Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful Angela Alsobrooks will launch her first television ad of the general election Thursday with a message her campaign intends to continue pushing until November: Control of the Senate could come down to her matchup with Republican Larry Hogan.
In a state that hasn’t elected a Republican senator since 1980, the race between the two-term Prince George’s County executive and the former two-term governor is the most competitive in decades.
Alsobrooks has been making the case for months that a narrowly divided Senate — currently split 51 Democrats or independents and 49 Republicans — will depend on the outcome of the election here.
“What’s at stake in this year’s Senate election? Everything,” Alsobrooks says in the ad, the first since she won a competitive primary in May. “Because, Maryland, this time we have the power to determine which party controls the Senate.”
Alsobrooks says the word “power” six times in the 30-second spot as she mentions her and other Democrats’ priorities if they keep the Senate majority.
“The power to hold big corporations accountable, the power to protect Social Security and Medicare, the power to stop Republicans from stripping women of our reproductive rights and confirming extreme justices to the Supreme Court,” she says.
The ad does not mention Hogan by name or show his image. It does show television news clips of the recent Supreme Court decision that ruled that former President Donald Trump was immune from prosecution for official acts committed while in office, as well as the confirmation hearing for Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018.
Alsobrooks last week reported a recent three-month fundraising haul of more than $5.3 million, with $3.7 million in the bank as of July 1.
Her campaign did not disclose how much it was spending on the new ad or in which media markets it was launching, but spokesman Connor Lounsbury said the campaign was “expecting to be consistently on the air making our case to the people of Maryland” moving forward.
Hogan, who outraised Alsobrooks with more than $6.5 million over the last quarter, has been running television ads for weeks and launched billboards on the Eastern Shore earlier this month. His campaign has also already scheduled tens of thousands of dollars worth of ads through Nov. 5, according to contracts available publicly through the Federal Communications Commission. He had about $3.3 million in the bank from three different political action committees, according to Federal Election Committee reports.
Both candidates are expected to see an additional boost from other groups supporting their campaigns — potentially further filling the airwaves with ads focused on the race.
For example, a Super PAC called “Maryland’s Future” was launched earlier this year with an initial $10 million investment from Hogan-backer and major Republican donor Kenneth Griffin, head of the Citadel LLC hedge fund. New donations made public with the recent finance deadline include an additional $2 million to that PAC from Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman and CEO of the global private equity firm Blackstone.
