America is politically polarized. In Maryland, only a few purple pockets remain.

All 188 seats in Maryland’s General Assembly are up for election this year. But just a handful are competitive in November.

Maryland is as politically polarized as the rest of the country, drawing districts to favor one party or the other as efficiently as possible.

Only about a dozen state legislative races could be considered competitive, according to a Banner analysis that evaluated how close the last presidential election was, voter registration trends and the strength of each party’s candidate.

Anne Arundel County is the heart of purple Maryland, with several competitive races. But there are also an Eastern Shore district Democrats are trying to flip and a Democratic Harford County senator who has held on despite the county’s Republican lean.

Here’s a look at four of Maryland’s purplest districts.

A Senate face-off in southern Anne Arundel

Jessica Haire’s tent at the Anne Arundel County Fair featured red-white-and-blue signs advertising her state Senate campaign, a large basket of lollipops — and not a single mention that she’s a Republican.

The county’s Republican Party had its own tent some 30 feet away, where candidates mingled with voters and a table was covered in campaign literature.

For Haire, though, party affiliation won’t be her ticket to the Senate, because she must woo voters from across the political spectrum.

When Haire talks to voters, she opens with emphasizing the bipartisan bills she passed when she was on the Anne Arundel County Council. She talks about electric bills and septic systems, not national debates or social issues.

“Folks are excited about not having a hyperpartisan person in there and really making sure that we’re just getting to work,” Haire said over a blaring rock band at the county fair.

The pitch doesn’t always land. When one curious fairgoer learned Haire was a Republican, she declared, “You’re not going to get me. I’m a raging liberal.”

Haire faces an uphill battle to unseat Sen. Shaneka Henson, a Democrat and lawyer. The district they’re running in, District 30, runs from blue neighborhoods in Annapolis through rural, red neighborhoods in southern Anne Arundel. It’s been represented by a Democrat in the state Senate since the early 1980s.

The district voted for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by an 18-point margin in 2024, and Gov. Wes Moore won his 2022 race over Republican Dan Cox by nearly 25 points.

But, Haire points out, the district also voted for Larry Hogan when the Republican former governor ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 2024.

Still, incumbents always have an advantage, especially Democrats in Maryland. Henson benefits from being part of the Senate Democratic Caucus, which pools resources to support vulnerable members.

The caucus is concerned enough about Henson’s race that it has sent out attack mailers attempting to link Haire to Trump. Anti-Haire TV ads with the same theme are also running in the district.

The candidates themselves are taking the bipartisan high road — publicly, at least.

“If something is a good idea, it’s a good idea, no matter who proposes it,” Henson said, mentioning a small-business tax relief bill she passed alongside a Republican cosponsor.

“We worked on that legislation because it was a good idea, not that it had an exclusive right to one party or the other,” Henson said.

Henson has rankled members of her own party with her positions on reproductive health and LGBTQ+ issues. This past session, she engaged in a pointed floor debate on a bill sponsored by fellow Democratic Sen. Clarence Lam that would have made it easier to update birth certificates to reflect a changed gender. The bill failed.

Henson also has a mark on her record. The General Assembly’s ethics committee directed her to apologize in 2024 after she advocated for an arm of her church to receive state funding without disclosing the church was paying her for legal work.

Some Democratic activists have defected and are supporting Haire, including Henry Green, a teacher and former political candidate who was kicked off the Annapolis Democratic Central Committee over his endorsement of Haire.

Haire, who worked as an engineer before becoming a lawyer, has some Democrats volunteering for her campaign and nabbed an endorsement from Reproductive Justice Maryland Action, which typically backs Democrats.

Henson isn’t bothered.

“I think that you may find an individual who has an axe to grind, but I don’t see any sort of movement beyond an individual,” she said.

Henson has fought for this seat before. When she was appointed by the county’s Democratic Party to fill a vacancy in the Senate, she prevailed by the narrowest of margins: 10-9.

As politically purple as they come in central Anne Arundel

Not far from Annapolis, in the rural community of Crownsville, Chuck Cook knocks on a home’s door and, when a woman answers, he admits he has “a pretty loaded question for a Saturday morning.”

The question: “Do you have an issue that’s top of mind?”

On this street, the major concern is a proposed giant water tower that would loom over the neighborhood that residents have been fighting for years. On other streets in other neighborhoods, Cook hears about congested roads, the loss of federal jobs and high energy prices.

Cook is a Democrat hoping to win a seat in the House of Delegates in perhaps the most politically purple district in the state, which stretches across western and central Anne Arundel County neighborhoods including Crofton, Millersville and Crownsville. Voters are registered as Republicans and Democrats in nearly equal numbers, with a sizable amount of unaffiliated voters.

The area’s current representative, Republican Del. Stuart Schmidt, won his race four years ago by just 297 votes, even as Moore carried the district by 15 points.

The narrow win earned Schmidt the nickname “Landslide” from his fellow Republicans. Democrats, meanwhile, smell an opportunity with those numbers.

Cook has spent much of his career working for labor unions and currently works for the state Department of Housing and Community Development. Moore is backing Cook so strongly that he invited him to be a featured speaker at his own campaign launch.

Cook knows he can’t rely on Democrats alone to win the district.

“I don’t lead with: I’m Chuck Cook, I’m running as a Democrat. I’m Chuck Cook, and I’m running for you in District 33B,” he said. “And that’s why I ask the issues question. I think a lot of people are just fed up with the partisan argument.”

Schmidt, an entrepreneur who just opened a youth fitness business, said he has tried to “vote the district” rather than always voting in line with Republican Party priorities. It’s earned him scorn, he says, but he believes he’s taken the right approach.

“My party affiliation has nothing to do with how I’m going to vote on a particular bill,” Schmidt said. “Some people just don’t like that. They want the tension. They want the far right and the far left to be at odds with each other. They don’t want Stu as a moderate.”

Despite his proclamations of centrism, Schmidt still is a Republican. But he said the most important Republican principle is fiscal conservatism. He worries that Marylanders, especially retirees, are being driven out of the state by high taxes. If not for the state’s high-quality healthcare and public schools, he thinks more would flee the state.

Voters in the district have received more than a dozen mail pieces. The mailers from each candidate are largely positive, with Schmidt describing himself as the “most independent, bipartisan member of the Maryland General Assembly” and Cook’s mailers proclaiming “he’s working for us.”

But the mail from party organizations takes a decidedly partisan bent — doing the dirty work that allows candidates to keep to the bipartisan high road.

One Democratic mailer criticized Schmidt for voting against a bill last year that offered a modest rebate to electric customers and for voting against the state budget last year.

“Spiking Costs: And NO Help From Our State Delegate,” it proclaims.

An anti-Cook mailer from Republicans ties the candidate to Moore, whom they blame for “a more expensive Maryland.”

“Whose priorities will Chuck Cook take to Annapolis?” the mailer asks, in all capital letters.

A Democratic flip opportunity on the Shore

Just as the nickname “Smalltimore” aptly describes the tight-knit nature of much of Baltimore, “Smallsbury” evokes the same idea in the Eastern Shore city of Salisbury.

As Josh Hastings walks through the city’s monthly Friday night street festival, in true Smallsbury fashion, he bumps into one person he knows after another. He’s a Salisbury native and Wicomico County Council member who has been out in the community campaigning for a seat in the Maryland House of Delegates in District 38B.

On the campaign trail, Hastings says he wants to lower the cost of living for Marylanders, protect the state’s natural resources and improve democratic engagement.

A Democrat whose career has been in conservation and land preservation, Hastings said, with Democrats outnumbered on the County Council, he’s tried to find “common ground” across the political spectrum.

Of all the state senators and delegates on the Eastern Shore, just one is a Democrat. This is largely the land of Donald Trump and Andy Harris. Democrats didn’t even run a candidate in the district in 2022 or 2018.

This year is different, because Maryland Democrats have targeted the district as one of their top flip opportunities.

The current delegate, Republican Barry Beauchamp, is a Realtor, construction company owner and local party official whose roots in Salisbury also run deep — though he did not respond to multiple interview requests for this article.

As red as the Shore is, the district that Beauchamp and Hastings are competing in has shifted bluer than you might expect. Democrats hold a modest voter registration advantage, and both Harris and Moore won the district, albeit by single-digit margins. Those numbers rocketed the district straight to the top of Democrats’ wish list of seats they hope to flip.

Hastings is benefiting from the Democratic Party’s efforts and landed a $6,000 maximum donation from Moore. But, in an interview, he said he believes the two-party system is “broken.”

He’d love to see a system of five parties or more, which he thinks would draw more people into the political process because they’d find their views better represented. He advocates for opening primary elections to independent voters and favors redistricting to be drawn by bipartisan commissions.

“At some point in time in this country,” he said, “we’ve got to say that democracy is more important than stupid political parties.”

The Democratic Party’s support of Hastings includes a recent ad from the House Democratic Caucus that criticizes Beauchamp for voting against funding for priorities on the Shore — due largely to Beauchamp and Republicans taking symbolic votes against the state budget. Beauchamp posted his own response video, clocking in at more than 2 minutes long.

“I say no to Annapolis so I can say yes to you,” Beauchamp says in the ad.

Republicans aim to take back a Senate seat in Harford

In Harford County, a battle for the Senate is shaping up between an established Democratic politician and a Republican newcomer.

Democratic Sen. Mary-Dulany James spent 16 years in the House of Delegates, then lost twice for the state Senate before winning a seat representing eastern portions of Harford in 2022 by just 591 votes.

James has a political pedigree. She serves in a chamber where her father, William S. James, served as Senate president in the 1960s and 1970s. Her Annapolis office is in a building named for him.

James’ Republican opponent in District 34, Raj Goel, is running in his first election. A former lawyer, he said he felt a calling to public service and traded legal briefs for a job in Harford County’s economic development office. After three years of working to boost local businesses and foster revitalization, he was drafted to run for the Senate seat.

“There’s no greater opportunity than to have the perch of a state senator to work on education, to work on small businesses and to revitalize our areas,” said Goel, who is on leave from his county job while campaigning.

Goel said he has knocked on 4,000-plus doors and he hears most about high electric costs and a loss of faith in the political process. He asks voters to judge candidates on their records, not their party affiliation.

“Once in a while you might get a tough conversation,” Goel said. “But by and large people are very responsive, very open. At the end of the day, they want to just see how you think. They really want to see your heart. Do you care? Will you be someone that will come around?”

Goel’s last point is a subtle dig at James, who some say isn’t visible in the community and was a no-show at a recent candidate forum in Joppatowne.

As Goel spoke to a small audience in a local church and more watching online, he offered a sharper critique.

“With all due respect to my opponent, [since] the last time she got elected, we have not seen her,” Goel said.

He added: “I’ll be a very active individual that will work with all stakeholders in the community to bring as much money as possible.”

James did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.

Banner data reporter Allan James Vestal contributed to this article.