Previous Report
The election is over, but we still don't know who will represent Maryland's First District in Congress. Right now Democrat Frank Kratovil leads Republican Andy Harris by fewer than 1,000 votes. The election seems to have come down to a battle between Maryland’s Eastern and Western shores.
On Tuesday, 19-year-old Nick Chester and 18-year-old James Middleton voted for the first time in their lives. They're Republicans from the Eastern Shore, and like many of their friends, their chief concern in the election was the Chesapeake Bay. ‘I hate seeing it getting polluted and not being really taken care of. And I really hope to see that in the future that it doe,’ Chester said.
Both of them voted for Democrat Frank Kratovil.
‘I mean I want someone who's going to do good for the people on the Eastern Shore,’ Middleton said. ‘We're not really heard of over there; the Western Shore is the Western Shore and the Eastern Shore is normally left out.’
Andy Harris is a Republican state senator from Cockeysville, Baltimore County. Right now Harris leads in the portions of the three Western Shore counties that are included in the first district, Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Harford.
Kratovil, the state's attorney from Queen Anne's County leads in every single Eastern Shore county.
Jessica Gerrity, a professor of political science at Washington College, which is in Kent County, said the endorsement of Kratovil by ousted Republican Wayne Gilchrest helped keep the race close. ‘There's a lot of people on the Eastern Shore who listened to that endorsement and were attracted to some of the positions that Kratovil had that matched Gilchrest's,’ she said.
After the initial county, Kratovil led by 915 votes. The race will come down to the more than 25,000 absentee votes cast in the First District.
Gerrity says that's an advantage for Andy Harris. ‘When they count the absentee ballots it tends to break in favor of the Republican because those are often military folks who tend to identify more with the Republican Party,’ she said.
The state board of elections says we could see some results from those absentee ballots as early as Friday. There's also provisional ballots that need to be counted; that could take more than a week.
