Chris Van Hollen, the seven-term congressman from Washington’s northern Maryland suburbs, has won the Democratic primary against congresswoman Donna Edwards for one of the state’s soon-to-be-vacant Senate seats on Tuesday night.
The win in heavily Democratic Maryland’s primary all but assures that Van Hollen, a key ally of House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, will be seated in the US Senate in 2017.
Van Hollen’s win also likely means that longtime Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski’s seat will likely be filled by a man – an outcome that Emily’s List, the powerhouse fundraising organization dedicated to electing pro-choice women to office, unsuccessfully spent $2.4m to avoid.
Had four-term representative Donna Edwards won the race, it would have put her on track to be the second African American woman ever elected to the US Senate; that distinction may now fall to California attorney general Kamala Harris, who is running for a vacant Senate seat in her home state.
Though Edwards and Van Hollen had remarkably similar voting records and positions on the issues, the campaign came down to issues of identity: Van Hollen, who is white, has spent 25 years in public office and is the son of an ambassador, while Edwards, who is African American, is a single mother who went to law school as an older student in order to launch a second career in liberal advocacy work. Edwards was plagued by allegations that her constituent services as a member of the House were not up to par.
In April, an anti-Van Hollen TV ad aired by the pro-Edwards Super Pac Working For Us backfired badly on the campaign by drawing a rebuke from the White House. Though the thrust of the ad wasn’t dissimilar from ones that Edwards herself ran, which noted that a compromise version of a campaign finance reform bill for which Van Hollen voted in 2010 would have created a special exemption from the National Rifle Association, the Super Pac ad featured news footage of Barack Obama talking about the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school and left the impression that Obama had endorsed Van Hollen.
He had not, and his office demanded the ads be taken off the air – and left the impression that, though Obama had not actually taken sides, he backed Van Hollen.
Prior to the ads, Edwards had been making great strides in the polls. After, her numbers tanked.
Van Hollen, like Hillary Clinton, had been running in Maryland as a pragmatic progressive who could get things done in a gridlocked Senate while Edwards, a longer-term member of the progressive movement, had run a campaign focused on the the transformative power of change. Clinton, like Van Hollen, won the state of Maryland by a wide margin.
