Look to Maryland's District 1st District to see how election night will go for the Republicans - it went 40points for Trump in 2016 and Andy Harris who is now in the fight of his life.
Midway through an acrimony-laden candidate forum Oct. 21 at the Talbot County Free Library in Easton, Democratic congressional contender Jesse Colvin — while responding to a question on immigration reform — lobbed a verbal grenade.
”Dr. Harris, I know we’re both veterans, but this is one of those moments where I wish you had a chance to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan or a war zone,” Colvin told his opponent, avowedly conservative four-term Rep. Andrew P. Harris. “And I say that because in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam, ideological leaders got people killed.”
A stunned look could be seen on Harris’ face. “Wow,” he muttered softly, seated at the other end of the table from Colvin, with Libertarian Party nominee Jenica Martin serving as a human buffer between them.
Colvin continued his answer. “If we’re ever going to have a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform, it depends on who’s at that table. Because if you have ideologues at the table, we’re never going to get anywhere.”
Two questions later, when a member of the audience at the League of Women Voters forum asked about the environment, Harris took the opportunity to strike back.
“Some people suggest there’s divisiveness going on,” he told the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen, I never thought that I would ever hear a fellow veteran criticize my 16 years in the Navy Reserve as a physician taking care of our wounded men and women in uniform … and it happened at this table. Think long and hard about what happened.”
Colvin, a 34-year-old veteran of four tours of Afghanistan, sought to retreat a bit.
“Dr. Harris, we were not very sensitive in the Army Rangers, and I’m sorry I hurt your feelings,” he said.
But the 61-year-old congressman, apparently sensing a self-inflicted wound, kept up the counteroffensive. “I’m going to repeat it — I never thought I’d hear the day a fellow veteran would say that somehow my service was unequal to someone else’s service. That is stunning to me,” he declared, to groans and other expressions of disapproval from an audience clearly partial to Colvin.
Welcome to war — or something close to it — this year in the 1st District, a 200-mile-long expanse of a dozen counties centered on Maryland’s Eastern Shore where up to 75,000 residents are veterans of military service, Colvin, in a recent interview, compared his campaign to an “insurgency.”
Colvin’s military service something he mentions repeatedly on the trail and has infused his campaign organization and strategy — his campaign manager was his deputy in a Ranger unit in Afghanistan..
“I just set about applying what I had learned in Afghanistan,” Colvin said during an interview late last month. “When I talk about running an insurgency, we have 1,250 volunteers on the ground, and they are reflective of the coalition that we’ve built. It goes from one side with the Bernie Sanders chapter to the AFL-CIO, to Congressman Wayne Gilchrest to President George W. Bush’s secretary of the VA.” Both Gilchrest, a Republican who represented the district from 1990-2008, and Bush administration VA Secretary Anthony Principi were among those scheduled to speak at a veterans’ roundtable sponsored by the Colvin campaign in Harford County Oct. 24.
In a district where Republicans have a 45 percent-35 percent advantage over Republicans, and which President Trump carried by more than 25 points in 2016, Colvin has sought to keep his public distance from state and national Democrats — even as he has received significant financial support from Democratic insiders.
His campaign signs, omnipresent on road sides throughout the district, do not identify him as a Democrat. Many include the phrase “Country Over Party,” a mantra he invoked a half-dozen times during Sunday’s 90-minute forum.
One of Colvin’s national endorsements has come from With Honor — an Alexandria, Va.-based group that seeks to promote “next-generation”, post-9/11 military veterans running for office. Colvin is among nearly 40 endorsements by the group nationwide, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans.