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2016 United States Senate election in Maryland

The 2016 United States Senate election in Maryland took place on November 8, 2016, to elect a member of the United States Senate to represent the State of Maryland, concurrently with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as well as other elections to the United States Senate in other states and elections to the United States House of Representatives and various state and local elections.

Incumbent Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski decided to retire after five terms in the Senate. Primary elections were held April 26, 2016, in which Chris Van Hollen and Kathy Szeliga were chosen as the Democratic and Republican party nominees, respectively. In addition, the Green Party chose Margaret Flowers and the Libertarian Party chose Arvin Vohra as their respective nominees.

Van Hollen was heavily favored to win the election. He ultimately won with over 60% of the vote. As typically occurs with the state's elections, most support for the Democratic nominee, Van Hollen, came from the densely populated Baltimore–Washington metropolitan area in central Maryland, while the Republican nominee, Szeliga, did well in the more sparsely populated areas on the Eastern Shore and in Western Maryland, and narrowly won Anne Arundel County, home to the state capital Annapolis, as well as exurban Frederick County.

Background

Mikulski first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1974, losing to Republican incumbent Charles Mathias. Mikulski then served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1977 to 1987 and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1986, succeeding the retiring Mathias. She was re-elected by large margins in 1992, 1998, 2004 and 2010. Shortly after being sworn in for her fifth term in 2011, she succeeded Margaret Chase Smith as the longest-serving female senator in U.S. history, and on March 17, 2012, she became the longest-serving female member of Congress in U.S. history, surpassing Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, who served from 1925 to 1960. On March 2, 2015, Mikulski announced that she would not run for re-election to a sixth term in office.

In August 2013, Abby Livingston of Roll Call had predicted that a potential retirement by Mikulski would create "chaos" and "blow open Maryland's political bottleneck" because "the state's teeming political Democratic Party talent is backed up in lower offices." Among the ten Democrats who ran in the primary, only two had previously been elected to an office.

Democratic primary

Candidates

Declared

  • Freddy Donald Dickson Jr.
  • Donna Edwards, U.S. Representative
  • Ralph Jaffe, perennial candidate
  • Theresa Scaldaferri
  • Charles U. Smith, perennial candidate
  • Violet Staley
  • Blaine Taylor
  • Ed Tinus, perennial candidate
  • Chris Van Hollen, U.S. Representative
  • Lih Young, perennial candidate

Declined

Debates

Endorsements

Polling

Results

Republican primary

Candidates

Declared

Declined

Endorsements

Polling

Results

Szeliga won the April 26, 2016, primary in Baltimore City and each of Maryland's counties except Calvert, St. Mary's, Charles, and Prince George's, in which Chris Chaffee received more votes.

Third party and independent candidates

Green Party

Results

Independents

  • Greg Dorsey
  • Steve Gladstone
  • Edward Shlikas
  • Kay Young

Libertarian Party

General election

Candidates

Debates

Endorsements

Predictions

Polling

Results

By county

Counties that flipped from Democratic to Republican

By congressional district

Van Hollen seven of eight congressional districts.

See also

References

External links

Official campaign websites (archived)