Can anyone topple Andy Harris? Democrats have created conditions where the answer is ‘no’

Even by the standards of the United States Congress, where all sorts of scoundrels have found refuge, Maryland’s 1st District stands out.

The sprawling, rural district has historically been anchored by Maryland’s Eastern Shore and has, at times, included communities as diverse as Lexington Park in St. Mary’s County and Brooklyn Park in Anne Arundel County.

While the 1st has undergone multiple permutations as population trends and political whims have changed over time, what has remained oddly consistent is the willingness of the district’s voters to embrace a motley assortment of rogues and send them to Washington.

There was Tom Johnson, Democrat from Worcester County. He lost his 1962 re-election bid after being indicted on corruption charges and eventually served a brief prison term.

And Bill Mills, protégé and successor of the venerated C. Rogers Morton. Mills, a Republican, took his own life in 1973 on the heels of a damaging General Accounting Office report that his campaign was bolstered by a $25,000 transfer from Richard Nixon’s infamous Committee to Re-Elect the President (or CREEP, as has always been fitting).

Of course, there was Bob Bauman, a pugnacious and intellectually imposing Talbot County conservative—the Newt Gingrich of the Captain and Tenille era. His promising political career was derailed when he was caught soliciting sex from a 16-year-old male prostitute.

Finally, there was St. Mary’s County’s own Roy Dyson—a conservative, pro-defense Democrat in the mold of former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn. The suicide of his chief of staff, Tom Pappas, while under a cloud of personal corruption and personal impropriety set into motion a chain of events that led to Dyson’s 1990 defeat at the hands of the morally unimpeachable Wayne T. Gilchrest, a schoolteacher.

Even in this putrid pond of dishonor, however, current occupant Andy Harris stands out.

The greatest hits of Harris, an anesthesiologist and former Maryland state senator, show the scars he has inflicted on our political system.

Now chairman of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, Harris was actively involved in the plot led by Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 presidential election on January 6, 2021. After those efforts led to a deadly insurrection against our nation’s government at the U.S. Capitol, Harris opposed a resolution to award Congressional Gold Medals to the police officers who risked their lives to defend American democracy on that terrible day.

Harris voted against the formation of a committee to investigate the events leading up to the January 6 riot, and publicly referred to the rioters as “peaceful patriots.”

By voting against an $870 billion agricultural bill that provided desperately needed farming, conservation and nutritional subsidies, Harris betrayed the interests of the leading industry in his district. By voting against a national healing garden meant to memorialize the victims of mass shootings and bring peace to their families, Harris failed the most basic tests of humanity.

With these and other votes on the back of his congressional bubble gum card, it’s no wonder he refuses to engage with constituents in town hall meetings.

So some hearts began to flutter with reports that Jake Day—the charismatic and telegenic Eastern Shoreman who served as mayor of Salisbury before joining Governor Wes Moore’s cabinet as housing and community development secretary—has been gearing up to challenge Harris in the 2026 elections. On paper and in person, this would-be Lochinvar from the Delmarva Peninsula has the perfect credentials for the assignment.

A highly decorated U.S. Army Major and U.S. Army National Guardsman with a combat deployment to the Horn of Africa under his belt.

As mayor, Day has been credited with the renaissance of the city’s long-dormant downtown commercial district and the revitalization of the city’s once-underperforming economy. He is also past-president of the Maryland Municipal League and an urban designer whose credentials include a masters degree from Oxford University.

The good news for Democrats is that this is the best matchup for which they could ever hope. The very best of what our political system could be, versus the worst of what it has become.

The bad news is that in spite of it all, Andy Harris remains the favorite to win re-election.

It’s a numbers game. Following the 2010 census and resulting reapportionment, the 1st District was conceived by Annapolis Democrats in 2011 as a storage locker for conservative Republican votes, needed to achieve their larger goal of flipping the 6th Congressional District from a scarlet red to a blue-leaning district.

It was, at the time, a perfect coalescence of interests. The party wished to shoehorn a seventh Democrat into its eight-member House delegation. Longtime Senate President Mike Miller wished to provide his loyal floor lieutenant, then-state Sen. Rob Garagiola, with a Montgomery County-based congressional seat to call his own (the fact that Garagiola was toppled in the primary by eventual Congressman John Delaney was but a mild inconvenience to the venerable Annapolis boss).

Added to this imperative was a laundry list of favors requested by the other Democratic incumbents of the day. It became imperative to pack as many conservative Republicans as constitutionally possible within the confines of the 1st District.

Today, the fruit of that corrosive labor is a scarlet red island in a sea of Maryland’s blue. One where Donald Trump lapped Kamala Harris by more than 70,000 votes in 2024 and where Larry Hogan defeated eventual winner Angela Alsobrooks by a more than 2-1 margin in the U.S. Senate race.

As for Andy Harris? The outcomes are generally the same, regardless of the caliber of his opponent. In 2022, he cruised past former state Del. Heather Mizeur, a gifted politician with a compelling personality, a national Rolodex and millions in the bank, by a comfortable 54-43 margin. Two years later, facing only token opposition, he glided to a 59-37 percent win. In other words, Mizeur’s millions and her friendships with Democratic influencers and celebrities counted for a bump of less than five percent.

Adding layers to the challenge is the fact that while the Eastern Shore remains the spiritual center of the 1st District, it no longer represents the largest bloc of votes. Rather, the majority of registered voters in the district—55 percent for the Republicans and 52 percent for the Democrats—are actually located along the I-95 corridor, in Baltimore, Harford and Cecil counties (you read that right: Cecil County is far more temperamentally aligned with its neighbors along the I-95 corridor, both in Maryland and in northern Delaware, than it is with Berlin, Salisbury and Easton).

Here, in a region where Harris has amassed a formidable political machine and remains largely familiar from his days in the legislature, he has been strikingly consistent. In his successful campaign against Mizeur, 55 percent of his 159,673 votes came from those three counties. Two years later, with a much higher turnout for the presidential election, he captured an identical 55 percent of his overall vote from those same jurisdictions. It must provide immeasurable comfort for an incumbent politician to wake up on Election Day knowing that more than 55 percent of your votes are already in the bank.

All of this is to say that Jake Day, for all of his exceptional qualities, would begin this race as an underdog.

He would be running in a district that is tailor made for a MAGA acolyte such as Harris, and votes in a manner consistent with its partisan splits. Moreover, this native son of the Lower Eastern Shore must figure out how to connect with voters in communities that aren’t on the Shore, have little in common with the Shore, and have a longstanding pattern of reflexive partisan voting in federal races.

That said, if we have learned nothing else from the gallery of rascals who have come before Harris, it is that anything and everything is possible in the 1st Congressional District.