Republican gubernatorial candidate Larry Hogan, right, greets Democratic opponent, Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown, at a candi- dates’ forum in Anne Arundel Co., near Riva, Md., in August.

SURPRISING TURNABOUT IN ELECTION
PREVIOUSLY CONSIDERED ‘DECIDED’;
DEBATE SCHEDULED FOR TUESDAY

The ‘most incompetent’ lieutenant governor?
Own man? or outgoing governor’s puppet?

POLLS PUT RACE WITHIN REACH BY GOP
 
By Alan Z. Forman
 
UPDATE (Tues. Oct. 21st @ 2:30 AM):  Don’t miss Maryland Reporter‘s diversified and well- balanced debate analysis, featuring nine mostly independent commentaries, focused mainly on the third and final Hogan-Brown encounter that was televised live Saturday night:  click here.  Then watch the full debate  by clicking here.
 
UPDATE (Mon. Oct. 13th @ 1 AM):  “Democrat Anthony G. Brown holds a modest lead over Republican Larry Hogan in Maryland’s race for governor, but many voters have not firmly made up their minds and the outcome is far from certain, according to a new poll conducted for The Baltimore Sun,” the state’s largest newspaper reported Sunday.

“The poll by OpinionWorks of Annapolis found Brown leading Hogan 49 percent to 42 percent,” The Sun declared in a Page 1 news story. (To read the article in its entirety, along with video featuring OpinionWorks President Steve Raabe explaining the poll’s results,  click here.)

Following an initial debate last Tuesday on WJZ-TV (Channel 13), the candidates will hold two additional debates: an hourlong encounter to be aired live at 10 a.m. today on Arlington, Va.’s 24-hour cable NewsChannel 8 TV show “NewsTalk with Bruce DePuyt,” co-hosted by WTOP-Radio (103.5FM) and the Washington Post — which will be streamed live at news8.net, wjla.com, wtop.com and washingtonpost.com — and a final debate Saturday at 7 p.m., to be hosted by WBAL-TV (Channel 11) and several other media outlets around the state, including Baltimore’s WBAL-Radio (1090AM), Maryland Public Television (WMPT: Channels 67 and 22) and TV stations in Salisbury and Hagerstown.

A debate between the two major candidates for lieutenant governor — Democrat Kenneth Ulman, the current Howard County Executive, and Republican Boyd Rutherford, a former Maryland Secretary of General Services in the administration of ex-Gov. Robert Ehrlich — will take place Thursday at 1 p.m. on Washington’s WAMU-Radio (88.5FM).

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Who knew back on June 24th when Maryland’s second consecutive black lieutenant governor vanquished his opposition in the Democratic primary, that less than four months later he would be in the fight of his political life to become the Free State’s initial African-American governor?

BROWN’S LEAD HAS PLUMMETED MORE THAN 10 POINTS

Since then, his lead over Republican opposition has plummeted from a more than 18-20 percent advantage to somewhere between four and nine percentage points, according to two independent polls conducted in recent weeks.

Last spring and through much of the summer, outgoing Gov. Martin O’Malley’s hand-picked successor, Harvard-educated Anthony G. Brown, seemed like a shoo-in, despite his acknowledged mishandling of the development of Maryland’s health insurance exchange, one of the rare leadership positions assigned to the lieutenant governor during his nearly eight years in office.

Since early in the spring Brown has been criticized for his ineffectual stewardship of the high-profile job, forcing the O’Malley Administration to apologize for its “botched” launch of the state’s healthcare website and to obtain emergency funding legislation for stopgap changes to fix the site — so far costing Maryland taxpayers more than $200 million, including over $30 million in unnecessary Medicaid spending resulting from the failed rollout.

Despite such alleged incompetence, Brown and his running mate, popular Howard County Executive Kenneth Ulman, handily defeated both major challengers for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination — Attorney General Douglas Gansler and State Del. Heather Mizeur — winning 51.4 percent of the vote in the June primary, and by nearly all accounts at the time, catapulting themselves into the post of governor and lieutenant governor come January.

[View humorous Republican campaign commercials depicting Brown as “The Most Incompetent Man in Maryland,” parodied from the popular Dos Equis Beer commercials featuring the fictional suave and debonair “Most Interesting Man in the World” — click here  and  here.]

‘A LITTLE BIT OF A MOLEHILL’

As recently as late spring, Brown was assuring supporters he would have only “a little bit of a molehill” to defeat in the November general election.

As for the Republicans, GOP candidates have rarely been elected governor in Maryland, a state that has been reliably “blue” since the Civil War.

So when Larry Hogan, a businessman from Anne Arundel County, won his party’s primary with 43 percent of the vote over Harford County Executive David Craig and two other contenders, his decisive victory seemed of little consequence vis-à-vis Brown’s presumed electoral prowess.

Virtually every prominent Democrat in Maryland rushed to support Brown.

Early Tuesday the two participated in an hour-long televised debate co-hosted by WJZ-TV (Channel 13) and the Baltimore Sun, which was taped in the morning and will be broadcast tonight at 7 p.m.

According to inside sources, the confrontation kept pace with the negative tone of the campaign, as the two exchanged harsh words, especially in regard to O’Malley Administration spending, education and the environment.

 
Maryland has had 61 governors — 29 since 1866, all but six of whom were Democrats.

Among the Republicans, only Theodore R. McKeldin, a former Mayor of Baltimore who was governor from 1951-1959, was reelected to a second term. The six Republicans served less than 25 years in total of the nearly 150-year period between the end of the Civil War and the present.

But now comes Hogan — an Annapolis businessman, son and namesake of post-Watergate-era Prince George’s County Executive Lawrence J. Hogan Sr., a highly regarded former congressman — who hopes to alter that scenario, which, in the weeks and months following the June gubernatorial primary, seemed highly unlikely to happen.

The younger Hogan is President and CEO of the Hogan Companies, a real estate business he founded in 1985. Unlike his Democratic opponent for governor, he has never held elective office, his government experience having been limited to a single four-year term as Maryland’s Secretary of Appointments under former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., along with previous positions working for Prince George’s County and the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington.

As Maryland is a reliable “blue” state with voter registration of more than 2-1 Democratic — in the not-too-distant past the differential was as high as 3-1 — election of a Republican to the Governor’s Mansion rarely occurs, and then, only under unusual circumstances.

Larry Hogan is running to become the seventh Republican to serve as Governor of Md.

Spiro Agnew was elected as a liberal Republican in 1966 when his Democratic opponent, George P. Mahoney, who had prevailed in a three-way primary against two highly regarded candidates, opposed open housing with the campaign slogan, “Your home is your castle — protect it.”

Although probably not a racist — his son told Voice of Baltimore years ago his father got a bad rap — Mahoney was painted by the then-liberal Agnew as the worst kind of bigot, and the characterization stuck, enabling the future conservative vice president to easily defeat him and become only the fifth Republican to serve as Maryland’s chief executive, from 1967 until he took office as Richard Nixon’s No. 2 in 1969.

Thirty-six years later, in 2002, GOP nominee Bob Ehrlich defeated the flawed candidacy of Democratic Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, eldest offspring of the assassinated Robert F. Kennedy, who had previously been defeated in her attempt to become a Member of Congress from the same district Ehrlich represented, by then-first term incumbent Republican Helen Delich Bentley in 1986.

Kennedy-Townsend never resonated with Maryland voters despite her family pedigree, which included her assassinated father; President John F. Kennedy; and another uncle, deceased Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, all of whose memories still resonate favorably with most Americans yet today.

However Ehrlich would serve only one term, having been turned out of office by O’Malley in the election of 2006 and soundly defeated in his comeback attempt in 2010.

Nonetheless, Ehrlich proved, along with Agnew and McKeldin, that a Republican perceived as moderate can win against a lightweight Democrat in Maryland.

This week, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll put Brown leading Hogan by 47 to 38 percent among likely voters, with 11 percent undecided, easily enough to tip the balance and causing a conundrum for Brown:  Should the lieutenant governor campaign as his own man? or as a loyal partner of the outgoing governor and staunch supporter of their administration’s policies?

MARGIN OF 47 PERCENT FOR BROWN TO 43 PERCENT FOR HOGAN

In August a Maryland Republican Party poll showed the race at 45 percent for Brown to Hogan’s 42 percent — a partisan perspective, to be sure — but then, just over a week ago, a poll commissioned by the Maryland My Maryland PAC (which is independent but whose leaders support Hogan) found the margin to be 47 percent for Brown compared to 43 percent for the Republican Hogan.

Conducted by longtime credible polling service Gonzales Research & Marketing Strategies Inc., the survey put the race for governor in a virtual dead heat, with the four points separating the two candidates effectively nullified by a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent.

In addition, the Democratic Governors Association has reportedly spent over $1 million on attack ads, including new media buys for October against Hogan, in a state that rarely requires national Democratic Party money to be allocated.

It was enough to cause O’Malley to announce last week that he would interrupt his national campaign for president to return to Maryland to campaign for Brown, creating the perception that he considers Brown’s election critical, or at least of utmost importance, to his presidential prospects.

And further begging the question asked by many in this gubernatorial campaign:

Is Brown his own man? or is he the outgoing governor and would-be president’s puppet?

But possibly even more significant:  Can Hogan effectively present himself as a moderate-enough Republican to attract the Democratic crossover votes he needs to win?

And will the Democrats effectively get their vote out, for an election that many Marylanders consider little more than a “snoozer”?
 
alforman@voiceofbaltimore.org