While Maryland is all but certain to back President Biden in the fall, the state’s open Senate seat has implications for the fate of Biden’s agenda, should he win a second term.
Alsobrooks faces Republican nominee Larry Hogan, the former two-term governor who has attracted national attention for his unwillingness to back Donald Trump. The GOP recruited Hogan and helped bankroll his campaign, seeing the popular and pragmatic Hogan as the party’s best shot in a generation to flip the seat in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-1.
Hogan has already crisscrossed the state and spent some $1 million in television ads, while Alsobrooks has yet to hit the campaign trail following a contentious primary against deep-pocketed, three-term Rep. David Trone (D-Md.), who spent a record $61 million against her.
Alsobrooks would be Maryland’s first Black person to join the Senate, and just the third Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate nationwide, after Carol Moseley Braun and Harris. Last July, according to a Biden-Harris official, the vice president and Alsobrooks sat down at a Delta Sigma Theta conference to discuss campaign strategy for her primary.
But the vice president’s connection to Alsobrooks spans more than a decade.
Both women have leaned on each other throughout the years, occupying spaces where few women of color have been present.
Harris’s 2009 book, “Smart on Crime,” about her time as San Francisco’s district attorney, helped inspire Alsobrooks’s approach to the job of Prince George’s chief prosecutor, a position she won in 2010. Like Harris, Alsobrooks has spoken often of restorative justice, which seeks to address the harm caused by a crime while also holding an offender accountable.
Harris later called and congratulated Alsobrooks on winning her race, beginning a supportive friendship as they each ascended in the political world. Alsobrooks campaigned for Harris’s Senate bid. Harris advised Alsobrooks in her county executive race. Alsobrooks hit the presidential campaign trail to help her “quintessential big sister” make history.
During the event Friday, Harris plans to highlight the administration’s gun legislation and promote Alsobrooks’s record on crime reduction.
On the campaign trail, Alsobrooks has frequently spoken about changing gun laws and about gun violence’s effects on her family. Her great-grandfather was shot to death by a White sheriff’s deputy in South Carolina in the 1950s, prompting her family to seek refuge in Prince George’s.