Former Maryland Democratic Rep. Kweisi Mfume is set to return to Congress after 24 years, representing a Baltimore district President Trump derided as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”
Mfume on Tuesday won the Democratic nomination in the 7th District, held for more than two decades by the late Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, a frequent Trump political foil. Winning the primary is tantamount to victory in the heavily Democratic district, which takes in a bit over half the city of Baltimore, plus most of suburban Howard County. The general election is on April 28.
Mfume, 71, a former NAACP president, captured a strong plurality of the vote in a field of two dozen Democratic hopefuls. He easily beat Cummings’s widow, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, former head of the state Democratic Party, and state Sen. Jill P. Carter, among others.
But those candidates will face Mfume again on April 28. Mfume only won the Democratic nomination for the remainder of Cummings’s term, which ends in early January 2021. He’ll also have to win the Democratic nomination for the district’s full term beginning in 2021, and in that April 28 primary race will again face Rockeymoore Cummings, Carter, and several other Democrats.
The district was put in the national spotlight last summer when Trump lashed out at Cummings, who as chairman of the House Oversight Committee led investigations into the president’s finances and practices for granting White House practices.
Trump tweeted in July that conditions in Cummings’s district are “FAR WORSE and more dangerous” than those at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place,” Trump wrote, arguing that Cummings’s “district is considered the Worst in the USA” and “no human being would want to live there.”
Cummings died on Oct. 17 from “complications concerning longstanding health challenges,” his spokeswoman said at the time.
Mfume was previously a House member from January 1987 to February 1996. He resigned at the time accept the NAACP presidency, a position he held until 2004. Mfume lost a Democratic Senate primary bid in 2006.
He’ll return to a House much changed since his departure. He left during the first term of Republican House control after the 1994 GOP “revolution,” when the party claimed its first majority in 40 years. Conservative ideas were ascendant nationally, and Mfume, with one of the chamber’s most liberal voting records, found himself an odd-man-out. Now Democrats run the House, having captured the majority in the 2018 election.
