There’s been a lot of analysis about how Larry Hogan beat Anthony Brown. Governor-elect Hogan worked hard for his win, and I don’t want to minimize his efforts, but Brown actively lost the election.
Brown has been singularly ineffective at any management role he was given while serving as Lieutenant Governor with Martin O’Malley. The disastrous rollout of the state’s nonfunctioning Obamacare website is the prime example.
This lack of basic organizational skills propagated through his campaign. The Gentle Reader may remember a story from a few weeks ago about folks walking out on Barack Obama during a campaign rally for Brown. I spoke with a Brown campaign volunteer who described the event as disorganized and running late. The crowd’s mood turned a bit surly. When the Democrats can’t get a crowd in Prince George’s County, Maryland, to stick around to listen their President, something has gone very wrong, and I began to suspect that Hogan had a chance.
Then, a few days later, Hillary Clinton spoke at a Brown rally on the University of Maryland campus—to a room with a lot of empty seats. At that point, I figured that Hogan would squeak by.
The big surprise was Hogan’s margin of victory. I put that down to his hard work that got the Republican base in the suburban and rural areas of the state out on election day.
Now, we will see how he can govern.
Reblogged this on A Conservative Christian Man.
That is the question.
Two words: rain tax.
A few folks on Twitter have been passing around Oliver Willis’ tweets on the race from the summer through a week or so ago. He was relentlessly mocking and disparaging the idea that Hogan could even make it close, even single digits, or that Brown wasn’t going to win easily.
Willis was calling those ‘wingnut polls’ and ‘right-wing fantasies’ and laying it on thick. Someone went through his timeline and has been bringing the pain by retweeting him.