Two MD Democrats were friends. Now they are spending millions to attack each other.

Listen to this article

Before they dipped into their vast personal fortunes and began lodging nasty allegations against each other, the current and former representatives from Maryland’s most competitive U.S. House District were friendly.

Now the two Democrats are waging what’s among the most expensive House primary races in American history, for a seat in one of the country’s least popular political institutions.

The more than $33 million public brawl, rife with accusations of deceit, will come to an end Tuesday when voters in the state head to the polls.

The two candidates have fought over whether Hillary Clinton endorsed either of them and whether one had a real or imagined connection to Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s restrictive views on abortion.

She accused him of meanness and stealing her campaign manager; he’s accused her of taking special interest money.

“There’s been a lot of absurdities,” Rep. April McClain Delaney, the incumbent, said in an interview where she speculated that former congressman David Trone staged a comeback bid against her because he’s “a bored billionaire.”

Trone said boredom had nothing to do with it.

“If I felt the congresswoman was doing a good job in representing the district and the Democratic Party, I would definitely have not run,” Trone said in an interview.

He then launched into a list of her votes that he would have not taken were he still in Congress – and had he not lost his $60 million self-financed bid for the Senate two years ago.

Both McClain Delaney, whose husband’s Forbright Bank went public earlier this month in a $900 million public offering, and Trone, co-founder of national liquor retailer Total Wine & More, live outside the congressional district – in Potomac, the wealthy suburb north of D.C.

She’s represented Maryland’s western-most congressional district for two years; he for six before her. They had endorsed each other, donated to each other, campaigned alongside each other, even hugged each other outside of precincts.

But now, two years and at least one cease-and-desist letter later on the eve of Tuesday’s primary election, they can’t even agree whether they were ever really friends.

“This race is the weirdest thing I’ve ever worked on,” a campaign staffer in one camp said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly.

McClain Delaney considers Trone’s sister-in-law one of her good friends, and said she knew Trone’s wife, June, well before the Trones split up.

Trone says he and the Delaneys don’t run in the same social circles and were only politically aligned before – including when McClain Delaney’s husband, John Delaney, helped Trone win his first election to Congress. (Delaney held the seat previously but left in 2020 to run for president.)

“Their social circle is the country clubs of Maryland. I don’t belong to any country clubs. I don’t own a pair of golf clubs,” Trone said.

Each are primarily self-funding their campaigns, with Trone investing $25 million to McClain Delaney’s $7.4 million.

“It’s such a freakin’ waste,” McClain Delaney said. “This campaign has been about money. It’s been about yelling and bullying people who did not endorse him,” she said.

Trone has said it’s the people’s seat, and McClain Delaney is not entitled to keep it because she won it once.

And he said he’s challenging her for voting for the Laken Riley Act that empowered ICE to detain people without criminal records, and for voting for a provision that made it more expensive for female service members to pay for out-of-state abortions – votes other Democrats in the Maryland delegation did not take.

He self-funded his campaign – and prior runs – because it insulates him from special interests, he said, before bringing up a $500,000 ad buy from a super PAC aligned with cryptocurrency interests that helped McClain Delaney.

“No one’s arguing that they’re not millionaires – or billionaires – yet they’re still taking all the PAC money, taking all the lobbyist money,” Trone said of his opponent.

McClain Delaney’s campaign declined to offer an estimate of the couple’s net worth after the bank’s sale.

Aside from her self-funding, McClain Delaney, who was a telecom lawyer and worked for the Commerce Department during the Biden administration, has raised about $1 million in outside money. Roughly 3 in 10 dollars of that came from various PACs.

Trone is just angry that he lost his Senate bid and that other Maryland leaders such as Gov. Wes Moore (D) and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D) endorsed her, she said. “This is about his retribution tour,” she said.

Several of the Trone-era staffers McClain Delaney inherited, including her chief of staff, jumped ship to work for Trone when he declared his candidacy.

Asked whether he thought McClain Delaney had done anything admirable during the campaign, Trone responded that anyone who volunteers to put themselves in public service deserves admiration.

But asked the same thing about Trone, McClain Delaney spent three-plus minutes listing grievances.

Trone, meanwhile, dismissed McClain Delaney’s attacks – on his motivations, on his ads – as a distraction from her record.

The campaign’s first controversy began when Trone sent out ads “from the desk of Congressman David Trone.” McClain Delaney sent him a cease-and-desist letter.

“Waste of my time, silly controversy,” Trone said. “When you’re a congressman, you’re a ‘congressman’ for life. President Obama – he’s called ‘president’ for life.”

Then there were the DeSantis ads McClain Delaney put $1.3 million behind, using footage of Trone appearing alongside the Florida governor to discuss their shared views on putting term limits in the U.S. Constitution.

Her ads said Trone was “calling for a constitutional convention empowering the radical right to put anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ+ amendments into the Constitution.”

“Once you have a constitutional convention, all things are open, everything is on the table,” McClain Delaney said in the interview. “Even calling for it is an incredibly crazy thing to do.”

Trone, who donated to establish an abortion clinic in Western Maryland, said suggesting he’s trying to overthrow abortion rights is “just a boldface lie.”

“I’ve known Governor Ron DeSantis for 12 minutes: six minutes on CNN, six minutes on Fox,” he said. “In business, if you did those type of behaviors, well, you’d be a Donald Trump.”

Erin Cox is a national politics reporter. She joined The Washington Post in 2018 as a staff writer on the Metro desk.