Numbers crunching in Maryland

Let me do a little number crunching on the Maryland Democratic Senate primary. Rep. Ben Cardin beat former Rep. and NAACP President Kweisi Mfume by just a 44-to-40 percent margin.

Turnout was 535,604, about the same as the last time Maryland had a seriously contested statewide Democratic primary for governor or senator (1994 governor: 547,403) and significantly less than the time before that (1986 governor: 639,964; 1986 senator: 621,924). Maryland's population has increased significantly since 1986 and 1994; Democratic primary turnout has gone down. But I don't know how significant this is, given that primary turnout in this party-registration state is partly a function of party registration, and historically in Maryland a far higher share of voters have registered Democratic than have voted reliably Democratic in seriously contested statewide races for governor or senator. The numbers do no more than suggest that November 2006 is not going to have a surge of Democratic turnout–but they only suggest it and fall far short of proving it.

Cardin is a good but not a perfect candidate by most contemporary criteria. He is 62 years old and has spent most of his adult life in elective office. He is a smart man and has shown a capacity to work with Republicans on bipartisan legislation, notably with former Rep. (and now OMB Director) Rob Portman on pension legislation. He is a professional politician (a compliment, usually, in my book) not usually given to partisan cheap shots; he voted against the Iraq war resolution and has made himself acceptable to the hard left of the Democratic Party.

In this primary he faced the difficult situation of opposing a black politician in a state with the largest black population outside the states of the Old Confederacy and a state that is in most elections safely Democratic only because of the huge margins its black voters give Democratic candidates. In 2004, for example, Maryland whites voted 54-44 percent for George W. Bush; Maryland blacks cast 24 percent of the state's votes and voted 89-11 percent for John Kerry, and Kerry carried the state 56-43 percent. Maryland is a generally safe Democratic state for one demographic reason: Blacks from Washington over the last 40 years have been moving into the Maryland suburbs, particularly into Prince George's County east of the District, which now has a solid black majority. Put that together with the black majority in Baltimore and you have a heavily Democratic state.

But not quite always, and not in 2002, when Republican Bob Ehrlich was elected governor over Democrat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, essentially by winning nearly all the white voters outside upscale Montgomery County, northwest of Washington.

Anyway, here are the results for Maryland's five largest jurisdictions, with vote totals for Cardin, Mfume, other candidates, total votes, and Cardin's margins over Mfume.

Mfume's percentage seems to track pretty closely to the black percentage of population; this was an electorate that broke down largely on racial lines.

What's interesting here is the emergence of the suburban Washington counties as a larger share of the statewide primary vote than in the past. Prince George's and Montgomery cast 36 percent of the primary votes; Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and Anne Arundel cast 39 percent. If you added to the latter total Harford, Carroll, and Howard counties, which are in the Baltimore metro area, you'd have a higher total. But still the largest single jurisdiction was Prince George's. And Kweisi Mfume's margin here was higher in votes and in percentage terms than his margin in Baltimore City.

There are obvious implications for the general election. The Republican nominee, Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, is black. He has put some considerable difference between himself and the Bush administration. His obvious target group is black voters in Prince George's County, most of whom have never voted for Cardin. For the Cardin campaign, Prince George's has to be the prime target as well. This should be an interesting political exercise. There are slum and high-crime areas in Prince George's, but by and large this is the home of the black middle class; the only American county that rivals it in this respect is DeKalb County, Ga., which just ousted Rep. Cynthia McKinney for the second time in four years. Many middle- and upper-middle-income blacks are government employees, and in some families both husband and wife are. But there has also been a surge in business formations in Prince George's County, a subject I mentioned earlier on this blog.

A Democratic-Republican struggle for the votes of middle-class blacks will be something new in American politics. Previously, political strategists have focused on middle-class blacks only in Democratic primaries, like the ones in which McKinney was defeated. Political organizational efforts among this group have been limited to Democratic efforts to register and turn out black voters. It's not clear whether Steele has the potential to make serious inroads in Prince George's. But it's probably the only way he can win, so he'll probably try.

Prince George's County, by the way, is one of the few (perhaps the only) American counties named after a Dane. This was Prince George of Denmark, married to Princess Anne when her uncle, Charles II, was King of England. Anne became Queen after the death of her brother-in-law William III in March 1702 and reigned until her own death, age only 49, in August 1714. Anne was a devout believer in the Church of England and for most of her reign supported the war effort against France in the War of Spanish Succession. Anne was very much in love with Prince George and wanted to make him commander-in-chief of Britain's armies; her military leaders, unanimous on this issue, managed to persuade her not to do so. Evidently no one thought much of his abilities; Charles II once said, "I've tried him drunk, and I've tried him sober, and there's nothing in him."

But Prince George's County was named for him in 1696, while Queen Anne's County, across Chesapeake Bay on the Eastern Shore, was named for his wife. (Princess Anne County, Va., was named for her also; it ceased to exist when it became the independent city of Virginia Beach, now the largest city in the state.) Queen Anne was devastated by Prince George's death in 1708; she had had something like 13 pregnancies, but her longest-surviving child, the Duke of Gloucester, died in 1700 age 11. His death prompted the passage of the Act of Succession of 1701 which still governs succession to the English crown (British since the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707). No Catholic or anyone married to a Catholic can succeed; named as successor to Anne was the Electress Sophia of Hanover, the granddaughter of King James I, who was born in 1630. She failed by a month to outlive Anne, who was succeeded by Sophia's son, King George I, ancestor of the current monarch. George did not speak English but was nonetheless an active king; he communicated with his ministers in French, the language of most of the courts of Europe in the 18th century. I can't resist passing along these things, most of which I learned in writing my book on the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89.

Much of Prince George's County has been represented for many years by House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, who is one of the few American politicians of Danish descent (the late Lloyd Bentsen was another).

There was also a notable House result in the Maryland Democratic primary. Incumbent Rep. Albert Wynn beat Donna Edwards by only 50-46 percent. Edwards criticized Wynn for his vote for the Iraq war resolution; Wynn relied on his prowess as a local representative. The Washington Post (somewhat unaccountably, in my view) endorsed Edwards. Interesting subcounty analysis:

Wynn prevailed by 56-40 percent in majority-black Prince George's. But in the Montgomery County portion, with a much lower black percentage and including the counterculture left hamlet of Takoma Park (which once banned nuclear weapons within its precincts, as if it could keep Soviet nukes out), Edwards won 60-34 percent. Edwards's 6,039-vote majority in Montgomery, which cast 31,240 votes, came close to wiping out Wynn's 9,030-vote majority in Prince George's, which cast 53,354. The result is a testimonial to the strength of the yuppie Left in the Democratic primary even in a black-majority district.

The latest poll numbers

Some remarkable results from pollster Scott Rasmussen. In three days, Rasmussen's robo-conducted poll has shown George W. Bush's job approval increasing from 41 to 47 percent. Disapproval declined from 57 to 50 percent. This is an unusual result: Rasmussen's polls usually show very glacial movement, because he weights the results by party identification. Polls that don't weight for party ID, notably Gallup, show considerably more volatility. Interesting note: The first night of interviewing on which this rise occurred was September 11. Hmm. On the realclearpolitics.com blog, Rasmussen expressed appropriate caution about the results. As he says, it could be "just statistical noise or a temporary bounce."

Signs of a more modest "uptick" in Bush's job approval come in the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll announced today. This poll shows Bush with 42 percent job approval, up from 38 in June. The poll also had some good news for Republican incumbents under attack:

At the same time, the Journal/NBC poll shows voters split on whether their incumbent House member deserves re-election. In July, voters said it was time to "give a new person a chance" by a 10-percentage-point margin. Voters also say by 42 percent to 37 percent that they are more concerned Democrats have offered "no specific plans" than that Republicans have offered "no changes" to deal with the country's problems.

The poll was conducted between September 8 and 11, which means that all or almost all interviews were conducted before Bush's September 11 television speech. Typically, pollsters don't place calls after 9 p.m., which is when the speech was delivered on the East Coast; some calls may have been made after the speech to the half of the country (approximately 54 percent) west of the Eastern time zone.