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Maryland's 6th District will tell us: red wave or tsunami - The Washington Post [1]

['Charles Lane', 'Editorial Writer']

Date: 2022-11-02

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MIDDLETOWN — Life can feel pretty good in this Maryland town of 5,000, with its rows of brightly painted Victorian houses and historic Main Street straight out of Norman Rockwell. On a sun-soaked afternoon this past Saturday, the vibe was downright idyllic, as costumed families, led by the Middletown High School marching band, wound through the streets in the annual Halloween parade, tossing candy to spectators.

Yet Middletown’s well-tended front yards tell a more contentious story: Dueling lawn signs for Republicans and Democrats indicate political polarization has reached the place readers of a local newspaper voted “best small town” in Frederick County for 2022.

Politically, “it’s a 50-50 town,” says resident Lonnie Ropp, an insurance underwriter and former member of the county GOP central committee.

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Middletown is a key battleground in Maryland’s 6th Congressional District, the most competitive of an otherwise deep-blue state. It stretches from a heavily Republican western region eastward to a swath of Democrat-dominated Montgomery County. Purple Frederick County sits smack dab in, well, the middle.

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The 6th is a good place to gauge whether Democrats might lose the House next Tuesday, or, more realistically, by how much. Election-night returns showing defeat for incumbent Democratic Rep. David Trone could mean the anticipated Republican wave has become a tsunami.

With a voting population that favored Joe Biden by 10 points in 2020, but with what both parties consider nearly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans, the 6th is rated “lean Democrat” by FiveThirtyEight, whose enigmatic forecasting model sees Trone beating GOP challenger Neil Parrott by precisely 51.6 percent to 48.4 percent, as of Nov. 1.

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John Miller, Middletown’s Democratic chief executive — quaintly titled “burgess,” not mayor — says Trone’s actual margin will be “double digits.” Trone, Miller told me, will run up a huge margin in Montgomery County, then carry Frederick County with the help of liberal-leaning, young suburban families that have migrated to new housing developments such as the one on the edge of Middletown.

That’s certainly the Trone victory scenario — though Miller seemed slightly surprised to learn the campaign’s internal polls show just a five-point lead.

Parrott, a veteran conservative activist and state legislator, is hammering on inflation, counting on western Maryland to offset Montgomery and betting that rural areas of Frederick, where he has made his career, will provide him a majority of that county’s expected 100,000 votes.

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Unfortunately for him, Trone, the millionaire founder of a wine retail chain, budgeted $12 million of his own money for the race. That scared off national GOP funders. Parrott raised roughly $600,000.

He is also hampered by internal GOP divisions. Gov. Larry Hogan, a moderate whom Parrott sued — unsuccessfully — in 2020 over state restrictions on public gatherings during the pandemic, and House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) both backed Parrott’s opponent in the Republican primary. Other than Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), who spoke at a recent Parrott rally, the national GOP has barely lifted a finger for him.

Nor does it help Parrott to be running on the same ticket with Dan Cox, the far-right gubernatorial candidate who beat Hogan’s chosen successor in the GOP gubernatorial primary, and badly trails Democrat Wes Moore.

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Yet Parrott knows the district. He and other Republicans fought for years to undo a Democratic gerrymander and make it more conservative-friendly — ultimately prevailing in court earlier this year. That’s why the 6th includes Middletown and the rest of Frederick County.

Buoyant and seemingly younger than his 52 years, Parrott lost to Trone by nearly 20 points in the 2020 version of the district. In this year’s rematch, he says he’s modeling his campaign on, of all things, progressive Democratic Rep. Jamie B. Raskin’s victory over a free-spending Trone in the neighboring 8th District’s 2016 Democratic primary for Congress. “Jamie was a popular state senator, had a grass-roots organization and beat Trone,” Parrott said.

One thing Raskin never would have done, however, was write a letter to the editor of a local newspaper suggesting people with HIV should have to wear special tattoos — as Parrott did in 2005. He retracted that position in 2010, but it’s still fodder for Trone.

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“Whatever,” Trone scoffs when I point out Parrott’s disavowal. “He put it in writing to the newspaper. That’s as crazy as it gets.” The incumbent spoke with me while greeting commuters at the Shady Grove Metro station in Montgomery County. Many stopped to say they had voted early for him.

Calling himself “the guy in the middle,” Trone contrasts his moderate ideology not only with Parrott’s but also with that of some in his own party.

Democrats “have absolutely gone too far to the left. Certain people have,” he says, name-checking Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) “and her crowd.” Jayapal, he complained, “caused so much trouble” in 2021 by blocking a bipartisan infrastructure bill hostage in an — ultimately futile — effort to leverage a multitrillion-dollar Build Back Better social spending plan.

Trone’s words sounded like the opening shot in a post-election debate over the party’s direction. Democrats’ internal arguments are likely to be intense even if the Republican wave isn’t strong enough to sweep him out of Congress — and downright furious if it is.

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[1] Url: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/02/maryland-6th-district-trone-parrott-midterms/

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