PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY and FREDERICK, Md. — Angela Alsobrooks starts off her stump speech with an anecdote about her grandmother Sarah, whose dream was to go to Washington to work for the federal government. Lacking a keyboard, she learned to type with a piece of paper taped to her fridge.
It’s a story about striving and the value of work, Alsobrooks says, that is familiar to many Marylanders, many Americans. Other parts of her story are familiar, too: how she is juggling the care of her aging relatives, including her mother, who has dementia. How she is worried about the fate of her daughters’ reproductive rights.
Alsobrooks, who leads Maryland’s second-largest county, is running for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat on the message that she is uniquely qualified to deliver for Marylanders because she understands what they need from their government — because she can relate. Her message takes direct aim at her closest primary rival, Rep. David Trone, a wealthy businessman whose self-funding campaign has outspent Alsobrooks $41.6 million to $3.9 million.
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No Democratic Senate primary in the nation is more hotly contested than this one, and its winner will face popular former Gov. Larry Hogan, the presumptive Republican nominee, in one of the most competitive Senate battles this year. The outcome of the primary will also help shape the face of the party heading into the November elections and define who exactly will be represented in the upper chamber.
Alsobrooks, a Black woman whose family fled the Jim Crow South for Maryland, could help address the lack of representation of Black women in the Senate, where only three Black women have ever served. The lone Black woman in the Senate right now, Democratic Sen. Laphonza Butler of California, will exit the chamber when her temporary appointment ends later this year. Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware is also mounting a Senate bid; if both women are elected, it would mark the first time in U.S. history that two Black women have served in the Senate at the same time.
Alsobrooks’ candidacy is also meaningful for Maryland’s congressional delegation, which right now is made up only of men; the state has never elected a person of color to the Senate. In Alsobrooks, the Senate would gain the voice of a mother a decade younger than the Senate average, and a local government official who won’t be among the roughly-two thirds of senators who are millionaires.
Hogan’s entry into the race came with new considerations for voters, making what was a safe blue seat into a competitive race with national implications. Which candidate can form the strongest coalition of Marylanders to counter Hogan, including the supermajority of the Black voters who viewed him favorably when he left office? For Alsobrooks, Hogan’s entry has also spurred questions about her ability to fundraise what’s needed to beat Hogan in the face of Trone’s open wallet, even as she posts record fundraising.
Alsobrooks and her supporters are hanging their hopes on a slew of TV ads airing in the final weeks of the election that will introduce voters to a candidate who really gets it — their hopes, their challenges — and who will animate voters come November. Trone, who has been pelting the Maryland airwaves months longer than Alsobrooks, has been shown ahead in every public poll in the race going back to at least February.
“It’s hard to represent people who you don’t understand and whose lives you don’t know,” Alsobrooks said in an interview. “I understand the struggles of hard-working families because I grew up in one. How we solve a lot of these issues is borne directly from my personal experience of watching people work hard to make things happen for their families.”
Alsobrooks thinks she’ll ultimately overcome Trone’s advantage because she has proved throughout her career that she can deliver results for her constituents. In a packed day of campaigning in late March that started with Black business owners in Prince George’s County and ended with a rally in Frederick, Alsobrooks and voters talked about how her experiences inform her political work.
The fourth event in a schedule that only left time for lunch in the car was an intimate roundtable conversation with local community advocates about reproductive rights and issues impacting local women in western Maryland. In a small conference room tucked inside a business on a Frederick commercial strip, Alsobrooks pulled up a seat among about a dozen other women and started taking notes on a legal pad.
The director of a local Planned Parenthood clinic talked about the influx of patients from out of state, along with a large share of women who have newly immigrated. Another woman described her experience with a series of miscarriages and the lack of compassionate and professional care she received at a nearby hospital.
“She understands things at a deeper level because she has that lived experience being a Black woman and the challenges she’s had to navigate,” said Danielle Haskins, 38, who is supporting Alsobrooks. “So often we have to explain the story leading up to it. With her, we can just start with the mess and then go from there.”
Alsobrooks is championing reproductive rights in Maryland as a way to distinguish herself from both Trone and Hogan. Alsobrooks is quick to highlight that Trone, the owner of beverage chain Total Wine & More, has made political contributions of more than $150,000 to Republicans; he has said he views them as business expenses for access separate from his political views, but Alsobrooks says they’ve bolstered candidates who enacted abortion restrictions.
Hogan has said he won’t support a federal abortion ban. When asked if he would support codifying the protections of Roe v. Wade into federal law, Hogan said he would have to weigh “whether it’s needed or not.” In 2022, as governor, Hogan vetoed legislation that would have allowed health care providers who aren’t physicians to offer abortions.
Maryland law protects abortion, but she worries about her daughter, in her first year at Spelman College, a historically-Black institution in Atlanta, Georgia — a state in which abortions are banned at six weeks of pregnancy.
“I never thought we’d need to fight the same battles for our daughters that our mothers fought for us,” Alsobrooks says in a new TV ad.
At an event earlier in the day with about a dozen military veterans, nearly all men, the conversation starts off with concerns about the backlog of claims for veteran benefits at the federal government. Then, one voter asked about the pay gap for women veterans, who seek higher education and vocational training at higher rates than men veterans, but ultimately earn less. “Any thoughts about that?” he said. “I’m the father of a daughter pursuing a graduate degree.”
Alsobrooks smiles and says, “How much time do you have?” to laughter in the room.
“We still have challenges in the way women show up in our society, how valued they are,” she continued, talking about persistent pay gaps and lack of access to reproductive health care among women in the military.
Then she jumps to representation. Maryland, she says, “doesn’t have a single woman representing us in Washington.”
“It’s important that we have all of us represented because it makes our policies more complete,” she added. “We’ve had in our country now over 2,000 senators. Sixty have been women. … That’s why I need your vote, so I can get there and make sure I bring that perspective for all of us.”
Alsobrooks isn’t a stranger to the dynamics that have kept women out of the highest offices. During her first run for office in 2010, when she would become the first woman elected Prince George’s County state attorney, Alsobrooks remembers being called a “nice lady,” which she saw as an unsuccessful attempt to demean her candidacy in front of voters who’d never seen a woman in that job. Alsobrooks would continue to blaze trails in Prince George’s, a majority Black locality hugging the eastern part of Washington, D.C. In 2018, she became the first woman to be elected county executive for Prince George’s County and the first Black woman to serve as county executive in Maryland.
Alsobrooks speaks with pride about her job as county executive, how her administration has brought jobs to the area and broken ground on 10 new schools. In an event with the Maryland Black Chamber of Commerce last month, Alsobrooks talked about fighting for the new FBI headquarters to come to Maryland with a pitch to the Biden administration that urged them to deliver on their promises to advance equity and opportunity for Black communities. Alsobrooks pointed out that the federal government had spent four times more money in the last 15 years in Fairfax County, the majority-white competitor site with a higher median income, than in Prince George’s.
“None of us are talking about diversity. I’m talking about equity,” Alsobrooks said, drawing out the word as the group of 40 Black business owners nodded in agreement. “Two totally different concepts. Just give us the opportunity.”
Her long tenure in Maryland politics has helped Alsobrooks clinch a wide range of endorsements from across the state, an advantage she has over Trone. That includes Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, the nation’s only Black governor; Speaker Adrienne Jones, the first Black woman to lead the Maryland House; and Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller, the first South Asian woman elected lieutenant governor in the country. Last week, she got the endorsement of The Washington Post editorial board, who called her a “pragmatic leader in the prime of her career.”
Alsobrooks has a well-documented friendship with Vice President Kamala Harris, who Alsobrooks says inspired that first campaign. In 2016, Alsobrooks traveled to California to support Harris’ Senate bid, and in 2019, she backed Harris’ presidential campaign, traveling to Detroit with her daughter to support Harris during a primary debate.
Harris endorsed Alsobrooks in her bid for county leader, calling her “one of the bright, bright stars in our country.” This time, the vice president’s support is less public because of the constraints of a presidential reelection campaign, but the two have spoken several times on the phone since Alsobrooks launched her Senate bid, and shared a lengthy private conversation during the national gathering of Delta Sigma Theta, a historically-Black sorority, last July.
Alsobrooks was raising a daughter through each of her campaigns. The first time around, she scrambled to coordinate child care for her preschooler, cobbling it together with the help of family. Alsobrooks talks about advocating for accommodations for her daughter, who, like Alsobrooks, has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. Her own parenting experiences, Alsobrooks said, have given her a close look at the nation’s broken child care system and under-resourced public education system, which sometimes leaves behind children whose parents can’t advocate for them.
On top of running for Senate, and her full time job in Prince George’s, Alsobrooks is also very involved in the care of her aging parents, specifically her mom, who has dementia and growing care demands. Supporting them in this new phase has been “the biggest honor,” but helping them navigate the health care system has renewed her drive to lower health care costs and make it easier for families to access care.
“My father was trying to call [his insurance] to get some help because my mother needs a caretaker,” Alsobrooks said. “He was on the phone one day for three hours, waiting on a hold line, trying to get through. That is unbelievable.”
Alsobrooks grew up in the Camp Springs neighborhood of Prince George’s County, a predominantly Black working- and middle-class neighborhood that Alsobrooks remembers as close-knit and warm. Her dad delivered newspapers for The Washington Post and sold insurance; her mom was a receptionist. She attended Banneker High School in Washington, D.C., an application school that has historically served top-performing Black students, where she was student body president.
Her first year of college at Duke University coincided with the racially charged 1990 Senate race between Republican Sen. Jesse Helms, who hinged his campaign on opposing affirmative action policies, and Democrat Harvey Gantt, who would have become the first Black person to represent North Carolina in the Senate.
Her experience at Duke was her first time living in the South. Her family had fled Seneca, South Carolina, after her great-grandfather was shot and killed by a White sheriff’s deputy in an act of police brutality in 1956.
The family’s story, Alsobrooks says, is part of what drove her interest in law and criminal justice.
Alsobrook’s third TV spot of the campaign shows her sitting at a picnic table, chatting with two women, Vivian Chavez and Tiffani Evans, whose sons were murdered in separate incidents of gun violence in Maryland. The ad, in which Evans wears a pink t-shirt featuring photos of her 8-year-old son before his death, focuses on Alsobrooks’ time as Prince George’s County’s top prosecutor. In the nearly nine years she was in office, the ad points out, violent crime in the county dropped by 50 percent.
Alsobrooks talks about her experience as a prosecutor with pride and some pragmatism: “It is important for people to live in places that are safe.” But, with the image of grieving mothers looking to Alsobrooks for help seeking justice, the ad confronts the fact that in this primary, this part of her résumé has become a political liability.
Alsobrook’s opponent, Trone, has made criminal justice reform and rehabilitation a key hallmark of his campaign, making visible efforts to relate to Black voters distrustful of law enforcement and the criminal justice system by talking about an arrest for illegal business practices in Pennsylvania in the early 1990s. Trone, who is White, was never convicted, but he has cited the experience as a driver for his work in Congress on rehabilitation and reintegration for people with criminal records.
That work precedes his campaign against Alsobrooks, but it has shaped a key line of attack against her focus on some of the voters she’ll need to succeed, including Black voters in and around Baltimore.
In a recent interview, Trone wrote off Alsobrooks’ candidacy based on her years as a prosecutor — not the policies she backed, or the cases she did or didn’t pursue — but ipso facto. “There’s not a chance that I’m not going to win over someone who is a prosecutor with all the things that prosecutors do,” Trone told Politico. Trone’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Some on the left have also criticized Alsobrooks’ record, including her support for policies that have been found to exacerbate racial disparities in the criminal justice system, including increased police presence in schools and mandatory minimum sentences.
The way her work as a prosecutor has featured in the primary seems to frustrate Alsobrooks. In her view, she has “worked to protect my community against violence,” while also championing programs to make it easier to expunge crimes off someone’s record, to keep truant teens out of the criminal justice system and to help nonviolent drug offenders get into community college or vocational training.
In 1997, more than a decade before she was elected as Prince George’s County state attorney, Alsobrooks started her career in criminal justice by becoming the county’s first full-time domestic violence prosecutor. As she recalls it, she applied to work for the state attorney’s office, and this position, funded by a grant, is the job that was available.
She became passionate about the work as cases unspooled in front of her. “I loved fighting for women, and I also loved, after the cases were done, talking to them in my office — supporting and encouraging the women who had had horrible things happen to them, to their children and families.”
That time continues to be a source of perspective on critical issues. While prosecuting cases of child abuse, Alsobrooks found too many cases where a mother would leave her child in the care of an untrusted or unprepared partner or family member to go to work. “I realized,” Alsobrooks said, “that many of the mothers didn’t have child care.”
Alsobrooks’ case to voters weighing their choice is that when it comes to criminal justice and public safety, she’s the only candidate who’s held the issue up close.
“The thing I think about is, I’m the only person in the race who has any experience at all in dealing with these issues. It’s one thing to talk about the issue, you know, from a theoretical standpoint, about what you feel,” Alsobrooks said. “It’s a different experience to say, I know what it means to keep communities safe, while also working not to harm our children, and also making sure that we have the appropriate justice and second chances built into the system.”
“It’s not me just kind of talking about issues. You know, a lot of people in Washington, they bicker, they spend a whole lot of time talking. But I’m a person who’s been getting results. And that’s the distinguishing factor.”
