturned Roe v. Wade. (The Hogan campaign has said he was thinking specifically about a ruling involving religious schools.)

Above all, they emphasize that even if you believe Mr. Hogan’s reassuring talk, his preferences won’t matter one whit if his party has the majority. “There won’t be a vote on Roe if Republicans control the Senate,” Ms. Alsobrooks told me, referring to the proposed codification Mr. Hogan has promised to support.

After Ms. Alsobrooks’s speech, the crowd moved outside for a joint rally on reproductive rights featuring national leaders from groups like Emily’s List and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. In November, Marylanders will vote on a ballot measure, Question 1, that would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s Constitution. And multiple speakers explicitly tied support for that measure to support for her. The road to restoring reproductive freedom “runs right here through Maryland, and it means we’ve got to elect Angela Alsobrooks,” said Mini Timmaraju, the head of Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL).

Wes Moore, Maryland’s Democratic governor, drew an even more explicit connection. “I just need people to remember that if you vote for Kamala Harris and Larry Hogan, you've just canceled your vote,” he told me in an interview after the rally. “If you say, ‘I’m voting for Question 1,’ but then you vote for Larry Hogan, which is going to give us a Republican Senate, you’ve just canceled your vote. And the thing I want my state to remember is, that cannot happen on our watch.”

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There are some signs this message is sinking in. A couple of new polls show Ms. Alsobrooks’s lead now in the low double digits — a more comfortable place than three earlier polls showing her up by only single digits, or the late August one by AARP Maryland that had the race tied. But with well over a month left until Election Day, the situation remains fluid — and Mr. Hogan is working furiously to make the sale.

On a recent sunny Sunday, the former governor was schmoozing his way around a festival at Sts. Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church in Montgomery County — another big Washington suburb — shaking hands, snacking on treats, grinning for photo after photo.

Trailing Mr. Hogan through the crowd, I periodically stopped to get people’s take on him, as governor and as a Senate contender. Their answers were all over the map. A trio of die-hard Republicans in the back corner of the food tent definitely were not Hogan fans — he is too anti-Trump for their taste — but said they would hold their noses and vote for him this time. “We need him in the Senate!” said Lily Gonzalez.

Two women working the festival really disliked Mr. Trump — one had even switched her registration to Republican to vote against him in the primary — but were devout Hogan supporters. “He’s moderate. He’s a family man. I love what he did for the state of Maryland!” Effie Tiches said.

And seated with her family at a table not far from the outdoor dance floor was Candice Theodossiou, a registered Democrat who had supported Mr. Hogan as governor but wasn’t sure she could bring herself to do so for senator. “State- and federal-level politics are so different,” she told me. “I just don’t know.”

Mr. Hogan is not wrong about the need for more independent and moderate voices in the Senate. But Ms. Alsobrooks is not wrong about the chamber’s stringent partisanship — and what it could mean if Mr. Trump returns to the White House. Given the dark, unsteady state of our politics, her warnings seem likely to resonate with Marylanders more than Mr. Hogan’s hopes of reining in his own Senate team.

This raises the troubling question of how polarization and extremism in Congress can ever get better in the face of this vicious cycle. But that feels like a puzzle for less ominous, less Trumpy election year.

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