From House seat, Trone aims for U.S. Senate in Maryland

U.S. Rep. David Trone has seen a lot in nearly five years in office. Now running for U.S. Senate, he says he’s heard a lot too — from Marylanders across the state “dissatisfied, unhappy with the political system.”

That was the top issue he says he has heard — from Baltimore County to Montgomery County to Western Maryland and the Eastern Shore. Asked how he reconciles his congressional career with the dissatisfaction of the political system as he campaigns for higher office, his answer is simple.

“I’m a total disruptor in the system,” the third-term Democrat said.

While the words in his answer may be simple, the trajectory of the individual who rose from the family farm’s failure to a business worth billions is less so. How that trajectory and cash flow effects a campaign with candidates, including Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks, who has history-making potential, is still an open question.

“The thing that has my eye so far about this race is the money, and just the curiosity of where that’s going to go,” said Candace Turitto, program director of the Applied Political Analytics program at the University of Maryland, College Park. She says the average time that a person spends with a piece of political mail is about seven seconds.

With Trone ads already on airwaves and filling mailboxes in multiple jurisdictions across the state, including Alsobrooks’ home county, the answer to Turitto’s curiosity has already started to come in somewhat. With about six months until the primary, larger questions still loom: When all of that ad time (and money) is added up, what will it mean both for the political career of Trone, and for Maryland? Those answers will come on May 14, primary Election Day, when the voters decide.

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‘He didn’t speak like so many people paint him’

Getting to know candidate Trone is a bit like getting to the location inside the Greenbelt American Legion Hall where USA TODAY Network in Maryland interviewed him. On Nov. 10, his campaign hosted a prime rib dinner for veterans there.

U.S. Rep. Jeff Jackson, D-N.C., an Army member and TikTok star, was set to headline. Water glasses and side salads sat next to Trone ads on tablecloths in the main hall. But getting past all that, before the main event with the decorated dining room, in a well-worn and somewhat shabby office, sat the man described by a prior political opponent as “DC millionaire David Trone.”

Another former political opponent, former state Del. Ana Sol Gutiérrez, D-Montgomery, who competed against Trone for a congressional seat in 2016, said: “He is not a born millionaire.”

“He impressed me with his hands-on and people-person skills,” Gutiérrez said of Trone in 2016. Both lost to then-state Sen. Jamie Raskin, D-Montgomery, and Gutiérrez, the first Latina ever elected to the Maryland General Assembly, now co-chairs the Trone campaign's Latino advisory board.

“(Trone) didn’t speak like so many people paint him — as a millionaire,” she said in an Oct. 31 phone interview, describing Trone during the 2016 campaign. “He talked about real people issues.”

Part of that may come from his background. Growing up on a farm in East Berlin, Pa., Trone started working before he even became a teenager.

“We didn’t have indoor plumbing,” he said.

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He saw the detrimental effect of alcohol on his dad. His dad’s farm failed, his parents split up, and the house he lived in was lost.

“You had this career you looked at, a life you planned, in agribusiness,” Trone said. “Then you have to get up the next day and say: ‘What are we going to do now?’”

The businessman said he saw a similar dynamic in his career aiming for elected office.

“In politics, I lost the ’16 election,” said Trone, who placed second then in a field of nine for the state’s 8th Congressional District seat, before asking himself the questions: “What did I do wrong? What can I learn from this?”

Trone won a seat in Congress in the next election and has been reelected twice since in the state’s 6th Congressional District that now stretches from Montgomery to Garrett counties.

‘That’s what politics is nowadays’

Behind his congressional runs, including this one for Senate, has been money — and lots of it.

Not so much other's money, but his own, accrued after years constructing a retail business from the ground up. This year, Trone has put close to $10 million in his campaign coffers, according to Federal Elections Commission reports.

In 2016, he broke House spending records on the race he did not win and poured in more than $12 million in personal loans to his campaign just last year for the seat he won again in Congress.

“We’re trying to get the word out, which is unfortunately expensive, because that’s what politics is nowadays,” said Trone, during a brief interview last year outside Hagerstown City Hall. Yet a reoccurring and underlying message of many of his advertisements is that money plays too big of a role in politics, emphasizing his independence from political action committees, or PACs.

“Not a Penny from PACs, Lobbyists or Corporations,” one Trone ad says in English, the words translated in Spanish just below on the 6-by-11 table card.

“No PACS. No Lobbyists. No Corporations. Nobody’s Senator But Yours,” the back of a supporter’s shirt said, in Cambridge.

Behind the big dollars that he contributes to his campaign are smaller amounts pitched in by others, revealing maybe more about the candidate than the money alone or the ads do.

More than 200 contributions totaling less than a quarter million dollars to Trone’s campaign were connected to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Political Action Committee. Asked about the apparent contradiction between his ad and the campaign contributions from the Israel-backing group listed on the FEC website, Trone said: “They’re not a PAC.”

He emphasized the donations from individual donors through the organization to his campaign. Asked about the underlying premise of whether the financial support from the group has an influence, Trone said: “That absolutely has an influence in that we listen.”

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What has Trone done for the 6th District?

But Trone has not spent the majority of his last five years in Israel. In just one of his three sessions of Congress (from 2019 to 2021) did he sit on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. He has spent a lot of time in the district he represents.

He’s brought money back to the district for expanding the facility at an aviation school he toured. He’s helped secure federal funds for the construction of a new Boys and Girls Club building in Hagerstown, and proposed millions of dollars more this year for centers in two other district cities.

He’s garnered the support of the Maryland State Education Association, the state’s 75,000-member teacher’s union, in part due to his work in the district.

“He and his staffers always had an open door,” said Neil Becker, immediate past president of the Washington County Teacher’s Association, who overlapped his leadership role with Trone’s tenure for more than four years, in a Nov. 9 phone interview.

Trone voted for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law signed by President Joe Biden, which brought about $90 million to widen a highway in Washington County, and the law included money to improve roads in the district’s more remote Maryland counties too.

He’s stood up to speak about opioids at community meetings, and brought an idea of a local official for a substance abuse awareness campaign to the nation’s Speaker of the House, and to the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

More: Maryland, top 5 nationally in opioid-related overdose death rates, seeks to change course

Yet, in spite of all he has done in the state’s 6th Congressional District, what he says he hears from Marylanders in the context of his U.S. Senate campaign is dissatisfaction with the “political system as it is.” Trone addressed that issue this way.

“I’m a disruptor in the system,” he said. “I’m in the wine-and-spirit business, and yet I’m a disruptor.”

Referencing Total Wine and More, the decades old, multibillion-dollar company that, after failure in agribusiness, he started with his brother, the congressman said: “We changed how it’s purchased in America.”

He cited “low prices, great selection, great service” as a cause of the disruption. Asked to cite an example of being a “disruptor” in his congressional career, Trone pointed to legislation he has passed on addiction.

Not quite half of current U.S. senators have served in the U.S. House

Del. Brooke Grossman, D-Washington, travelled across Maryland to Cambridge on the Eastern Shore to support Trone at a Nov. 3 U.S. Senate candidate forum. The state delegate representing Hagerstown cited Trone’s “track record at the federal level” as a reason for her support.

“Ready to go day one,” Trone said towards the end of the Nov. 10 interview.

“This should be about electing the person that’s going to make lives better for people in Maryland and the United States,” Trone said of the U.S. Senate campaign, his first statewide.

Carin Robinson, associate professor of political science at Hood College in Frederick, called the role of U.S. senator a “fundamental different orientation” than that of a member in the House or the leader of a jurisdiction, a position which another candidate, Alsobrooks, currently holds.

U.S. senators, she said, “need to address a wider range of concerns, issues, and backgrounds.”

Not quite half (44) of the current 100 U.S. senators have served in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The congressman’s years in the House are not the only experience that he’s carried while campaigning, either.

Asked if his family’s situation while he was growing up prepared him well for a life in Congress, Trone said: “Totally.”

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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 Salisbury Daily Times: Maryland Rep. David Trone sets his sights on U.S. Senate seat