Dan Rodricks: Midst the big blue wave, the one that got away from Democrats

As of Saturday morning, with all but a few mail-in ballots counted in Maryland’s 1st congressional district, Andy Harris’ ninth general election victory looked like this: The Republican incumbent had 164,989 votes in the Nov. 3 midterm election while his 38-year-old Democratic opponent, Dan Schwartz, had 150,881.

That’s a 4.5 percentage point win for Harris, but the closest any Democrat has come to knocking the 69-year-old incumbent out of his safe seat.

Since his first victory over Frank Kratovil in 2010, Harris has trounced Democratic opponents in the mostly rural 1st District, racking up margins as big as 35 and 40 points in some elections. Heather Mizeur, who ran a smart campaign in 2022, still finished 11 points behind.

This year, Dan Schwartz assumed the underdog role and sparked hope of an Eastern Shore upset.

It didn’t happen, as pundits and prognosticators predicted. 

But, given the blue wave that swept the nation, with Democrats scoring significant majorities in both the House and Senate, Schwartz’s 4.5-point defeat stands out as a lost opportunity. He beat Harris in four counties — Harford, Kent, Talbot and Wicomico.

Maryland Democrats could have achieved a complete sweep in congressional representation for the near future by unseating an arrogant right-wing extremist fully aligned with a deeply unpopular president. 

But the state party did little to help Schwartz while Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s push for Question 3 on the ballot pretty much ensured a vigorous Republican turnout in the 1st District.

If approved, Question 3 would give Maryland legislators more power to gerrymander the state’s districts. It was born of a reaction to President Trump’s sleazy attempt to get Texas and other states to redraw congressional maps, in time for November’s elections, to keep a Republican advantage in the House. 

While Question 3 passed statewide, it gave Maryland Republicans and others who resented the effort, particularly on the Eastern Shore, an incentive to vote on Nov. 3.

And that served Andy Harris. 

While Schwartz came within 1,688 votes of the incumbent in early voting and beat him by 18,534 mail-in votes, Harris clobbered Schwartz on Election Day, with a 34,215-vote advantage.

Schwartz believes the Maryland Democratic Party’s push for Question 3 doomed his chances in a year when Democrats flipped House and Senate seats all over the country, in places no one expected. 

Voters of the 1st District opposed Question 3. It lost in every county of the Eastern Shore, and in Harford County, part of which Harris represents.

“It drove Republicans and even independents to the polls and made it harder for me to get them on my side,” Schwartz told me during an interview this week.

He prefaced his comments by expressing a desire to “not sound like a whiner” but someone frustrated with his party’s establishment. The circumstances of Schwartz’s defeat deserves a post-mortem the Maryland Democratic Party is unlikely to conduct. So we’re doing it here.

“We did get a lot of independents and Republicans to vote for us,” Schwartz said. “This was a [4.5-point] race in a district that’s 60-plus percent Republican. I’m really proud of the big tent that we were trying to build.”

Sen. Chris Van Hollen campaigned for Schwartz, as did Rep. Jamie Raskin. But the state party put most of its effort and money into Question 3, undercutting Schwartz’s campaign against Harris on local issues and the one most top-of-mind for voters — the cost of living.

“This was not a blue wave election, this was a purple wave,” Schwartz said. “This was about putting up good candidates who could speak to people across the political spectrum. I just needed a little bit of help from the state party and from the national party in terms of finances, instead of all of that money going into Question 3.”

Schwartz contends that Question 3 alienated rural voters at a time when Democrats gained ground among them elsewhere.

“A big tent is what is needed right now for all of America,” he said, “but the state party instead tried to do the most partisan thing possible. We can’t be a strong Democratic Party if we’re isolating and alienating independent and Republican voters, and that’s exactly what Question 3 did.”

The referendum did not serve Moore on the Eastern Shore; his re-election vote totals dropped from their 2022 levels in six of the nine counties. 

That might constitute a big “so-what?” for Moore and other leaders, but, given two Trump elections and more recent trends across the country, Democrats should never again dismiss a single demographic. Thus the lesson of the 2026 midterms, and thus the instruction for the road ahead.

“The path to the White House goes through rural America,” says Schwartz. “There’s no way around that.”

I asked if he will run for Congress again.

“I’m willing to give it another shot, however hard it is, or whatever the environment is,” Schwartz said. “I think we really did something here that we have to build on. I think what my team was able to accomplish — shifting every county to the left, even with the [purple] wave helping us, but with Question 3 holding us back — is really impressive. As a first-time candidate with no real support from the party, no fundraising help from the party, nobody thought that we would get this close.”

Dan Rodricks writes weekly for Baltimore Fishbowl. He can be reached via danrodricks.com.