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Governor and U.S. Senate Losses Just the Tip of State GOP Collapse
Rep. Benjamin L. Cardin, elected Tuesday to the Senate, speaks with reporters yesterday morning with Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski.
(By Michael Robinson Chavez -- The Washington Post)
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"I've had the ride of my life," Ehrlich said as his wife, Kendel, stood at his side with their toddler son, Joshua, in her arms. "I've tried to conduct myself with dignity and a little bit of a sense of humor. And we obviously tried to push the state forward."
Ehrlich thanked about two dozen advisers who stood under umbrellas. He said that during a brief phone conversation with O'Malley, he offered to help "in any way possible" with the transition.
Two hours later, Steele strode into a State House reception room crowded with teary-eyed staff members to formally concede and to thank Marylanders for making his four years of service a "unique blessing."
"I asked for six years as a U.S. senator; that's all I ever wanted," he said. "But the people thought otherwise, and I trust them in their judgment."
Although both men took a night to digest the election returns, their races were not particularly close. The margins in the Washington suburbs, especially, were resounding.
Ehrlich lost in Prince George's County by more than 100,000 votes; Steele lost in Montgomery by a similar margin.
Voters turned away from the governor, even in the places where he was strongest in 2002. The most dramatic drop came in the Baltimore suburbs and central Maryland, where Ehrlich won 55 percent of the vote, compared with 65 percent in his matchup with Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. In Western Maryland, his support dipped 8 points to 60 percent and in Southern Maryland, by 7 points to 53 percent.
The results made Ehrlich a political rarity: an incumbent governor who lost despite generally sunny favorability ratings and a public that said he was doing a good job.
"The reason it's hard to think of others is because there aren't many," said Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. His staff came up with only the late Ann Richards, the Texas Democratic governor defeated in 1994 by George W. Bush. The conditions were the same: a highly partisan year in a highly partisan state, albeit with the parties reversed.
O'Malley's communications director, Steve Kearney, said the national climate "didn't hurt, but voters are smart enough to make decisions based on what they want from their state government."
That viewpoint was bolstered by exit polls suggesting that a majority of voters had their minds made up for more than a month. House Speaker Michael E. Busch (D-Anne Arundel) said that four years of watching Ehrlich wrangle with the legislature left many voters "convinced he was trying to bring the dynamics of Washington to Annapolis."
Other aspects of Ehrlich's campaign might also have backfired, said Timothy Maloney, a former Prince George's delegate who advised O'Malley. Most notably, he said, were the election-eve fliers that seemed to try to trick voters into believing that Ehrlich had the support of prominent African American leaders.
