David Trone, a multimillionaire who has spent more than $40 million in Maryland’s U.S. Senate race, has opened a wide gap between himself and Angela Alsobrooks for the Democratic nomination, a new poll from The Baltimore Sun, FOX45 and the University of Baltimore found.
But either would lose to former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan in the general election if it were held now, according to the poll’s sample of nearly 1,300 likely voters. Hogan’s popularity suggests Maryland, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 2-to-1, will be a battleground in the national parties’ push to win a majority in the narrowly divided Senate.
Trone, co-founder of the chain of Total Wine & More stores, leads Alsobrooks, the second-term Prince George’s County executive, 48% to 29% in the April 7-10 poll of 600 likely Democratic primary voters.
“He’s benefiting from name recognition and television spending,” said Steve Raabe, owner of OpinionWorks of Annapolis, which conducted the poll. “I think it would be very hard for her to close this gap, but she can.”
That’s because, the poll said, only 42% of the Democratic primary voters say they have firmly made up their mind.
“Time is short, but she could still close this,” Raabe said of Alsobrooks.
Trone, who has emphasized protecting Social Security and Medicare during his three terms in the U.S. House, held a particularly large advantage — 60% to 27% — among senior citizens, according to the poll’s Democratic primary voters.
Trone’s overall lead over Alsobrooks dropped to 50% to 38% when Democratic primary respondents were asked to choose only between those two. Fields tend to narrow — there were eight candidates in the survey who collected 2% or less — as an election draws near.
Trone, whose district includes Frederick County and Western Maryland, and Alsobrooks each want to succeed Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin, who will retire when his term ends in January.
Hogan has little opposition in the GOP primary and is the choice of 69% of 451 Republican primary voters statewide, the poll found. His closest competitor is Robin Ficker, who got 9%. Ficker, a former state delegate and term limit advocate, ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 2000 and has run for Congress several times, as well for governor, state Senate and other offices.
Hogan was encouraged by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to enter the race and filed as candidate on Feb. 9, the last day to declare for the May 14 primary.
Democrats hold a 51-49 U.S. Senate majority. One Senate Democrat in a red state — Joe Manchin of West Virginia — has announced his retirement. That poses a challenge for Democrats, who also must defend a handful of seats in states that Democratic President Joe Biden narrowly won in 2020.
Hogan beat Trone, 53% to 40%, and Alsobrooks, 54% to 36%, in the poll’s hypothetical November matchups. OpinionWorks, which has conducted polls for The Sun since 2007, surveyed a total of 1,292 likely voters of Republican, Democratic, other party and no party affiliation on those questions.
In 2018, Hogan became the first Republican in 70 years to be reelected Maryland governor. He prevailed by presenting a low-key brand of moderation to win critically needed, crossover Democratic votes in one of the nation’s bluest states. His second four-year term ended in January 2023; Maryland governors are limited to two terms.
Raabe said it is significant that 63% of the nearly 1,300 polled viewed Hogan as “independent-minded,” while just 23% considered him “a partisan Republican who will vote with Republicans most of the time.”
“That’s the thing that I would be happiest about, if I were him,” Raabe said. “Democrats are going to try very hard to cast him as another vote for the Republicans in the Senate. He can say, ‘I’m an independent.’”
The landscape that surrounds Hogan will look different than during his gubernatorial runs.
Unlike in 2014 and 2018, he is running in a presidential election year. While Hogan has clashed with Republican presidential contender Donald Trump, analysts say the likely presence of the polarizing candidate at the top of the November ballot may significantly boost Democratic turnout in the state.
“It’s going to be a much bigger electorate than his gubernatorial runs,” said University of Baltimore professor John Willis, who was secretary of state in the administration of Democratic Gov. Parris Glendening. “And you’ve got to do a lot of number crunching to see where that turnout is coming from and what issues are they motivated by. Whichever the opponent, there’ll be an opportunity to reshape the issues that voters would have to consider.”
Maryland Democrats’ hopes in November will rest partly on voters — such as poll respondent Jane Jenkins — who were happy with Hogan as governor, but won’t vote for him now because his election could tip the Senate balance to Republicans.
While she says his views are to the right of her own, “I liked Hogan as governor,” said Jenkins, 71, a Cumberland retiree.
But she says maintaining the Democrats’ Senate majority, which allows the party to shape the chamber’s agenda, “is extremely important. Frankly, I think the Democrats have better ideas and are leaning more the way the country feels about issues.”
Jenkins said she will vote for Trone — she is in his congressional district — in the primary and that she had never heard of Alsobrooks “until she threw her hat into the ring.”
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Another person surveyed for the poll, Raymond Waters, 44, of Baltimore, said he would likely support Hogan. A former registered Democrat, Waters said he lost faith in the party and became a Republican because of corruption among Baltimore officials, including former Mayor Sheila Dixon’s conviction for stealing gift cards in 2009.
“Maybe the Republicans will do a better job,” Waters said.
Trone got his message out early, sponsoring a number of television ads and other media using tens of millions of his money since entering the race last May. That kind of spending — more than $40 million so far, his campaign said Monday — is important to build the kind of name recognition needed in federal and state races.
“David got a jump on the election,” Willis said. “He started doing communication with voters through broadcast media, direct mail, other ways of communicating, and he basically had the space to himself for a good, long period of time.”
That “jump” is reflected in his poll numbers, Willis said.
If she wins in May and November, Alsobrooks would be Maryland’s first Black U.S. senator. Also, she would return a woman to the state’s 10-member congressional delegation.
The poll shows Alsobrooks with a 39% to 35% margin among Black voters in the Democratic primary. Her margin among women and men is identical: she is losing both by 18 points, Raabe said.
“It is surprising there is no gender gap in this race,” Raabe said.
Alsobrooks raised $5 million and spent $1.8 million from May through the end of last year, according to her Federal Election Commission reports.
Both Democratic candidates are spending heavily in the months before the primary. For example, on WJZ-TV, the Baltimore-based CBS-affiliate, Alsobrooks’ latest ad buy for the week starting April 9 is for 69 spots worth $42,175. For Trone, it’s 129 spots worth $104,900, according to reports filed with the Federal Communications Commission.
Eight days of early in-person voting begin May 2, but nearly 600,000 statewide voters requested mail-in ballots in advance and the state elections board began delivering those March 27. Voters had returned more than 38,000 completed ballots as of Sunday.
Both Trone and Alsobrooks tout their abortion rights positions and their personal histories — Trone as a self-made business executive from a struggling Pennsylvania farm family, and Alsobrooks as a mom and lifelong Marylander inspired by her parents and grandparents to pursue a public service career as a prosecutor and county executive.
“What she hasn’t done is really firmed up any kind of a base,” Raabe said. ”There are hundreds of thousands of voters that already have their ballots in hand. Time is of the essence.”
Baltimore Sun reporter Sam Janesch contributed to this article.
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About this poll
Results are based on a statewide survey of 1,292 likely general election voters: 600 likely Democratic primary voters, 451 likely Republican primary voters, and 241 voters of any party affiliation who said they were likely to vote in the general election but not a primary. The poll was conducted April 7-10 by OpinionWorks of Annapolis. Voters were randomly selected from the Maryland State Board of Elections’ voter file and contacted by trained interviewers by phone (landline and cellular). Additional voters were interviewed online through voter file sampling and databases known as consumer panels. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.0 percentage points for questions on which all voters were surveyed. It is 4.0 points for the Democratic primary voters, and 4.6 points for the sample of Republican primary voters.
