Heather Mizeur won the Democratic primary for Maryland’s 1st Congressional District on Tuesday, positioning herself for an uphill battle to unseat GOP Rep. Andy Harris in November.
Mizeur, a former state legislator, defeated David Harden, an ex-Foreign Service officer, to be the Democratic nominee for the Eastern Shore-centered district. Mizeur, seen as the more liberal candidate in the race, held large advantages in fundraising, name recognition, and endorsements over her centrist opponent.
While Harden ran a low-key race focused on local economic concerns, Mizeur focused her campaign on hot-button issues such as abortion access and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. She received endorsements from virtually every prominent Democrat in the state, including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, and every Democrat in Maryland’s House delegation.
Harris first won election to the House in 2010, when he rode that year’s tea party wave to unseat freshman Democratic Rep. Frank Kratovil in a rematch from the prior election cycle. Previously a state senator, Harris ran a successful conservative challenge to longtime centrist Rep. Wayne Gilchrest in the 2008 GOP primary, but Gilchrest’s later endorsement of Kratovil and a strongly Democratic national political environment led to Harris’s narrow loss in the general election. Gilchrest endorsed Mizeur last year.
A member of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, Harris’s ultraconservative stances on issues have made him a top target of Democratic ire over the course of his congressional career. He recently made headlines for a series of controversies, including his admission last October that he prescribed the antiparasitic drug ivermectin to treat COVID-19 and a January 2021 incident involving his alleged attempt to bring a gun onto the House floor. Harris, a licensed anesthesiologist, later told reporters that a complaint seeking to have his medical license revoked had been filed over his decision to prescribe the drug, which has not been approved by government regulatory agencies as a legitimate treatment for COVID-19 infections.
Harris, the only Republican member of Maryland’s congressional delegation, has also come under fire for his role in attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) alleged at a Jan. 6 committee hearing last week that Harris had been among a handful of GOP lawmakers who attended a Dec. 21, 2020, White House meeting involving attorney John Eastman’s now-infamous memo, which called on Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes from battleground states including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Wisconsin and unilaterally “gavel President Trump as re-elected” on Jan. 6.
Mizeur, a former member of the Maryland House of Delegates representing liberal Takoma Park, just outside Washington, D.C., previously ran for governor in 2014 but lost the Democratic primary to then-Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown. Mizeur announced her campaign for Congress in early 2021, soon after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Since then, much of her campaign’s focus has been spent highlighting Harris’s alleged involvement in events leading up to the riot, often characterizing her opponent as a “traitor” and “seditionist.”
During the decennial redistricting process that concluded earlier this year, Maryland Democrats initially proposed maps that could have forced Harris out of Congress by redrawing the 1st Congressional District to include parts of Democratic-leaning Annapolis and Anne Arundel County. However, state courts rejected Democrats’ redistricting proposal as unfair partisan gerrymandering, and final congressional maps left the 1st Congressional District’s boundaries largely unchanged.
The staunch Republican bent of the 1st District — former President Donald Trump won it by 20 points in 2020 even as President Joe Biden won Maryland by a nearly 2-to-1 margin — means that Republicans remain strongly favored to hold the seat this year.
