County, state elections to dominate
2006 front pages

As 2006 is an election year, there will be no escaping it. Politics and state and county races will dominate the headlines, as various politicians leak their intentions to run for county and state office, pre-announce their intentions to run, file the necessary paperwork to make it official, and then announce what they’ve just done to a startled world. The local press will play the game with its customary breathless, if manufactured, gusto, trying to one-up the competition with “scoops” that such and such politico has “decided” to run after extensive soul-searching and urging by his or her family, friends and supporters.

It happens every year in Ocean Pines, which elects anywhere from two to four directors every summer, depending on the number of term expirations, resignations, deaths or move-outs that year. With county and state offices to be filled Nov. 7 – party primaries are Sept. 12 – the sheer volume and repetition of election hype in 2006 is bound to test the patience of even the most dedicated news consumers.

With Gov. Robert Ehrlich seeking reelection and his lieutenant governor, Michael Steele, opting to run for an open U.S. Senate seat, the Republican primary at the very top of the ticket won’t be suspenseful. The real action will be on the Democratic side, where several well-known candidates will be competing against one another for the privilege of running against the Republican slate.

Down ticket, the contest for two delegate seats to the state General Assembly from District 38B, comprised of Worcester County and eastern Wicomico County, should prove to be highly entertaining. Ehrlich has made electing more Republicans to the Democratic-dominated General Assembly a top priority, and Worcester County, which has been sending Democrats to the House of Delegates for decades without interruption, would seem to be a territory ripe for change.

Little noticed and reported locally, but well known to party officials, Republican registration in Worcester County has grown dramatically in the last four years, with the GOP reaching near parity with the Democrats. This according to Pat Schrawder, who chairs the Worcester County Republican Central Committee.

A decade ago, near parity between the parties would have seemed quite implausible. This new situation has resulted from newcomers who have moved into the county, as well from more conservative Democrats switching parties. There’s a certain irony there because, locally, on the county board of commissioners, party affiliation carries no discernible governing philosophy or differentiation. On development or zoning matters, for instance, party is no predictor of voting patterns. Fiscal conservatism is not owned by one political party to the detriment of the other. Indeed, there is little evidence of fiscal conservatism anywhere in Snow Hill, any more than it is evident in the Republican-controlled corridors of power in Washington, D.C.

Whatever the reason, these county registration figures suggest that the delegate races could be far more competitive in this year’s election cycle than they have been previously, although no one should count out the power of incumbency retained by old warhorses Bennett Bozman, of Worcester County, and his colleague, Norm Conway of Wicomico.

Bozman and Conway probably won’t face significant primary competition, as local Democrats in recent years have generally avoided unpleasant intra-party battles in primaries. They can be expected to run as a team in the General Election, citing their long tenure in the General Assembly and their leadership positions, as chairmen of committees and sub-committees. Conway is the more powerful of the two, chairing as he does the House Appropriations Committee, with direct influence over a lot of state spending, including pork and beef, depending on your point of view, for the local folks.

Those leadership positions perhaps come with some baggage, as party leaders are expected to toe the party line, and toeing the party line has placed both Bozman and Conway to the left of Worcester County and the more conservative, traditional Democrats who presumably still make up a large part of the party base on the Lower Shore.

If one doubts that this is still true of local Democrats, look only to state Sen. Lowell Stoltsfus’ string of electoral successes in the 38th district starting in the last century. He’s Republican, is generally quite socially and fiscally conservative, has a high profile as Senate minority leader, and he couldn’t continue to win comfortable reelections without the support of a lot of Democrats, who still make up a sizeable majority in the tri-county 38th senatorial district of Worcester and parts of Somerset and Wicomico counties.

Local Democrats have been voting Republican for U.S. Congress for the first Congressional district, including the Eastern Shore, for decades. Although it’s possible the character of local Democrats has changed, a Nancy Pelosi-Howard Dean transformation (an alliance of the clinically depressed), is nowhere visible.

Indeed, if Democrats across the bay who control the state legislature resembled their brethren on the Lower Shore, they would not deserve their well-earned reputations as big spending, big taxing, nanny-state, ACLU-loving, business-bashing socialists.

Look to local Republican officials in the coming months to try to “prove” that Bozman and Conway have drifted leftward, marching to the drumbeat of Montgomery County liberal Democrats, rather than their own constituents. For instance, Pat Schrawder told the Progress recently that Bozman and Conway, in recent years, have turned sharply away from their pro-business voting records that burnished their reputations as more conservative Democrats.

Bozman would seem to be the more vulnerable of the two, as he has been out of synch with his constituents on the volatile issue of video gaming, or slots as they are known in the vernacular, particularly as it relates to the Ocean Downs racetrack in northern Worcester County. But with Ocean City officials reconciled to slots at Ocean Downs as preferable to slots in Cambridge in Dorchester County, a pragmatic shift in their previous dogmatic opposition, perhaps Bozman, too, will become more flexible.

Contrast Bozman’s opposition to slots to that of his announced Republican opponent, county commission president Sonny Bloxom of Pocomoke. Last year, Bloxom staked out the position, presumably with the backing of most of his colleagues, that he could support slots in either Pocomoke or Ocean Downs. The county commissioners warmed up to the idea of slots in Worcester County, more or less reflecting the changed point of view of Ocean City officials. The commissioners’ position has been to support a local referendum on the issue, something that Bozman has not favored, contending that deciding the basic issue of whether to go with slots anywhere in the state or specific venues are matters that should be decided in Annapolis by elected representatives, rather than by all the voters in referendum.

In the waning days of last year’s session, the House Democratic leadership proposed a statewide vote to settle the issue one way or the other. Presumably, Bozman became a bit more flexible on the issue at that point, but it’s hard to say for certain. In an election year, anything’s possible.

Another rumored, but unannounced and unconfirmed candidate for delegate, Ocean Pines’ County Commissioner Judy Boggs, has in the past staked out a position on slots that has seemed more open-minded and potentially supportive than Bozman’s previous dogmatic hostility.

If she decides to take the plunge to join Bloxom in the quest to wrest the two 38B seats from the Democrats, the perception of a more accommodative position on slots might be one way, among others, to punch the ticket to Annapolis.

What are the prospects for Boggs taking a clear, unequivocal political position on a controversial political issue prior to an election? Actually, she did so four years ago, in fact, when she more or less endorsed a YMCA south of Ocean Pines on Gum Point Road, in contrast to her primary opponent, who made her skepticism known to all with ears to hear.

Slots represent a large part of the unfulfilled Ehrlich agenda these past three years. Republicans running for state office will ignore this to their peril, whatever the prospects for slots in the upcoming General Assembly session.