The great surprise of the 2006 Maryland elections was the utter lack of surprises.
There was talk of Republican Gov. Bob Ehrlich and Senate hopeful Lt. Gov. Michael Steele bucking national trends and the state’s built-in Democratic advantages to eke out victories. We heard that blacks, feeling ignored by state Democrats, might bolt for the GOP and help generate those narrow victories. And then came suggestions that voting glitches and a cascade of absentee ballots would delay the outcome for days, if not weeks.
Wrong, wrong and wrong again.
What happened this week was a smooth-sailing election that generated a partisan correction in the Old Line State. To a small degree, that correction was triggered by a national Democratic wave. But to a larger degree it reflected the return of a more muscular state Democratic Party.
To their credit, Ehrlich and Steele attempted — throughout the campaign and since their 2003 inauguration — to appeal to a broader base. Part of this outreach was to suburban women, epitomized by Ehrlich’s choice of Kris Cox as his running mate. Part of it reflected the very sort of multicultural inclusiveness Ehrlich once dismissed as “bunk.”
All of it was a calculated gambit to win in 2006.
On the race question, the two Republicans repeatedly insinuated that establishment Democrats had taken for granted the support of the state’s sizeable black population.
When it turned out that none of the Democrats’ four statewide nominees — Martin O’Malley for governor, Ben Cardin for Senate, Peter Franchot for comptroller, and Doug Gansler for attorney general — was black, the Republicans seemed both validated and buoyed by the prospect of mass defections of blacks to their side. A week before the election, Steele even held a headline-grabbing event with black Democrats from Prince George’s County who had broken ranks to endorse him.
It wasn’t enough. According to exit polls, Ehrlich pushed up his share of the black vote from 2002 about three points, to 15 percent — too little to get past O’Malley.
Steele did better among his fellow blacks, garnering 25 percent of their votes — a threshold plenty of Maryland analysts projected would make Steele only the fourth black senator since Reconstruction. But Steele’s white vote was much lower than Ehrlich’s, so much so that his overall losing margin to Cardin was wider than Ehrlich’s over O’Malley.
The election ran smoothly, despite Ehrlich’s warnings that the outcome could be prolonged by a tight margin (it wasn’t), and compounded by lots of absentee voters (there were many). In fact, the only late-campaign controversies were provided by Ehrlich’s and Steele’s distribution of bogus endorsements — something Ehrlich did in his very first primary campaign for the state legislature, way back in 1986.
The first win and first loss of Ehrlich’s electoral career were thus marred by dirty politics. That, too, was no surprise to those familiar with Ehrlich’s history.
As for that Democratic revival, 2006 witnessed the unleashing of a coordinated field operation, led by the state party and orchestrated by O’Malley campaign manager Josh White, which flooded Maryland with calls, mail and precinct walkers. “I’ve never seen a field campaign like this in my life,” party spokesman Derek Walker marveled.
Four years ago, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend had nothing of the sort. Long comfortable with repeated statewide victories, Democrats had allowed their machine to rust. Townsend failed to notice the problem or fix it.
Some might say that, given the national headwinds, Ehrlich and Steele won their campaigns but lost their respective elections. There’s sometruth to that — but only if a campaign is measured by the air war, rather than where the Democrats won it, on the ground from one end of the state to the other.
Thomas F. Schaller is associate political science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of “Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South.”
