In Maryland’s 6th Congressional District, the battle isn’t over policy. It’s over whose poll numbers are more fictional.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews Data Desk
Welcome to Maryland’s 6th Congressional District, where the mountains meet the Chesapeake Bay watershed, the farmers still outnumber the lobbyists — barely — and two extraordinarily wealthy Democrats are currently engaged in what can only be described as poll warfare.
It started Monday when David Trone, the liquor store billionaire who lost a $62.5 million Senate race in 2024 and apparently decided the solution was to try again for a different seat, posted a triumphant announcement on X: “A new, independent poll just dropped — and we’re winning by 21 points!” The graphic was dramatic. The font was large. The momentum was, per David, entirely because of YOU.
The poll had 154 respondents.
Let that sink in.
For reference, a packed Sheetz on Route 40 on a Friday afternoon probably sees 154 people. A sold-out showing of a bad movie at the Hagerstown multiplex seats 154 people. The margin of error on a poll of 154 likely voters is somewhere in the neighborhood of ±8 points — meaning Trone’s own poll, by its own math, is nearly as uncertain as its finding.
But sure. “Big news.”
Enter April McClain Delaney, the incumbent congresswoman, wife of former congressman and failed presidential candidate John Delaney, and fellow member of Maryland’s exclusive “I am also very wealthy and would like your vote” club.
Her campaign fired back with a poll of its own — 500 likely Democratic primary voters, conducted by Fred Yang of Hart Research in mid-March. A real pollster. A real sample. A real poll. Her number? Delaney leads Trone by 12.
So to recap: Trone is winning by 21. Delaney is winning by 12. The 33-point gap between those two claims is, we believe, a world record for simultaneous self-delusion in a single congressional primary — and we say that with the utmost statistical confidence, based on our own poll of three people in the MDBayNews breakroom.
(We are winning by 47.)
But let’s zoom out for a moment, because the real story here isn’t which millionaire’s pollster is less embarrassed by their methodology. The real story is why this race exists in this district at all.
Maryland’s 6th Congressional District used to be a reliably competitive seat. Western Maryland — Frederick County, Washington County, the panhandle, Garrett County, the mountains — tilted right. Republicans held the seat for decades. Andy Harris territory. Hardworking, rural, center-right Maryland.
Then the Maryland Democratic legislature got out their redistricting maps and a thick Sharpie.
After the 2020 census, Maryland’s Democratic supermajority redrew the 6th to swallow a large chunk of Montgomery County’s wealthy, heavily Democratic suburbs — essentially gerrymandering the rural western Maryland voter into irrelevance in their own congressional district. Federal courts actually struck down a previous version of the map for being an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. The legislature drew a new one that, while more defensible legally, still packed the district with enough Montgomery County Democrats to change the entire character of the seat.
The result? A district that now nominally includes the farmers of Garrett County and the rural communities of Washington County — but whose primary is effectively decided by Potomac and Chevy Chase.
And so the residents of Western Maryland get to watch two candidates from Montgomery County argue over polls while spending combined millions to represent a district that, frankly, wouldn’t have elected either of them under the old lines.
Nobody in Frostburg asked for this. Nobody in Hagerstown held a rally demanding a liquor store tycoon with a 154-person poll. Nobody in Cumberland woke up hoping their congressperson would be the product of a Montgomery County money primary.
As for the candidates themselves:
David Trone will tell you he’s a self-made man who spent his own money because he gives a damn and isn’t beholden to special interests — while his company, Retail Services & Systems, has donated tens of thousands of dollars to anti-abortion Republicans in Georgia, Wisconsin, and elsewhere to advance Total Wine’s business interests. He’ll tell you he’s winning by 21 points. He’ll tell you momentum is on his side. He told the Gaithersburg St. Patrick’s Day Parade the same thing, apparently — though Team Trone showed up with seven supporters and, according to observers, no David Trone. I think he made a quick cameo.
April McClain Delaney will tell you she’s up by 12, endorsed by a real pollster, backed by mob boss Nancy Pelosi, and the choice of the entire Maryland Democratic congressional delegation, which did indeed unanimously snub Trone in a rebuke that says everything you need to know about how his colleagues feel about him. She is not wrong about any of that. She is also, notably, married to a man worth hundreds of millions of dollars and represents a district she can see from her kitchen window — if her kitchen window faces west.
Meanwhile, in Garrett County, somebody’s got to fix the roads.
That’s the part nobody’s polling about. Not the agricultural funding cliff. Not the lack of broadband in the panhandle. Not what happens to rural Western Maryland communities when their representative is chosen by a primary electorate 200 miles away, who have never driven through Oakland on a Tuesday in February.
Maryland’s Democrats engineered this situation deliberately and cynically, and they got exactly what they wanted: a safe blue seat in a district that used to be competitive. What they also got — and what voters in the 6th get to enjoy — is an endless, expensive, self-referential food fight between two candidates whose poll numbers are as reliable as a Ouija board.
Trone is up 21. Delaney is up 12. The frog in our breakroom is up 47. Math is hard.
Primary day is June 23rd. Western Maryland will wake up that morning with a congressperson chosen largely by Montgomery County suburbanites. That’s not democracy. That’s cartography. Maybe if enough people vote for someone else, we can defeat the system and save Western Maryland.
MDBayNews covers Maryland politics from the Bay to the mountains — including the mountains nobody in Annapolis thinks about until they need a vote.
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