Before there was Hillary Clinton, there was Anthony Brown.
Last year’s presidential election upset isn’t quite as unprecedented as it often seems.
Before Donald Trump officially became the Republican Party’s nominee for president, Minnesota Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison appeared on ABC News and offered a healthy dose of wisdom to the American public.
“This man [Donald Trump] has got some momentum,” Ellison stated, “and we better be ready for the fact that he might be leading the Republican ticket.”
ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos responded to Ellison with a light chuckle and a blast of nullification.
“I know you [Ellison] don’t believe that,” Stephanopoulos said.
But Ellison didn’t waver. Ellison did, contrary to Stephanopoulos’s denial, believe that.
“We had Jesse Ventura in Minnesota win the governorship,” Ellison proceeded to point out, “Nobody thought he was gonna win. I’m telling you, stranger things have happened.”
Because Ellison had experienced a dramatic and unpredicted political upset, he knew the dangers of discounting a nominee before election day. Just two weeks before the 1998 Minnesota gubernatorial election, a Star Tribune/KMSP-TV poll granted former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura a 21% chance of winning the governorship, as opposed to his competitors, Minnesota Attorney General Skip Humphrey and St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman, who sported 35% and 34% chances respectively. The rest is history.
The mass shock and disbelief following Trump’s victory in the general election were fueled by people like George Stephanopoulos, who so carelessly scoffed at the idea of a Trump nomination, let alone a Trump presidency, on national television. But perhaps the idea of Trump becoming president wouldn’t have been as astonishing if political upsets at the state level were analyzed and discussed more often.
These gubernatorial election upsets are far more common than their national media coverage suggests. In fact, you don’t have to go very far from the White House to relive this nation’s most recent upset in a race for governor.
To show you what I’m talking about, let’s travel back in time to the year 2013.
Date: May 10th, 2013
Lieutenant Governor of Maryland Anthony G. Brown launches his campaign for governor at Prince George’s Community College in Largo, Maryland. Brown is a blossoming politician and serves in the administration of Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, who is concluding his final term as governor. Brown is well spoken and sports all of the qualifications you would expect from an aspiring governor and more, including a Harvard Law School degree and military service. At this point, Brown is already a seasoned politician, having served in the Maryland House of Delegates prior to becoming lieutenant governor. Sitting across from him in the pool of democrats running for governor is Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler, who is also a product of the O’Malley administration.
Date: January 21st, 2014
Maryland businessman Larry Hogan announces his bid to be the next governor of Maryland, running as a Republican in a heavily democratic state. Hogan has spent some time as Secretary of Appointments under former Maryland governor Bob Ehrlich, but otherwise, his political career is marked by a pair of failed state congressional campaigns. Hogan is primarily known for his Annapolis, Maryland-based real estate business, which he founded in 1985.
Hogan also started an organization called Change Maryland in 2011, which criticized the O’Malley administration’s statewide tax hikes. Change Maryland claimed that roughly 31,000 residents left the state of Maryland from 2007 to 2010 during the existence of O’Malley’s infamous ‘millionaire’s tax’, which slapped a 6.25% tax rate on annual incomes of one million dollars or more.
Date: May 8th, 2014
Anthony Brown’s overconfidence has begun to take over his public appearances. The notion that the race is already won by the democratic candidate, even before the primaries, seems to have gotten to Brown’s head.
“We take that hill,” he says, referring to the democratic primary election, “and then we’ve got a little bit of a molehill to take in November,” now referencing the general election.
Brown is quoted on the record during a speech to a crowd that he considers the primary election to be “the bigger objective” as opposed to the general election.
It’s clear at this point that in Brown’s mind, once he gets past the primaries, his bid for the governorship is as good as won.
Date: June 24th, 2014
Maryland primary elections are held and both Brown and Hogan emerge victorious by wide margins in each of their respective parties. A CBS News/The New York Times/YouGov poll held in July indicates that Brown has 52% of support, as opposed to Hogan’s measly 39%. In a state where democratic voters outnumber republican voters by more than a 2:1 ratio, a general consensus begins building among Marylanders that Anthony Brown is inevitably going to win.
The next few months leading up to the election are headlined by Brown shaming Hogan in any way possible which, in his defense, is to be expected during a political campaign. But Hogan wastes no time refuting and diffusing Brown’s political advertisements.
One Brown-sponsored advertisement claims Hogan “wants to ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest.” Hogan makes it very clear to The Baltimore Sun that he has never once said anything of the sort and labels the statement as “an absolute lie.” Hogan goes on to point out that he “will do nothing as governor to take away women’s rights.”
“I don’t mind tough ads,” Hogan is quoted saying in a Baltimore Sun article, “But you can’t just blatantly lie. This goes beyond the pale. It’s absolutely the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
Date: October 31st, 2014
At this point, Anthony Brown has publicly boasted about how winning the general election will be a cinch, while his campaign has published a stream of smearing lies about Larry Hogan and his political beliefs that Hogan vehemently discounted.
On the other hand, Larry Hogan has made lowering taxes the centerpiece of his campaign, while also making it very clear that a complete change of leadership needed to occur in Maryland’s capital of Annapolis, hence the name Hogan’s organization ‘Change Maryland’. The name ‘Change Maryland’ itself offers voting incentive to those who are struggling under O’Malley-era tax laws and is, at the very least, a symbol of statewide unity and loyalty.
But regardless of these notions, just days before the election, popular statistics website FiveThirtyEight grants Anthony Brown a 93% chance of winning the Maryland governorship. Likewise, every major poll except one, including the Baltimore Sun, Washington Post, and Gonzales Research, predicts a Brown victory during the month of October.
Date: November 4th, 2014
It’s Election Day and Maryland watches as Larry Hogan handily defeats Anthony Brown in what Chris Christie calls “the biggest upset in the entire country.” The race isn’t necessarily incredibly close either, with Brown losing to Hogan by roughly 65,000 votes. Through the voting process, Maryland responds positively to Hogan’s messages of fiscal responsibility and political restructuring, while simultaneously calling out Brown for his cocky attitude and lack of a message.
In fact, as the election results pour in, retrospective Marylanders fail to recognize what exactly Anthony Brown’s message really was. Democratic Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger tells WBAL-TV, “I think he was not able to let the people know who he was.” It’s clear at this point that Brown was focused so heavily on attacking Hogan because he didn’t feel like he needed to prove anything about himself. Like Brown said himself, he thought “the bigger objective,” that being the primary election, had already come to pass.
Parallel #1: Democratic victories were deemed inevitable.
Coming back to the current year and drawing comparisons, the first major parallel between the 2014 Maryland gubernatorial election and the 2016 United States presidential election is that the minds of the pollsters, analysts, and the eventual losing candidates had already been made up before the election even arrived. Anthony Brown was much more direct than Hillary Clinton in downplaying the importance of the general election, but both ultimately failed to develop a strong sense of political identity and rather focused on shaming their opponents because they seemingly didn’t feel the need to try any harder than that. Many democrats and pundits agreed immediately after the election that Hillary was a weak candidate because the public didn’t really know what she stood for, and instead, all we knew was that she was “anti-Trump.” Skimming headlines from opinion pieces and news articles since the campaign, it becomes overwhelmingly evident that Hillary’s lack of a message is indeed general knowledge. The Washington Examiner shows an article titled “2016 election study: One candidate had no policy message…the other was Donald Trump” while the Washington Post features a piece labeled “Democrats angry that Clinton had no economic message.” All in all, when you don’t stand for anything concrete, it’s naive to assume that the public won’t notice. We learned that in Maryland in 2014 and should’ve remembered that during the presidential election in 2016.
Parallel #2: “Change Maryland” and “Make America Great Again”
Both Larry Hogan and Donald Trump had motivating campaign slogans that alluded to reworking certain aspects of the state and the nation respectively. Each candidate spread their slogans using merchandise and by word of mouth. But most importantly, each motto offered hope to voters that the negatives of previous administrations could be remedied by a new one that wants to make major changes. As ambiguous as that sounds, and is, it’s the sort of thing that can be applied to anyone’s problems at a superficial level, regardless of the actual message behind the slogan. High taxes? Let’s Change Maryland. Unemployed? Let’s Make American Great Again. Sick of politicians ignoring you? Let’s Change Maryland. Tired of feeling like your opinions don’t matter? Let’s Make America Great Again.
Parallel #3: Politicians vs. Businessmen
Hogan and Brown certainly aren’t at the level of business and political experience that Trump and Hillary are respectively, but the smaller, state-wide scale of Maryland compensates for that. The business-savvy backgrounds that Donald Trump and Larry Hogan share were apparently very appealing to voters, but probably more so because of the distrust of conventional politicians than anything else. Brown and Clinton were both seasoned politicians, with years of experience working in government and doing both good and bad things during their terms. But to the general public in Maryland and soon after the United States as a whole, this made them villains. The reputation of politicians being untrustworthy has taken a stranglehold on American common knowledge, and the victories of both Hogan and Trump are evidence of that.
The Lesson
There was no way to predict that what happened in Maryland would foreshadow perhaps the most extreme presidential election upset in American history, but this can teach us something for the future. What happens at a smaller scale often times can indicate what could happen at a much larger scale, and so we should absolutely pay more attention to smaller upsets and political happenings like this moving forward. Similarly, the whole concept of polling is centered around predicting mass thought on the opinions of a small group, but why not take advantage of the largest ‘polls’ we have access to? Those so-called ‘polls’ are gubernatorial and congressional elections, which can each offer tremendous insight into what the country may be leaning towards at any given moment.
