O'Malley, Ehrlich Get a Jump on Fall Contest

Maryland voters will get their first good look tomorrow at a governor's race that has suddenly become a general election duel after last week's dramatic departure of Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan.

Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, who became the presumptive Democratic nominee upon Duncan's exit, is planning a large-scale rally outside the State House. From there, flanked by supporters -- including former Duncan backers -- the mayor plans to march several blocks through Annapolis to state election board headquarters to officially file as a candidate.

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) will return tomorrow to his boyhood home in the working-class Baltimore suburb of Arbutus to announce his reelection campaign. A decision on his running mate will follow before Monday's filing deadline.

O'Malley's message will remain unchanged despite the new dynamic, aides said.

"We are accelerating our efforts and focusing on the fall," O'Malley said Sunday as he traipsed booth to booth shaking hands and posing for pictures at a Filipino cultural festival in Prince George's County.

O'Malley -- who led Duncan in polling and fundraising -- tried in recent months to ignore his Democratic rival, focusing on Ehrlich and offering a vision for the state. At tomorrow's rally, the mayor will try to portray himself as the champion of working-class families and suggest that Ehrlich has sold out to special interests.

But Duncan's departure to battle clinical depression has changed the tenor of the race in countless other ways. This morning, for example, O'Malley will be the only gubernatorial candidate at a forum in Ocean City sponsored by the Maryland Municipal League.

Duncan's name has also been quietly removed from a section of O'Malley's Web site that his campaign set up to respond to attacks. "Our Response to the Latest Ehrlich-Duncan Attack" is now "Our Response to the Latest Ehrlich Attack" -- and most of the material is gone.

That is a reflection of the barrage of attacks Duncan levied against O'Malley. He questioned whether O'Malley had "cooked the books" to show a sharp reduction in violent crime in Baltimore under the mayor. Duncan suggested that the low performance of Baltimore's schools resulted from the mayor's "putting education last" among his priorities. And recently, Duncan said O'Malley was "not good at governing."

Duncan's departure, O'Malley said last week, means "we will not have to fight two battles simultaneously" throughout the summer.

Some O'Malley allies say the competition, and criticism, may have helped toughen the candidate for the November election.

The Democrats' 2002 gubernatorial nominee, then-Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, ran unopposed in the primary, and many in the party have said she came to the general election untested and under-prepared.

Duncan stayed in the race long enough to season O'Malley, said Thomas F. Schaller, a political science professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, but not long enough to drain the mayor's campaign coffers.

"The whole education and crime story line has been put out there, discussed and defended," said Schaller, who is supporting O'Malley. In the election against Ehrlich, "O'Malley certainly won't get a free pass on those issues, but the news will be more stale. There will be a lack of novelty."

Carol Hirschburg, a Republican strategist, said that sounds like wishful thinking. Ehrlich, she said, will be able to point to Duncan's criticisms of O'Malley in competing against him.

"I think Duncan helped the governor in that respect," Hirschburg said, "unless Duncan wants to come out now and say he was lying, that he doesn't think those really are problems."

Duncan's departure could also shift the geography of the race. He and O'Malley had been fighting for votes in Prince George's, home to more Democrats than any other Maryland county.

Now, the campaign could focus earlier on the Baltimore suburbs, a region key to Ehrlich's victory in 2002.

Ehrlich won 61.2 percent of the vote in Baltimore County in his race against Townsend and also ran far better than expected in other counties ringing the city of Baltimore.