In deep-blue Maryland, where seven of the state’s eight congressional districts are represented by Democrats, redistricting has provided Republicans with a perceived opportunity to capture a U.S. House seat.
That makes the Republican 6th Congressional District clash between state Del. Neil Parrott, who has served 12 years in the state’s General Assembly, and 25-year-old investigative journalist Matthew Foldi the most watched contest among the state’s July 19 U.S. House primaries.
The Republican nominee in the reconfigured district is expected to give two-term Rep. David Trone (D-Md.) a competitive contest in November’s general election.
Whoever emerges victorious from the 4th District Democratic primary battle in this solidly Democratic district will likely meet little resistance from the Republican nominee in November’s general election.
Otherwise, Maryland’s July 19 federal slate offers little anticipated drama, including the state’s U.S. Senate preliminaries, where Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) faces nominal primary opposition and is projected to breeze past his Republican opponent in the fall to secure a second six-year term.
Altogether, there are 65 candidates on Maryland’s eight congressional primary ballots, including 31 Democrats and 34 Republicans. Those 65 candidates include the seven congressional incumbents, who all boast massive funding advantages over primary challengers and are projected to advance to the general election.
Among those seven incumbents is Maryland’s only Republican House member, six-term Rep. Andrew Harris (R-Md.), who’s the only sitting lawmaker not being tested in a primary. He'll be the overwhelming favorite to defeat the winner of the Democratic primary between Dave Harden and Heather Mizeur in November.
The Cook Political Report, Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales, and Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball all rate the 1st District as solid Republican.
Also expected to advance are the 2nd District’s 10-term Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.); the 3rd District’s eight-term Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md); the 5th District Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), House majority leader who has served 42 years in Congress; the 7th District’s first-term Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.); and the 8th District’s three-term Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the lead impeachment manager for former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment and who also sits on the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach.
The Cook Political Report, Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales, and Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball all rate these districts, as well as the 4th District, as solid Democratic.
Of the nine Democrats running in the 4th District, the clear frontrunners are Glenn Ivey and former Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.). Ivey is a former assistant U.S. attorney, Maryland Public Service Commission chair, and twice-elected state’s attorney for Prince George’s County, while Edwards in 2008 became the first black woman elected to represent Maryland in Congress and served four terms in the House.
Ivey, who has served as chief counsel for the U.S. Senate majority leader and chief majority counsel to the Senate Banking Committee, has raised $1.26 million for his campaign, which had $321,127 cash on hand as of June 29, according to his Federal Election Commission (FEC) filing.
Edwards, an NBC/MSNBC analyst and contributing Washington Post columnist who, in 2017, borrowed an RV named “Lucille” and traveled 12,000 miles across the country talking with voters, has raised more than $980,000 for her campaign, which had $243,247 cash on hand as of June 29, according to her FEC filing.
Of the state’s eight congressional districts, the 6th District is the only one that isn’t solid blue or, in the 1st District, solid red.
The Cook Political Report and Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball rate the 6th as “Lean Democratic” while Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales classifies it as “Likely Democratic.”
The 6th District had previously been “solid” Democratic before deep blue areas in Montgomery County were shifted out of the district in post-census reapportionment. The district spans much of the state’s western panhandle framed by Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, where there’s a higher density of Republican voters.
Trone, the co-founder of Total Wine & More, a 210-store retail chain based in North Bethesda, is expected to breeze by three rivals in the Democratic primary and will have a massive war chest to defend his seat in November. According to his campaign’s June 29 FEC filing, he has raised $12.78 million, spent $2.116 million, and has a whopping $10.76 million in cash on hand.
Parrott and Foldi are the clear frontrunners in the race to take on Trone in the general election.
Parrott, 51, a Maryland State Highway Administration traffic engineer and former City of Frederick deputy director of engineering, is a Tea Party activist elected to the General Assembly in 2010. He has made election integrity a priority for more than a decade, proposing voter ID measures and introducing legislation to require signatures on ballots that exactly match those on registration forms.
Parrott was among state lawmakers who sued Gov. Larry Hogan to challenge his emergency COVID-19 pandemic orders.
His campaign calls for placing “social media monopolies” under the control of the FEC “to enforce freedom on these platforms.”
Parrott vows to defend Second Amendment rights, protect the “right to life,” encode “medical freedom” to ensure the unvaccinated aren’t treated as “second-class citizens,” and promote “pro-parent policies.”
He maintains that the best way lower inflation is by “reducing borrowing and spending less” and will “work to restore our energy independence by allowing the United States to harvest our own natural resources and allowing us to use the most cost-effective energy.”
In Congress, Parrott said he’ll lobby for federal money to widen the 6th District’s north-south roads, particularly U.S. 219, I-81 in Washington County, and I-270 in Frederick and Montgomery counties.
Parrott acknowledges that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and is the legitimate president. He declined to attend former president Donald Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, rally in Washington and has condemned the violence it engendered.
Foldi, who was named Maryland Young Republican of the Year in 2015, is the vice president of the Montgomery County Young Republicans, and vice president of the Montgomery County Republican Club.
As an investigative reporter at The Washington Free Beacon, he exposed U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm’s “multimillion-dollar relationship with an electric vehicle company receiving government perks, and Chinese Communist Party influence in the Commerce Department.”
His reporting has led “to multiple Congressional investigations” and has been featured on FOX News and Newsmax.
Foldi has been endorsed by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and has vowed to issue subpoenas and conduct oversight of the Biden administration if elected.
His campaign calls for securing the border, supporting law enforcement, and taking measures to “crush Communist China.”
“The Chinese Communist Party is infiltrating every level of American society, from its spyware Tik Tok that is destroying teenage girls’ mental health to buying off our professional athletes,” Foldi said in a campaign statement.
In Congress, he'll “unleash American energy,” stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons, fight corruption, and promote parents’ rights.
According to their June 29 FEC filings, Parrott had $344,757 cash on hand and Foldi had $98,422 with three weeks to go before election day.
With the state’s July 7 through July 14 early voting period over, turnout for primary elections has been light, the Maryland State Board of Elections (MSBE) reported.
In addition to the eight congressional contests and one Senate race, the state’s primary slate includes inter-party races for governor, attorney general, comptroller, and state assembly.
In 2018, the last non-presidential election year, 872,207 people, about 24 percent of eligible voters, cast ballots in Maryland primaries, with 30,122 mailing them in.
For 2022’s midterm primaries, more than 500,000 Marylanders have requested mail-in ballots, with about 115,000 of them being returned by July 12, according to MSBE.
Maryland law prohibits counting mail-in votes until the Thursday after Election Day. Conclusive results won’t be available until that day at the soonest, with late-counted ballots likely to determine the winners in the gubernatorial primaries and many other contests.
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