Maryland Republican women seek more opportunities

Del. Kathy Szeliga (R-Baltimore County) has tried to recruit more conservative women to run for political office. File photo by Danielle E. Gaines.

MILWAUKEE — The Republican presidential ticket is two men, Donald Trump and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance.

But women played prominent roles throughout the GOP convention week here — whether speaking on the convention floor or at glitzy events, at celebrations of donors and party activists, or making things happen behind the scenes.

“Republican women are the first call you make if you want to get someone elected,” Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders (R) told a jam-packed gathering of the National Federation of Republican Women in Milwaukee.

Throughout the week, on venue stages and in private conversations, Republicans said they’d like to see more conservative women running for office. That same mantra was being repeated in the Maryland delegation, where a woman, Nicole Beus Harris, is chair of the state party.

Republican women in Maryland are painfully aware of the success of Emerge Maryland, the Democratic recruiting and training organization that, since its founding in 2013, has helped send dozens of women to political office, including state Comptroller Brooke Lierman (D), Frederick County Executive Jessica Fitzwater (D) and state Sen. Sarah K. Elfreth (D-Anne Arundel), who is almost certainly headed to Congress in January.

“The Democrats are very, very organized,” said state Del. Kathy Szeliga (R-Baltimore County), a leading conservative voice in the Maryland GOP. “It’s very frustrating in that I’ve always had a passion for getting more Republican women elected.”

Szeliga resigned from her post as House minority whip in 2021, in part to spend more time recruiting conservative women to run for office. But she said the lingering effects of COVID-19 and other factors have slowed those efforts.

Several Republicans had high hopes for Kelly Schulz, a former state lawmaker and Hogan administration Cabinet secretary, when she ran for governor in 2022. But she was deemed insufficiently conservative by the Trump wing of the GOP — which holds sway in Maryland, just as it does most everyplace else — and lost the Republican primary by more than 8 percentage points to then-Del. Dan Cox, who was clobbered in the general election.

In the General Assembly, women hold seven of the 39 House Republican seats, and just one of the 13 Senate seats. Women have 14 of the 34 Democratic seats in the Senate, and make up almost 60% of the 102-member Democratic caucus in the House.

Republicans have elected two female county executives in recent years — Danielle Hornberger in Cecil County in 2020 and Julie Giordano in Wicomico County in 2022. And Jessica Haire, then an Anne Arundel County councilmember, came close to being elected county executive in 2022, finishing almost 8 percentage points behind Democratic incumbent Steuart Pittman in the general election.

Haire was leading on election night by more than 13,000 votes, but after the mail-in ballot count favored Democrats dramatically, she lost by over 16,000 votes. 2022 also turned out to be a stronger year for Democrats, up and down the ballot, than many political analysts had anticipated.

Yet even with these victories and one near-win, Hornberger, Giordano and Haire have encountered pointed resistance and setbacks in their young political careers — the product of sexism, institutional tensions and ideological cleaves within the GOP.

In interviews last week, all discussed the obstacles Republican women face as they’re seeking to get ahead.

“If you asked the 30-year-old Danielle or even the 35-year-old Danielle whether women are treated unfairly, I’ve always been outspoken: ‘I’m going to go out and get what I deserve,’” said Hornberger, who is now 43. “I never thought I’d be swimming in that [sexist] environment.”

‘It’s become more brutal’

Each woman’s circumstance has been different, even with some underlying similarities. And what they’ve encountered will sound familiar to Democratic women. But the Democrats generally have more support systems for their women candidates than Republicans do, in Maryland and nationally.

Hornberger is now a lame duck: She lost her bid for a second term in the May 14 Republican primary, falling to Deputy Sheriff Adam Streight, 53% to 47%. She’ll remain in office until early December.

Several Republican leaders, including Hornberger, believe her undoing was precipitated by an organized campaign by some Cecil County school officials and the teachers’ union, who had been at odds with Hornberger, to convince Democrats, independents and new voters to re-register as Republicans to oppose her in the primary.

The gambit appears to have worked. It produced about 1,500 new registered Republicans, and Hornberger lost the primary by about 900 votes. An ally of Hornberger’s on the county council, Jackie Gregory, was also ousted in the GOP primary.

But Hornberger said the primary campaign was the culmination of almost four years of attacks on social media from political opponents, about everything from her policies to her political allegiances to her appearance. Before being elected, Hornberger worked for U.S. Rep. Andy Harris (R-1st), the highest-ranking Trump-aligned official in the Maryland GOP, and she defeated a more centrist Republican incumbent in the 2020 primary.

Hornberger said she was stunned by how some men in the political world who had known her for years as an aide to Harris and as the wife of state Del. Kevin Hornberger (R-Cecil) — the couple have since divorced — began to look at her and treat her differently as county executive. And she said she was chagrined by how some of her most strident criticism came from women.

“The ugly part is, we always talk about women supporting women, but we know that doesn’t always happen,” she said.

Hornberger said she isn’t sure what she’ll do after her term ends and wants to focus on the next 3 1/2 months in office. But she didn’t rule out another run for office some day.

“It’s become more and more difficult to get more people into politics — not just women — because it’s become more brutal,” she said. “You have to have an incredibly strong backbone and the will to take the arrows and do whatever it takes. Maybe people will start to see each other as humans again. But I fear that social media and the ability to hide behind a computer screen is going to make it more difficult.”

A ‘campaign against the good old boy network’

Giordano has been in office less than two years and already she’s facing political peril. She and the county council, despite its 5-2 Republican majority, have been feuding ever since she took office.

The council, in retaliation, has put an initiative on the Election Day ballot, asking Wicomico residents whether they want to keep the county’s charter form of government, which has been in place since 2006 following a 2004 ballot initiative, or revert to a county commission form of government, without an executive.

Giordano and her allies are cranking up to oppose the ballot measure.

“We’re definitely going to fight it,” she said. “I have donors lined up and ready to go. It’s not so much a fight but an education for what the people are voting for.”

Giordano’s predecessors as county executive have also had power struggles with the council through the years.

“I think they’ve always had an issue with this form of government,” she said of the council. “And they’ve been chipping away at the inherent powers of the county executive ever since…. From my perspective, they’re always looking across the hall at my office instead of looking forward.”

But Giordano is the first woman to serve as county executive, the first political neophyte elected to the position, and the first person from the conservative wing of the GOP to hold the job, and those factors have also come into play in her standoffs with the council. She defeated the interim incumbent, John Psota, who was appointed to the position by the council after serving as the county’s chief administrative officer for years, by 4 percentage points in the primary.

Giordano said that in the fall campaign she plans to highlight her record and the contacts she has made in Annapolis that are benefiting the county. She also plans to argue that the charter form of government is still relatively new to Wicomico, but has brought great progress, and that returning to a commission system would be a step backward.

“This is just another opportunity for me to connect with people in the county,” she said, “and to campaign against the good old boy network.”

‘I definitely got it from both sides’

In Anne Arundel County in 2022, Haire faced a bruising Republican primary against former state lawmaker Herb McMillan, who attacked Haire on county COVID-19 mandates, property taxes and more. That required Haire to protect her right flank and burn resources before she could pivot to the center in the general election and focus on Pittman.

“I definitely got it from both sides,” she said. “In the primary, my opponent called me a moderate, and in the general Pittman called me extreme.”

Despite the disappointment of 2022, Haire is contemplating a second run for county executive in 2026, when Pittman is termed out of office. Haire has raised some money, and said she will be polling and talking to community leaders in the months ahead to “gauge whether the county agrees with my approach.”

Haire, who plans to decide about another campaign sometime next year, said her principal arguments against Pittman are even more salient today.

“I said this on the campaign in 2022 — I don’t think most people felt better about the economy and crime than they did in 2018, and we’ve got the same leadership. There’s so much in Anne Arundel that needs strong and commonsense leaders.”

Haire said that while encountering sexism in politics is inevitable, Republican women are succeeding in overcoming the obstacles.

“We have strong women in the county,” she said. “We have strong women in Maryland. We have strong women in the country. We can always do a better job of helping them and promoting them.”

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