Angela Alsobrooks defeated David Trone in Tuesday’s Democratic primary in Maryland, becoming the party’s nominee to fill the seat currently held by Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat who is retiring when his term ends in January.
Alsobrooks will face Republican Larry Hogan, the state’s former governor, who handily won the GOP nomination on Tuesday without considerable opposition.
As of 10 p.m., Alsobrooks, the Prince George’s County executive, was ahead with 52.8 percent of the vote to Trone’s 43.2 percent. The Associated Press called the race for Alsobrooks at 9:46 p.m.
Despite Trone’s sizeable campaign war chest — the co-founder of Total Wine & More broke the self-funding record for a Senate primary, spending upwards of $61 million of his own money — Alsobrooks won big-name endorsements from both inside and outside Maryland over the course of the campaign. She was endorsed by seven U.S. senators, including Cory Booker (D., N.J.), Chris Murphy (D., Conn.), Raphael Warnock (D., Ga.), and Maryland’s own Chris Van Hollen. She also received endorsements from Maryland Democratic representatives Steny Hoyer and Jamie Raskin, and the state’s Democratic governor, Wes Moore.
Trone was endorsed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) and Maryland’s Democratic attorney general, Anthony Brown, but he did not have nearly as many political heavyweights in his corner as Alsobrooks did.
Cardin declined to endorse either Democrat vying to replace him.
The Democratic-primary campaign was a particularly heated one, with Trone attacking Alsobrooks’s thin resume and accusing her of being beholden to special interests. At one point in the campaign, Alsobrooks seized on a gaffe in which Trone, seemingly meaning to say the word “bugaboo,” uttered the racial slur “jigaboo” instead.
The most recent polling on the general-election race, an Emerson College survey, shows Alsobrooks leading Hogan 48 percent to 38 percent, meaning the popular former governor has plenty of ground to make up before November. With control of the Senate up for grabs in November, Republicans are hoping that Hogan can put Maryland’s typically-safe Democratic seat in play this year.
Though Hogan left office with the approval of 81 percent of Marylanders, the last Republican to serve as one of the state’s two senators was Charles Mathias, who left office in 1987.
Correction: An earlier version of this article named J. Glenn Beal Jr. as the last Republican to win a Senate election in Maryland. While he was the last non-incumbent Republican to win one of the seats, Charles Mathias — initially elected in 1968 — outlasted Beal by ten years. The article has been corrected to reflect this information.