CUMBERLAND, Maryland — When former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan won the Republican primary race last month for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat, many experts speculated that would be his high-water mark and everything would go downhill from there.
Case in point: When Angela Alsobrooks emerged as the winner of the Democratic primary, Politico reported that the Prince George’s County executive was on the precipice of making history as Maryland’s first black senator.
It was a theme that went across the media spectrum, dismissing Hogan’s chances despite the fact that a Hogan victory would be a little history-making as well because it’s been decades since a Republican has won a Senate seat in Maryland.
While there has been no fresh polling in the past month, there is no indication Hogan is astronomically or even slightly behind Alsobrooks in voters’ minds. Indeed, he may even be ahead.
When former President Donald Trump said a little over a week ago that he would like to see Hogan, a frequent critic of the former president’s comportment, win the race, those same experts went a bit apoplectic with stories that Trump’s endorsem*nt would end the former governor’s chances in the deep blue state.
Again, there is no polling, so there is no indication of what, if any, impact there has been either way, yet the deconstruction of the Trump effect went on for days.
The more interesting story that does have the potential of materially affecting this race is the steady stream of union and labor support Hogan has been accumulating since the moment he won the primary, including the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 333. There were even longshoremen in attendance at a Hogan event who had been in an ad supporting Alsobrooks’ Democratic primary opponent, Rep. David Trone (D-MD). This support for Hogan from otherwise Democratic union members could be significant.
On Wednesday, ILA Local 1429, which, like ILA Local 333, works out of the Port of Baltimore, also endorsed Hogan over Alsobrooks with the president of the chapter, Troy Nilsen, saying members “are glad to have a fighter for longshoremen at the Port of Baltimore and across the state working for us in the Senate.”
They are not the only union endorsem*nts he has received. The Ocean City Career Firefighter Paramedics Association, the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 4269, the Worcester County IAFF Local 4916, and the International Union of Police Associations all have announced support, with many others in the pipeline.
The twice-elected former governor, who left office in 2023 with an unprecedented 81% approval rating in the deepest of deep blue states, has also launched a “Democrats for Hogan” coalition spearheaded by former state Sen. Bobby Zirkin from Baltimore County.
Hogan said in our previous interview in April that he was running to best represent the state in Washington, not his party or anybody else’s party.
Ahead of the primary race in early May, a Washington Post poll showed 64% of registered voters held a favorable view of Hogan compared to the 26% who held a favorable view of Alsobrooks. Hogan’s appeal to working-class voters is going to be critically important because they are the ones who will determine who will win the big races.
Why? Well, firstly, they are the overwhelming majority of eligible voters, and, equally importantly, they are voters whose pocketbooks have been hit hardest by crippling inflation, energy costs, homeowners- and car-insurance spikes, and housing costs or availability. They are also the ones whose communities have been gutted by the fentanyl crisis and gang-related violent crimes — and, just like everyone else, they can draw a straight line from the crime to the open border fomented by Democrats.
It isn’t just working-class whites who share these concerns; working-class blacks and Hispanics are equally dissatisfied with how the Democrats have handled all these problems.
Couple that with Democrats already having slowly lost ground with black, Asian, and Latino voters since 2018. When you have a candidate such as Hogan who is willing to go eye to eye and listen to their problems rather than preach to them or, worse yet, tell them there is no problem at all, experts should be paying attention.
In 2023, a study released by the Center for Working-Class Politics, a left-leaning research group, indicated that unless the Democrats improved their standing with blue-collar voters, they were not going to get a far-left agenda passed in Congress. The inversion of politics over the past two decades, in which the Democratic Party has shed working-class voters in every cycle while instead gaining activist elites, could have a large consequence favoring a candidate such as Hogan, who demonstrated as governor that he understood the union workers’ struggle and was there to help.
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Hogan has a realistic understanding of the state and country he lives in, one that consists not just of the professional class that crowds cities such as Baltimore but one that is rooted in the understanding that two-thirds of eligible voters, such as longshoremen, police, and firefighters, are working-class.
Based on the endorsem*nts, they seem to understand him as well. But the people who don’t seem to understand what this election cycle is about are the ones at the Maryland Democratic Party who placed “Trump endorsed Hogan” Billboards along I-895 and I-95.
