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Rep. David Trone was locked in a tight race with Republican challenger Del. Neil Parrott Tuesday night, in a battle for Western Maryland’s congressional seat where new political lines have boosted GOP fortunes and created the state’s most competitive district.
Parrott, a member of the Maryland House of Delegates since 2011, was carrying 51.07% of the vote in Maryland’s 6th Congressional District after midnight, all Election Day precincts reporting but thousands of mail-in ballots uncounted. Trone, the Democratic incumbent and wealthy owner of a liquor store empire, trailed by about 4,500 votes.
With a winner too close to call, preliminary returns revealed a much tighter race than in the pair’s previous matchup in 2020, when Trone dusted Parrott by nearly 20 points. Since then, the 6th District has gotten significantly more conservative. Lawmakers redrew Maryland political lines, cutting off part of Montgomery County’s liberal Washington, D.C. suburbs and picking up territory in fast-growing — and purple — Frederick County.
While the Maryland GOP has had little cause for celebration Tuesday night — Democrat Wes Moore was declared the state’s next governor as soon as polls closed — the party could make inroads in the state’s Democrat-dominated congressional delegation with a Parrott upset.
But Trone’s campaign is also benefitting from a massive financial advantage: The owner of the liquor chain Total Wine & More, Trone sank more than $12.5 million of his own fortune into the race, building a $13 million war chest that Parrott never came close to touching. The House of Delegates member raised less than $800,000, according to the latest campaign finance disclosure.
“We always knew this race was going to be close‚” Trone told a packed restaurant of supporters at an election night party in Frederick. The congressman said it will take “a few days” for elections officials to count all of the outstanding ballots. There were still close to 170,000 ballots left to be counted in Montgomery and Frederick Counties, Trone said “the heart of our district.”
“I am confident that we’re heading back to Congress,” he said to cheers from the room.
Without North Potomac and other deep blue Montgomery County suburbs, the redrawn 6th turned from a comfortably Democratic district to one some political observers have classified as a “toss-up.” The suddenly competitive district received a few marquee visitors in the final stretch of campaign season: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz stumped for Parrott at a late October event in Frederick, while President Joe Biden paid a visit earlier in the month, appearing alongside Trone for a speech on the economy at Volvo Group’s manufacturing plant in Hagerstown.
Trone has campaigned on his record of reaching across the aisle, billing himself as “the most bipartisan” lawmaker in the Maryland delegation. The congressman lost a nephew to a fentanyl overdose several years ago, and the region’s opioid epidemic — as well as the culpability of big pharmaceutical companies — have also been central to his message.
At Gaithersburg High School in Montgomery County, the two-term congressman shook hands with Anuddnaya Mahamannage, a local certified nursing assistant, before she cast her ballot. Mahamannage said she voted for former President Donald Trump in 2016, but didn’t like his leadership and flipped to vote for President Joe Biden four years later. She said she felt an urgency to cast her ballot for Trone this year to protect Democratic control in the U.S. House of Representatives, where many analysts have predicted Republicans to take control Tuesday night.
“We cannot lose the House,” Mahamannage said. The “president can’t do anything if we lose this one.”
For Scarlett Gonzalez, a 48 year-old resident of Gaithersburg, Trone’s beginnings as a farmer’s son resonated.
“I know he comes from humble roots and worked his way up,” said Gonzalez, who works for labor union representing railroad workers. The Democratic congressman’s positions on gun control and women’s rights also align with hers, she said.
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Parrott, meanwhile, has attacked Trone as a super wealthy interloper — the wine store magnate doesn’t live in the district and hasn’t during any of his time in Congress — and argued that the Democrat doesn’t advocated for the values of Western Maryland.
The Republican delegate camped out at a single polling site in Frederick County for almost all of Election Day. He greeted some of the last voters Tuesday night at Deer Crossing Elementary School, where he said he’d spoken with many voters who expressed concerns about the state of the economy and direction of the country under Democratic leadership.
Approaching midnight at his campaign office in Hagerstown, Parrott told supporters that they have “a real chance to pull off a huge upset.”
“We’re on a path to win,” he told the crowd. “We took on the 12 Million Dollar Man, who just wrote himself a check — and we did it with about $700,000.”
The engineer and staunch social conservative appeared at a rally over the weekend for far-right gubernatorial nominee Dan Cox, who has denied the results of the 2020 presidential election. In an interview with The Banner last month, Parrott said he accepted the outcome of the 2020 presidential election but added that he would not have voted to certify results in some states, favoring local investigations into possible fraud.
Up until 2013, Western Maryland was represented for two decades by Tea Party conservative Rep. Roscoe Bartlett. Some in the area expressed excitement at the possibility that the state’s new political lines could help deliver them back into Republican hands.
Chris Chmelik, a student at Frederick Community College, said he cast his vote for Parrott in part because of the Republican’s support for lower taxes, his pro-life stance and because “he’s not as woke as Trone.”
“We’ve had Trone in this position for a couple of years now, and we know what he’s capable of,” Chmelik said outside a polling site in Frederick County. “And Parrott’s gonna be the better man for the job.”
The 6th District’s more conservative boundaries exist thanks in part to Parrott himself, who was among a group of Maryland state legislators who sued over an earlier version of the state’s political map last year. That map would have given Democrats a more comfortable advantage in the 6th, but it was thrown out when a judge sided with its Republican opponents.
Democrats hold seven of Maryland’s eight congressional seats, and Parrott is likely running to increase the state’s GOP representation in Washington to two members. Ultra-conservative Rep. Andy Harris has held the 1st Congressional District, covering the Eastern Shore on the opposite end of the state, for more than a decade.
WYPR reporter Scott Maucione contributed to this article.
adam.willis@thebaltimorebanner.com
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Adam Willis covers city government for The Banner, including the impacts of the large COVID-19 stimulus package that Baltimore received from the federal government.
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