Democrats’ stronghold on state began more than a century ago
Maryland strengthened its image as a reliably blue state as Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley handily won re-election on an Election Day that saw widespread gains by the Republican Party across the nation.
With O’Malley’s 14-point victory over his Republican predecessor, Bob Ehrlich, and continued control of the state’s congressional delegation and General Assembly, the Democrats retained their longtime stronghold on Free State politics.
“I think the trend in Maryland is that this is a totally blue state,” said Nancy Dacek, a former Republican Montgomery County councilwoman. Likening Maryland to Massachusetts, she said the two-party system is dead in the state.
“There’s really no point in voting,” she said. “There’s no way to really raise what I call a farm team of [Republican] candidates, because what would be the point in running?”
Maryland has elected five Republicans and 13 Democrats to the governor’s mansion since 1900. By comparison, Massachusetts has elected two more Republicans than Democrats to the governor’s post during the same period.
Maryland Democrats began flexing their political muscle more than a century ago, asserting their dominance in 1864 as abolitionists seeking to rewrite the state constitution, according to Maryland historian Theodore F. Sheckels.
“A lot of Marylanders with Southern allegiances were basically booted out of the political process” at the 1864 Constitutional Convention, said Sheckels, a communications professor at Randolph-Macon College.
He said Southern sympathizers — whose politics mostly align with today’s GOP — began fleeing to friendlier states.
Thus began Maryland’s long, North-South identity crisis that shaped it into “a land of middle temperament,” notes Maryland State Archivist Edward C. Papenfuse.
In Baltimore, where 50 percent of the state’s
population lived in the early 1900s, progressive social reforms were well under way and in constant conflict with the Eastern Shore. A similar tug-of-war between urban and rural areas in Virginia was tempered by the state’s expansive size and “residue of slavery,” ingrained by a violent 1831 slave revolt.
As federal jobs began sprawling into Maryland in the early 1900s, political leaders elected to give the governor extraordinary power over the budget-writing process. The changes gave the General Assembly limited say in the state’s spending.
“That [political structure] gives a lot of power to the party in power, in extending patronage and creating the structure of government,” Papenfuse said.
Five years later, Democrat Albert Ritchie was elected governor of Maryland — and stayed in office for four terms.
Ritchie was an old-school Democrat who helped transition the party into its modern-day platforms.
He invested record amounts in highways, fought for women’s voting rights and introduced a then-radical policy of transferring money from richer to poorer counties to pay for public education.
In 1966, Marylanders elected Republican Spiro Agnew, who later became Richard Nixon’s vice president. Agnew, the son of a Greek immigrant, won over Democrats by running on a moderate, pro-integration platform.
“Agnew was a different kind of Republican who reflected cultural and racial issues of the 1960s,” said John White, politics professor at Catholic University. But Agnew was forced to resign as vice president in 1973 after admitting to tax evasion as part of an investigation into bribery and corruption.
It would be another 30 years before another Republican — Bob Ehrlich — would become Maryland’s governor.
Like Republicans before him, Ehrlich gathered Democratic votes by embracing moderate principles. Some critics say his Democratic challenger, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, was a particularly weak opponent. Ehrlich served one term and was defeated in 2006 by O’Malley, then Baltimore’s mayor.
“Today, the movement of the national Republican Party created a different kind of party that has become more conservative,” White said, “and the ability for them to win [Maryland] statewide elections has become severely diminished.”
