The only state-wide democrat this century to win more Maryland counties than Montgomery County’s Peter Franchot did in his 2018 Comptroller re-election bid was Doug Gansler in 2010, running for Attorney General.
Gansler was running for re-election, and he ran unopposed.
Today, Franchot is gearing up for a 2022 run at Maryland’s Governorship — an ambition that he’s had his eye on for years. With his incredible electoral strength (especially on the Republican Eastern Shore) and massively popular Incumbent Governor Larry Hogan unable to seek re-election, Franchot is seen by many as the clear favorite to win the nomination and cruise to the seat he has so desperately coveted.
But where did this all begin? How did an army veteran and apparent craft beer enthusiast become such an electoral behemoth that, since toppling a powerful incumbent in 2006, he has been able to walk to almost unanimous support in the state of Maryland?
To answer that question, we need to do some digging.
Peter V. R. Franchot was born in New Haven, Connecticut in November 1947, and lived in Massachusetts for most of his life — attending Phillips Academy in Andover, disappearing to serve in the army for a couple years before returning to earn his bachelor’s from Amherst and his J.D. from Northeastern, and working for then-congressman Ed Markey as a staff director. Employment in Markey’s office brought him down to Maryland, where he bought a home in Takoma Park, Montgomery County.
In 1986, Franchot was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates. He would serve there for the next twenty years, although he was humbled by a loss in his run for Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in 1988 (at the time, a Republican district with a strong incumbent. This was back in the days before Maryland was the Democratic powerhouse we recognize it as today).
Come 2006, where William Donald Schaefer sat as Maryland’s Comptroller, an ambitious Franchot had his eyes set on the seat. Though Schaefer was fresh off of a powerful electoral performance in 2002, he quickly became marred by scandal — and with Franchot and Anne Arundel County Executive Janet Owens entering the race, he quickly found himself staring at his most competitive race in a good long while. Instead of consolidating his strength, falling back on his own record, keeping his mouth shut and riding his incumbency advantage to a primary victory, Schaefer cost himself tens of thousands of voters through off-color comments and half-hearted apologies.
The difficulties started when Martin O’Malley, the Mayor of Baltimore and winner of the Governorship in that same 2006 election, began to attack Schaefer for his relationship with Incumbent Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich. Claiming that Schaefer covered up the poor performance of the Governor, O’Malley successfully used this attack to garner support in his race and kill off Schaefer’s chances in his own.
Schaefer then cost himself an incredible number of minority voters — especially Hispanic voters — through his comments at a Board of Public Works meeting, where he expressed his frustration with people speaking other languages and wished that immigrants would adjust to our language. “This is the United States”, he said. “I don’t want to adjust to another language.”
But he wasn’t just an anti-immigrant Republican apologist — he was sexist, too. At a Board of Public Works meeting in February 2006, not long before the primary, he watched a female aid walk away and asked her to walk again. He also expressed his opinion that Owens was “like a man” because she wore long dresses. Though he apologized for both incidents, his opponents — especially Franchot — lit into him for these apologies, noting that he seemed only to be apologizing for the negative publicity he had received instead of showing real remorse for his actions.
Schaefer, once a powerful incumbent, slid all the way to a third place finish in the primary.
In one of the most contentious three-way primaries in Maryland history, Franchot emerged victorious — fueled by a strong showing in the National Capitol Region, especially Montgomery County. He took the victory despite an absolutely atrocious showing in rurals — he came last place in most of the Eastern Shore, an area where he finds remarkable electoral support today. Owens carried most of the Eastern Shore, did well in central Maryland, and stopped her losses in the National Capitol Region — fueling her to a very close second place finish. Schaefer’s support came almost entirely out of Baltimore City and County, with lingering support sitting in Western Maryland and the Southern Eastern Shore — but those last two aren’t places where very many people live, and so he slid massively down to a firm third place finish.
But how did Franchot manage to carry only four counties and still win the nomination? Sure, there’s lots of people in those places, but he did poorly in the rest of the state. Are there truly enough votes in Frederick, Montgomery, Charles and Prince George’s counties to win a state without any other counties?
As it turns out, the answer is yes.
There just aren’t that many people who live in Maryland’s rural counties — and, those being largely Republican areas, there are even fewer Democratic primary voters in them. Franchot blew his opponents out of the water in the counties surrounding DC, and those counties accounted for over a third of the total votes cast in this election. He took a third place finish in Baltimore City and County, yet didn’t need votes there at all — by almost 15,000 votes he defeated Janet Owens, fueled by hometown support.
That primary, fifteen years ago, was the last truly competitive election Franchot has faced.
For the next several years, Franchot walked to Comptroller victory after Comptroller victory. It started in the 2006 general, his most narrow victory of the lot, where he defeated University of Baltimore Professor Anne McCarthy, fueled by support in central Maryland and in spite of only carrying one rural county — Kent, on the Eastern Shore, home to Maryland’s smallest County population.
He continued this domination in 2010 and 2014, running against former Amtrak CFO William Campbell. He flipped two counties on the Eastern Shore in 2010 — Dorchester and Talbot, the latter of which is shifting left at an incredible rate within Maryland (flipping for Biden in 2020). He continued to rack up his margins beneath the surface even in counties which didn’t flip, priming him for a remarkable electoral performance in 2018.
Ever aggressive and ambitious, Franchot explored the possibility of running for Governor in 2014. However, polling suggested his chances were much better when running for Comptroller than for Governor — and so he made the decision to seek re-election back in 2012. This was, in hindsight, probably the best thing possible for his electoral career — in a shocking, unexpected upset, Republican Larry Hogan won the Governorship in 2014, a move that could perhaps have spelled the end of Franchot’s ambitions.
Franchot proved himself to be a very popular figure in the state of Maryland, pushing towards daring initiatives even when the General Assembly disagreed. He grappled with the legislature over craft beer sales, looking to loosen restrictions on the current industry. He boldly opposed the expansion of slot machine gambling and casinos in Maryland, pushed to delay school openings until after Labor Day for the sake of economic vacation revenue, and leveraged his position on the Board of Public Works to force Baltimore schools to install HVAC systems.
He also knew what he was doing electorally. He pushed for infrastructure projects on the Eastern Shore, even when it wasn’t the popular thing to do as a Democrat, knowing it wouldn’t cost him voters in his stronghold areas and could win him over rural voters. He cozied up to Governor Larry Hogan, a very popular figure in Maryland, and infuriated Democratic establishment leaders regularly — yet he was electorally powerful, and not a single Democrat was willing to even primary him.
That, combined with the national blue wave in 2018, produced one of the most remarkable electoral maps in recent Maryland history.
As a powerful incumbent, Franchot faced off against a very unique if not necessarily strong candidate in 2018. Anjali Reed Phukan, a Republican and auditor in the state of Maryland, took the nomination — and proceeded to get flattened. Phukan, who was kicked out of Montgomery County Public Schools as a child, was once a member of the Green Party and an Occupy Wall Street Protestor and still describes herself as a recovering drug addict who leads weekly recovery sessions on the Ocean City beach.
She has a history of breaking with the Republicans, many of whom have claimed she’s too social liberal for the party. She did not outright support Trump in 2016, breaks from party preferences regularly, and has declined to denounce the National Organization for Women despite Republican requests for her to do so.
Phukan ran as a write-in candidate for Comptroller in 2014 (winning a staggering 595 votes), challenged Montgomery County’s Shebra Evans for her 4th District seat on the Board of Education in 2016 (where she got all the way up to 31.4% of the vote), and was living in Ocean City by the time of this election in 2018.
Oh, yeah, and she gives voters Twizzlers when she meets them.
“They’re red with a twist, I’m Republican with a twist”, she says.
She’s also a woman of color and an open Buddhist, and neither of these factors help her too much with Republican voters. Combined with her weak electoral history and nonexistent political history, Franchot absolutely devastated her electorally and produced an incredible map — which has quickly become my favorite to look at in recent Maryland history.
Drawing from his strength in developing infrastructure in the Eastern Shore, Franchot flipped every county except for Cecil — the one county which stubbornly refused to shift for Franchot even a little. He flipped St. Mary’s and Calvert counties in Southern Maryland, Carroll and Harford in Northern Maryland, and even Allegany in Western — though surprisingly, he didn’t flip Washington (which has been, for some reason, less elastic than Allegany in other elections as well).
To truly look at how absurd, this margin of victory was for Franchot, let’s go back to our cartograms. Let’s first look at where Phukan’s support came from:
She was able to garner a few votes from Central Maryland just on the basis of sheer population in the area, but most of her votes came in from Baltimore county and, to an extent, the more populated counties in Northern Maryland — but to be honest, she didn’t really win that many votes at all. Look instead at Franchot:
There was far more strength from Central Maryland, Baltimore went for him overwhelmingly, and because of the amount of support he received in these counties the rurals may as well have not existed. Here’s a look at the margin of the winner in each county:
This is why people see so much strength for Franchot in this upcoming Governor’s race. He’s immensely popular with both Democrats and Republicans — even if those in the legislature don’t like him much at all. He draws support from all over the state in his elections, and seems to have the ability to unite the state — which is much less essential for him anyways, given that he’s a Democrat running in a blue state.
I’m going to leave you with one last map — a look at how Franchot’s electoral coalition has changed since 2006. Every single county has grown its support for him, and he’s flipped 13 of them. Franchot, love him or hate him, is an electoral juggernaut in Maryland. He is not to be underestimated.
All elections data in this article comes from the Maryland Board of Elections, maps are made by me in QGIS, and information mostly comes from Wikipedia and this article. Feel free to follow me on Twitter (@dav_and_a_doge) and subscribe on YouTube (Dav Talks Local Politics). Thanks for reading!