Money and related issues in the Alsobrooks-Trone race
Charlie Cooper
Money Misses the Mark in Maryland
Despite spending $62 million of his own fortune on the Democratic Senate primary, Rep. David Trone lost last night to county executive Angela Alsobrooks.
May 15, 2024
Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images. Angela Alsobrooks, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Maryland, is seen at a campaign event in Silver Spring, Maryland, April 24, 2024.
Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks pulled off an upset victory in the Democratic primary race for Maryland’s open U.S. Senate seat, for which longtime Democratic incumbent Ben Cardin chose not to seek re-election. She defeated Rep. David Trone, the multimillionaire wine merchant who burned through $62 million of his own fortune, the most ever spent by a candidate in a Senate primary race.
Alsobrooks will now face off against two-term former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan in the general election, a key race in the Democrats’ bid to try to hold their current Senate majority.
Trone’s blatant attempt to buy political office through an inescapable deluge of advertisements likely turned off many more voters than it won over. With nearly 60 percent of the vote in, Alsobrooks has a double-digit lead, in a race where polls only showed her closing to a toss-up in the final week.
By tapping his own personal wealth, Trone had outspent Alsobrooks by 9 to 1, according to the most recent figures by the Center for Responsive Politics. Late spending could have pushed that even higher. Besides his own self-funding, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its network were the next largest outside contributors to his campaign, though this particular money spigot was turned off down the stretch, including when Trone became more critical of Israel’s military actions in Gaza. Trone has for many years been a top “minyan” donor to AIPAC, and a vocal critic of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement against Israel.
Trone led in polling for most of the race in large part because of his early advantage in blitzing the airwaves with nonstop ads. That may have led to oversaturation by the end. In the final weeks of the race, Trone ran three separate attack ads against Alsobrooks simultaneously across the state’s three media markets. One veteran Maryland campaign strategist said he’s never seen that kind of barrage before.
Trone focused to a significant extent on criminal justice reform, criticizing Alsobrooks’s record as a state prosecutor in a transparent attempt to siphon away Black voters from her campaign. He claimed the issue was personal to him as a “victim” of the criminal justice system, which strained credulity since his experience consisted only of charges against him as a white-collar offender for business malpractice.
This electoral strategy failed to pan out. Alsobrooks won by handily carrying three predominantly Black counties in the state—Prince George’s, Baltimore City, and Charles. She also opened a narrow lead over Trone in the largely white Washington suburbs of Montgomery County. Black voters were projected to be about 40 percent of the Democratic primary electorate. Those areas will be critical for Democrats in November.
Despite Trone’s best attempts to claim the progressive mantle, the distinctions between the candidates were not chiefly ideological, though there were substantive differences between the two. Alsobrooks ran mostly on kitchen-table issues, such as expanding health care access, education reform, and creating better jobs. Trone emphasized criminal justice and some of his pro-labor credentials, which drew backing from some building trades unions.
Late in the campaign, Alsobrooks ran a series of ads highlighting her support from the state’s leading Democrats and her experience as a pragmatic legislator. She also benefited from a major ad campaign launched by the group Fight Corporate Monopolies, which went on the attack against Trone for his company Total Wine’s monopolistic tactics to corner liquor markets.
The ad emphasized Total Wine’s “dirty, unlawful, and corrupt business practices,” including violating state anti-monopoly laws and pushing out independent stores. It also mentioned a lawsuit that Trone faced during the race from the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission, related to an ongoing probe into Total Wine’s closest client, Southern Glazer’s. Total Wine was unwilling to comply with FTC orders.
The ad also described an incident in 2021 where Trone threatened a delivery worker at one of his stores by saying, “I will fucking end you … I will execute you!” That altercation took place while he was a member of Congress, which raises questions about his continued involvement in his company, despite claiming he was no longer affiliated.
“I believe our @fightmonopolies ad against Trone—both in timing and in message—played a key role in changing the trajectory of the Senate race,” wrote Faiz Shakir, a political adviser to the American Economic Liberties Project, whose political arm, Fight Corporate Monopolies, ran the ad.
Trone’s campaign suffered a series of missteps and gaffes down the final stretch of the race that hurt his campaign. The troubles began back in March when he accidentally used a racial slur in a congressional hearing. That incident got popular Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin to endorse Alsobrooks, as did the Washington Post editorial board.
Trone also had to retract a characterization in one of his ads that called Alsobrooks supporters “low-level,” presumably referring to many of her state and local endorsers. It brought a swift rebuke from her campaign, noting that she was endorsed by most of Maryland’s U.S. House delegation, including former majority leader Steny Hoyer, as well as the state’s other Democratic senator, Chris Van Hollen, and its Democratic governor, Wes Moore.
Alsobrooks’s win also defies many figures in Democratic leadership in Washington who lined up behind Trone because of his financial prowess as a fundraiser for the party, and because he could self-fund the upcoming race against Hogan, which would enable Democrats to spend their dollars on other close Senate contests this fall. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and his top lieutenants Reps. Katherine Clark (D-MA) and Pete Aguilar (D-CA) endorsed Trone, but they were not notably visible down the stretch stumping for their candidate.
Brian Witte/AP Photo. Maryland state Sen. Sarah Elfreth speaks at a news conference, March 12, 2024, in Annapolis, Maryland.
WHILE AIPAC’S PREFERRED CANDIDATE was unsuccessful statewide, it did break through in a House race where it invested millions of dollars.
State legislator Sarah Kelly Elfreth came out victorious in the Democratic primary for Maryland’s Third Congressional District, a safe blue district vacated by retiring Congressman John Sarbanes. Elfreth beat out a crowded field of 20 candidates vying for the spot, though the race had mostly narrowed to a contest between her and former Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, who defended the Capitol on January 6th.
Still, Elfreth took only 35 percent of the vote, with Dunn taking 25 percent. The numerous also-rans provided much more than the margin of victory.
After writing a best-selling book about his experience and receiving much media acclaim, Dunn made the decision to run for Congress, mainly on a democracy reform platform. In the end, he vastly outraised all his opponents by nearly a 4-to-1 margin, raking in over $4 million.
But what fundamentally altered the race was when AIPAC decided to intervene on behalf of Elfreth for what remain unclear reasons. Israel was not a major area of disagreement between the candidates in the race. Both Elfreth and Dunn expressed support for Israel and were not vocal proponents of conditioning military aid.
Overall, AIPAC and its affiliated campaign spending vehicle United Democracy Project (UDP) spent around $4.2 million to help Elfreth to victory. The spending included a six-figure ad buy in April mostly just commending her record on climate issues and reproductive rights, mirroring the “redbox” page on her campaign site.
In the final campaign disclosure filing period, over half of Elfreth’s individual contributions came from AIPAC’s network, including many longtime heavyweight Republican donors. Some of those names were disgraced Suns owner Robert Sarver, former AIPAC president Edward Levy, Robert Kraft’s son Daniel Kraft, and Colorado Trump bundler Larry Mizel.
AIPAC went as far as to actually run a ground game for Elfreth by hiring several field directors and phone-bankers for the GOTV effort, an unprecedented effort by the PAC.
Dunn’s campaign decried the outside spending and tried to use it to their advantage. In the final stretch of the race, Dunn ran ads attacking Elfreth for taking dark money and accepting help from GOP loyalists.
But ultimately it wasn’t enough, and AIPAC’s infusion of financial support blanketed the district with Elfreth ads.
It’s still unclear why AIPAC got involved in the first place if it wasn’t because of a public-facing position on Israel from Dunn. A spokesperson for AIPAC claimed it was to oppose another anti-war candidate, John Morse, who was backed by Bernie Sanders. But Morse never raised any money and ended up in ninth place with just over 1.5 percent of the vote.
Dunn pledged not to take money from super PACs and to implement campaign finance reforms, which may have raised concerns for a corporate-funded super PAC like AIPAC. Now, pending an expected general-election victory, Elfreth will take over for Sarbanes, whose legacy was working to keep big money out of politics, by leveraging big money in politics.
Mark Patro
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Charlie Cooper
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