Hutzell: Maryland Democrats traded away their best chance to beat Andy Harris

I asked Wes Moore Tuesday morning if Question 3 would ensure Andy Harris a ninth turn in Congress.

The governor was optimistic.

“I feel good about two things,” Moore said outside Annapolis High School as Election Day started. “I feel good that Question 3 will pass in the state of Maryland, and I feel very good that Dan Schwartz will be heading to Washington as a representative of the 1st District.”

He was half right.

Harris beat the upstart Democrat in an election so vulnerable for Republicans that North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio and even Texas — Texas! — voted blue.

Oh, Maryland Democrats, what have you done? The referendum to give legislators more power to gerrymander won and aided Harris as an unintended consequence.

Was it hubris that saved him?

“I think we would have won without it,” Schwartz said as his watch party wrapped up on Kent Island. ”I think it brought out all the Republicans."

Not happy with unbreakable control of the state legislature, a lock on the governor’s mansion, insurmountable majorities in the biggest counties and a well of political talent, Moore and his party couldn’t resist going national.

Yes, I understand gerrymandering was a fight Democrats didn’t start. With noble words, Moore defended the reasons that convinced some 60% of voters.

“We are simply saying, should Maryland follow the same rules as the rest of the country and Maryland should have the same flexibility,” the governor said. “Question 3 is simply asking, ‘Who’s in charge of our democracy?’

“And I think we all stand united to say that it’s Marylanders who should control our democracy, not Donald Trump.”

Maryland agreed, but was not united. Voters in the 1st District overwhelmingly turned out against it.

“It got them really angry,” Schwartz said. “I can’t disagree with their view that they’re trying to steal the Eastern Shore, because they are.”

By pushing a state constitutional change that would unlock an all-Democratic congressional map in 2028, Moore gave up the chance to win one this year with the power of ideas.

A few Democrats helped Schwartz, but the party invested far more in the referendum than in beating the state’s most popular Republican.

Turnout for Harris matches prior elections, although his 56-44% margin of victory was narrower. Comparing 2026 to previous years ignores the context of this election.

If affordability was this election’s central theme nationally, it didn’t have the same impact in the 1st District.

The most striking difference was Question 3. It gave voters a reason to ignore inflation as well as Harris’ arrogant behavior and accept the status quo.

And my, how arrogant he’s been.

Voters saw why Harris prefers controlled settings like his telephone town halls. Confronted at a voter forum in Cambridge, the congressman couldn’t conceal his contempt for everyone who disagrees with him.

America laughed. The butt of a national joke for weeks, Harris seized on Question 3 to silence the laughter.

He tied Schwartz to the referendum, even though the young Democrat argued against it from the start. He made it us against them, and an old argument that plays on the shore’s isolation across the Chesapeake Bay.

“‘Tax and fee’ Wes Moore campaigned for my opponent in secret on the Eastern Shore [Friday] at a Democrat party headquarters filled with Vote Yes on Question 3 signs,” Harris wrote.

“They had to do it privately because my opponent doesn’t want anyone to know he’s Wes Moore’s puppet.”

Schwartz ran a campaign that put Harris in jeopardy.

He talked about maternity clinics closing and home health aides caught up in an immigration purge. He talked about tariffs’ impact on farmers, the impossibility of buying a house and unaffordable electricity bills.

His pace — more than 100 campaign appearances heading into the final weeks — was a rebuke of Harris’ antipathy toward the public.

Harris talked about federal funding for sewer systems and fire trucks, seafood processing grants and dredging money. A member of the Appropriations Committee, he brought $55.6 million in earmarks home this year, twice what any other Maryland House member secured.

“I’ve worked to secure tens of millions of dollars for fire stations across Maryland’s First District so our firefighters have the facilities they need,” he wrote last week.

But Question 3 moved to the center of his message after the debacle in Cambridge.

“People can hardly wait to get out and vote against Wes Moore’s taxes and fees, and especially against his gerrymandering scheme,” he wrote on the last day of early voting.

He was right.

Harris now goes back to Washington, relegated to a minority that may find little sympathy from Democrats who won the biggest majority by any party in 50 years.

“He’s going to return a diminished figure, leading a Freedom Caucus that has no power,” Schwartz said.

Harris will lose his chairmanship of the appropriations subcommittee, and the voters who returned him to office will have to ask Democrats to fund their fire trucks.

As much as Question 3 may have decided this race, 1st District voters did this to themselves. They will be the ones who discover the cost.

Don’t expect Harris to change. Still petulant over critical columns I’ve written about him, he booted my colleagues from his watch party in Cambridge.

Maybe he’ll find a spot in President Trump’s administration. There almost certainly will be vacancies soon.

The Democrats will carve up the 1st District before 2028, most likely reaching across the Chesapeake Bay to connect part of it with Annapolis.

They might have beaten Harris at the polls without Question 3. Instead, Democrats gave up in search of a different kind of victory.

That, too, may eventually prove a costly decision.

“This is wrong, and I don’t fault anyone for how they voted on it,” Schwartz said. “But this will screw over the Democratic Party on the Eastern Shore for decades to come.

“If we couldn’t win now, we won’t win in 2028.”