Democrat Rep. David Trone: Service, legislation are reelection bid focus in redrawn district

Looking up the steep hill from Douglas Zaruba’s house on Summit Avenue in Hagerstown, you notice two things: a Ukrainian flag and a campaign sign for David Trone for U.S. Congress.

Zaruba received help from the congressman’s office earlier this year when sponsoring a Ukrainian refugee. An expected 90-day response from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was cut down to within a week after being connected with Trone’s district director, Zaruba said.

“Every time I need somebody, he's there,” said Zaruba, a small-business owner, who also contacted Trone's office about unemployment and a Paycheck Protection Program loan early in the pandemic.

Opponent:Traffic engineer Parrott tries again for Congress on new map

Trone, owner of Total Wine & More, said strong constituent service reflects his background.

“I’m a retailer,” he said during a Sept. 29 phone interview. “I call it customer service.”

Trone wants to take that customer-focused approach into another term. But he faces perhaps his strongest challenge yet with Republican Del. Neil Parrott in a newly shaped congressional district, and his party faces historical headwinds in the midterms. A visit from President Joe Biden to Hagerstown this month to promote his economic policies underscored the stakes of next month’s election.

The national polling site fivethirtyeight.com shows Trone up two points over Parrott, while the Cook Political Report lists the seat "likely Democrat."

Trone has been in office for three years and has had three bills passed into law, according to the official website for U.S. federal legislative information, congress.gov. As many as eight additional pieces of legislation from Trone have been enacted as part of other bills, according to his campaign and the legislative tracking website, GovTrack.us. He has established another measure of influence to deliver for his district, sitting on the appropriations committee that controls federal spending.

And he is experienced with expenditures.

Trone broke House spending records in 2016 and loaned his campaign over $12 million this election cycle to keep his spot in Congress, accounting for nearly all his financial contributions. Parrott has made Trone’s wealth and his residency outside the 6^th Congressional District — about 10 miles away in the wealthy suburb of Potomac — focal points in his campaign to flip the seat.

And with inflation at the forefront of many voters’ minds, Parrott said Trone’s support of Biden’s spending are financial mistakes that helped drive up costs.

“Over the past two years, David Trone has voted to spend trillions of dollars that we do not have,” said Parrott, during an Oct. 5 news conference, adding that the spending has resulted in “soaring costs” on food, gas and other goods.

Trone argues otherwise. He pointed to the infrastructure law’s funding for roads in Allegany and Garrett counties, as well as spending to bring high-speed internet to rural communities, as examples of delivering long-term projects for his constituents.

“Go build it,” said the congressman. “It’ll take the number of years to build it, but the money is all there.”

Real estate:It's big. It's beautiful. And a little bit spooky. The Gov. Hamilton House is for sale

'Attack this like we attack a business problem'

Trone grew up in East Berlin, Pennsylvania, about 20 miles from the Maryland state line. With his brother, Robert, he grew the Total Wine and More franchise from two stores in Delaware to more than 200 in 27 states since 1991.

Trone ran for Congress to address mental health and addiction issues, “to help those in the shadows,” he said, in an interview after a Sept. 13 event on the Opioid Crisis in Washington County, borrowing a phrase from former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, one of his political heroes.

He co-founded and co-chairs the Bipartisan Addiction and Mental Health Task Force, which released a report last month showing a nearly $1.5 trillion economic cost of the opioid epidemic. More than 100,000 Americans died due to overdose last year, which Trone sees as a failure of strategy.

Brook Lane:Born of conscience, Hagerstown mental hospital lives on to heal others

“Shame on us politicians that we can’t figure out how to attack this like we attack a business problem,” he said at the Washington County event.

Trone said he’s been frustrated by partisanship in Washington, D.C., and legislation he co-sponsored to address mental health and substance abuse has stalled in the Senate.

He has at least one sympathizer in Eric Vaughn, an undecided voter who lives in Hagerstown. He compared the job of a congressman to a new police officer.

“When you get in it, you probably realized that you can’t be as effective as you would like to be,” said Vaughn, during a Sept. 30 street interview on Summit Avenue. “By year five, they understand that the real world doesn’t really work that way, and they’re less optimistic than they were on that first day.”

When asked if the job of congressman is what he expected, Trone expressed displeasure at the job's pace.

“The job is slower than what I would have hoped,” the businessman said during the phone interview.

With the seat key for both parties in achieving a majority in Congress, the president's visit to a Volvo factory in Hagerstown with Trone alongside provided a clear message

More:Why is the president coming to Hagerstown? Well, why not?

“We just have to keep going,” the president said, in his speech about the nation's economy, with Trone seated in the crowd.

Correction: This story was updated at 10:00 a.m. Oct. 18, 2022, to clarify the number of bills Trone has proposed that have become law. The Herald-Mail apologizes for the error.

Dwight A. Weingarten is an investigative reporter, covering the Maryland State House and state issues. He can be reached at dweingarten@gannett.com or on Twitter at @DwightWeingart2.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Wine retailer Trone brings businessman’s approach to public office