The following is a guest post by Adam Pagnucco:

The Maryland Democratic Party’s top goal is defeating Governor Larry Hogan. The Maryland Republican Party’s top goal is getting him reelected. But the context of the next election is not simply about Hogan and his Democratic opponent. The context also includes other state and local offices, and in that arena, the GOP is on the march.

To demonstrate that, we compiled data on party identification of office holders at the state and local levels in 2003 (the first year of Governor Ehrlich’s term) and 2015 (the first year of Governor Hogan’s term). The offices we examined are State Senate, Delegate, County Executive (including the Mayor of Baltimore), county councils and commissions, State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs. For Senators and Delegates we compiled results at the regional level (large individual counties and groups of small counties) because state legislative districts often cross over county lines. All local offices are reported by county.

Let’s look at State Senators first.

The party split of Senators is identical for both 2003 and 2015: 33 Democrats and 14 Republicans. There were no major regional changes between the two years. The imbalance in favor of Democrats is preserved in this category. (Note that the change numbers in the right column don’t add to zero because some regions overlap each other.)

Now let’s look at Delegates.

The GOP won a record number of Delegate seats in 2014, but their total (50) is not that much more than it was in 2003 (42). A few regional trends are apparent. The Democrats are down to one Delegate on the Eastern Shore. They are close to an even count in Southern Maryland, although that is because one of the area’s three legislative districts is split with heavily Democratic Prince George’s County. The two Democratic Delegates in Western Maryland come from a district that is narrowly drawn around the City of Frederick. Baltimore City has lost two Delegates who would normally be Democrats because of population shifts.

Despite these changes, the Democrats are firmly in control of the General Assembly and proved it by overriding all six of Governor Hogan’s vetoes. The REAL changes are taking place in local governments, far from the attention of Annapolis and Democratic officials in the party’s strongholds of the City of Baltimore, Montgomery and Prince George’s.

We’ll illustrate that in Part Three.

The following is a guest post by Adam Pagnucco:

Competition between Governor Larry Hogan and General Assembly Democrats has been hot and heavy since the Governor’s first State of the State speech and his first budget. The Governor has alternated between calling for bipartisanship and landing heavy partisan blows against his opponents. The Democrats have responded by holding up some of his legislative agenda and overriding all six of his vetoes. Battle lines are clearly being drawn for 2018.

Hogan is sometimes compared to his former employer, Governor Bob Ehrlich. When Ehrlich won the 2002 general election, Democrats chalked it up to the lackluster campaign run by their nominee and regarded him as a fluke. They soon rallied around Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley and kicked out Ehrlich after one term. O’Malley decimated Ehrlich in their 2010 rematch by 14 points. Senate President Mike Miller promised to bury the Republicans and predicted it would take them forty years to recover. And then Hogan was elected.

Like Ehrlich, Hogan ran against an underwhelming Democratic Lieutenant Governor. Like Ehrlich, Hogan has positive job approval ratings (although Hogan’s are a bit higher for the moment.) And like Ehrlich, Hogan has problematic relations with the General Assembly. But there is one major difference between the two: the Maryland Republican Party is stronger now than it was in Ehrlich’s day.

Prior to Ehrlich, the last Republican Governor was former Baltimore County Executive Spiro Agnew, elected in 1966. Four straight multi-term Democratic Governors (and one Acting Governor) separated Ehrlich and Agnew. In that time period, the GOP had two U.S. Senators (John Glenn Beall and Charles Mathias) but those offices have both been held by Democrats since Barbara Mikulski’s election in 1986. The Democrats held most U.S. House seats and controlled most of the large local governments during the majority of this period. The GOP was rarely a factor in either politics or government.

Ehrlich was criticized by some for not doing enough to change this imbalance. During his time in office, the GOP’s voter registration percentage fell slightly and the party did not substantially increase its reach around the state. After his defeat in 2006, Ehrlich conceded Democratic dominance. He told WBAL, “It’s clear in Maryland that there is a direction people are more comfortable with… It’s the way it’s always been. And then we had this four-year sort of off-course thing, and people are clearly more comfortable with a single-party kind of deal here. They did not like the conflict.”

That is not Governor Hogan’s point of view. He is happy to battle Democrats through his dominant social media machine and uses them as whipping boys for all that ails the state. And Hogan has something that Ehrlich did not: a growing GOP bench. Whatever happens in the next election, that bench is something that demands attention from the Democrats for the foreseeable future.

What does the GOP’s bench look like? We’ll find out more in Part Two.