It’s a wonderful time to be a Democrat.
President Joe Biden stepped aside as the nominee, opening the door for Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The Democratic National Convention ended and Dems left Chicago on a buoyant cloud of joy.
Be forewarned. This is a Dougie Downer kind of column. What goes up must come, well, the opposite of up. Democrats might be enjoying sweet dreams of November, but the hardest days of the campaign start right after Labor Day.
There are plenty of potential nightmares to keep Maryland Democrats awake at night. Here are five.
There’s a reason the Harris campaign and former president Donald Trump have been lawyering up.
Trump makes almost daily allusions to potential voter fraud — with zero evidence — an old Republican canard given nefarious life by the scheme to flip the 2020 presidential election results with fake electors. A new source of challenges to the Electoral College tally may come from local election boards controlled by Trump’s supporters.
In Maryland, local election boards are scorekeepers. Legal challenges go to the court system. But rule changes in Georgia give local election boards the power to conduct “reasonable inquiries” into the results if doubts are raised.
That makes them referees in a swing state crucial to Trump. If they don’t certify the results by the Dec. 11 deadline, that could reduce the number of electoral college votes needed to win from 270 to 254 — advantage Trump.
Lawyers for Harris and others would challenge that, but Trump’s lawyers would defend it. Remember four years ago, when Trump called Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s top elections official, in search of 11,789 votes? With Trump holding an edge in many small states, Harris can’t afford to have the electoral college map change at the last minute.
Remember, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Al Gore both won the popular vote when they ran for president, but lost in the Electoral College.
If delayed or disputed results go to the U.S. Supreme Court, how many Democrats would have confidence in the court’s 6-3 majority of Republican appointees?
In Maryland, former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s path to victory in the U.S. Senate race is narrow but very real. As my colleague Pam Wood pointed out, it’s rare for a governor or a former governor from the minority party in a state to make the step to the U.S. Senate.
Yet a poll sponsored by AARP — OK, that’s a new one on me — showed Hogan neck and neck with Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, the Democratic nominee.
That means this Democratic nightmare is possible: Harris wins the White House, but her party fails to recapture the House of Representatives and loses the Senate because of a Hogan win in Maryland.
Hogan is betting that voters believe him when he says he’ll be an independent centrist in Washington, a middle way. His election, though, might extend the era of bitter, winner-take-all politics in a divided Washington.
The Annapolis-area Republican governed reluctantly with Democrats in the State House, and they don’t remember him fondly.
“Larry Hogan keeps yapping about ‘bipartisan solutions,’” former state Attorney General Brian Frosh wrote recently on X. “He should have tried bipartisanship when he was governor. He refused to sign more legislation than any governor in MD’s history. He vetoed bills on choice, gun safety, minimum wage, healthcare and more.”
Hogan and Alsobrooks have reportedly agreed to debate on Oct. 10 on Maryland Public Television. That’s two weeks before the start of early voting and just 20 days before the deadline to request a mail-in ballot.
The upshot there, however, doesn’t come close to what’s riding on the Sept. 10 debate between Trump and Harris.
For Harris, a debate can be the key to filling in the blanks for voters who don’t know that much about her. Being the vice president is a big deal, but it’s not one that cements your image.
Trump’s campaign has tried to define Harris and Walz, a former high school geography teacher, football coach and National Guard veteran who was largely unknown outside of Minnesota before being tapped as running mate, before they can. That explains the will-it-stick spaghetti approach to insults from Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance.
You only have to look at Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June to see what could go wrong. While Harris seems to have hit her stride rhetorically, a misstep would give opponents material for seven weeks’ of Instagram memes and TikTok fodder.
It’s not the same risk for Trump. You expect him to say something daffy and disqualifying, but none of his outrageousness ever seems to stick. I mean criminal convictions, impeachments, the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, documented lie after lie, using Arlington National Cemetery as a political prop — none of it matters to those who’ve signed on for his ticket to chaos.
I follow a New York Times parody account on Twitter that mocks the nation’s most powerful news organization with headlines that seem ridiculous, yet plausible.
“If Kamala Harris wins the election in November, she will be depriving an entire generation of young women of their dream of being the first woman president,” New York Times Pitchbot wrote on Monday.
Many Democrats have seen any serious look by journalists at Biden, and now Harris, as some form of betrayal.
“There is a surprisingly large contingent of braindead resistance types who somehow believe that The New York Times is pro-Trump, and that any criticism of Democratic politicians amounts to treason,” New York Magazine columnist Benjamin Hart wrote on X Tuesday. “Thankfully, this is an almost exclusively online phenomenon.”
Pitchbot responded with an acknowledgment that sometimes what journalists do defies logic.
“There is a surprisingly large contingent of people who work at New York Magazine who like to comment on the political coverage in the New York Times without even bothering to read the headlines.”
There is debate among media critics whether The Times has fallen into the trap of false equivalency, treating Harris and Trump with equal scrutiny when it isn’t always logical. I think it’s simpler. The more journalists like a candidate or government figure, the harder we are on them to ensure objectivity.
It’s a form of tough love in a world where your heroes regularly disappoint. It’s human to have an opinion, but journalists can’t let that affect their work.
Journalism will affect this election through a negative — the absence of strong, regional outlets focused on the Harris-Trump race. The average voter doesn’t read The Times, and smaller newsrooms just aren’t focused enough on the national election.
The Banner and its legacy media competitor, The Baltimore Sun, are rightly reporting on Maryland’s U.S. Senate race. But when was the last time you read a piece on the potential impact on the Chesapeake Bay cleanup, how much Trump’s 2017 tax cut cost Maryland homeowners, or how immigration seems like a different issue in this state?
Multiply this by all the journalism jobs lost around the state and the country, and you get an idea of what voters are missing.
We don’t know what we don’t know, except that it will happen tomorrow.
If Vladimir Putin goes nuclear in Ukraine, or the Iranians and Israel start firing at one another for real, it could affect the vote in November. If there is political violence in the United States, either another assassination attempt or a repeat of Jan. 6th, it would be an election nightmare.
If the Chinese or the Russians launch cyberattacks on the campaigns or the voting systems, it would make the Iranian hack of Trump’s campaign look like simpler times.
If COVID resurges this fall, or mpox spreads, or avian flu jumps from livestock to people — OK, I’m starting to scare myself.
Just because these things can happen doesn’t mean they will.
But if something bad occurs between now and the Jan. 20 inauguration, we will look to one guy. It’s the same guy Democrats celebrate for getting out of the way and who Republicans in Congress want to impeach without any evidence of wrongdoing.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if, sometime between now and Inauguration Day, we’re awfully damn glad that Scranton Joe is still president?
