| | | | |  | | By Brakkton Booker | With help from Ella Creamer, Jesse Naranjo, Rishika Dugyala and Charlie Mahtesian
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Maryland's Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan announced his entry into the state's Senate race last week. | POLITICO illustration/Photo by AP | What up, Recast family! Voters on New York’s Long Island vote in the special election to replace expelled Rep. George Santos. Donald Trump backs a pair of replacements for Ronna McDaniel at the RNC — and yes, he’s related to one of them. And President Joe Biden joins TikTok. First we focus on a jolt to the race for Maryland’s open Senate seat. Larry Hogan for months said he had no interest in running for U.S. Senate in Maryland, but he suddenly reversed course last week and will now compete for the seat being vacated by Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin. Hogan, a popular two-term GOP governor of a deep-blue state, left office with a ridiculously high approval rating of 77 percent, according to one survey. His entry instantly injected fervor into the race, which until then had been an under-the-radar Democratic primary to crown the state’s next senator. His candidacy also turns Maryland, where Democrats have a 2-to-1 voter registration advantage, into an unlikely battleground. The timing, however, couldn’t be better for Democrat Angela Alsobrooks, the top elected official of Maryland’s majority-Black Prince George’s County, just outside of Washington, D.C. With fresh eyes now on the contest because of Hogan, there might be an opening for her amid the renewed urgency among Democrats to field a candidate who has the gravitas to go toe-to-toe with the former governor. Alsobrooks makes up half of what is for all intents and purposes a two-person race for the Democratic nomination — her main rival is Rep. David Trone. Alsobrooks is a Black woman, running to become the state’s first Black senator two years after the Old Line State elected Wes Moore as its first African American governor. On the surface, she would appear to have the upper hand for the nomination.
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After all, she’s got the backing of most of the party’s state and federal establishment including Moore, U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, state Senate President Bill Ferguson and Maryland House Speaker Adrienne Jones, the state’s first African American and first woman to hold the post. She even got a boost from her one-time primary opponent, Will Jawando, who dropped out in early May and backed her.
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Alsobrooks, center, listens during a Jan. 23, 2020, hearing in Annapolis. | Brian Witte/AP Photo | | Though she’s displayed strong fundraising prowess, she’s struggling to compete financially against Trone, a wealthy wine store magnate who is white. He has dumped some $23 million of his personal fortune into the race this far, according to the latest FEC filings. This includes spending $17 million on TV ad buys alone. By comparison, Alsobrooks, who turns 53 later this month, spent roughly $138,000, according to an analysis by AdImpact. She released her first television ad on Monday. Her ad takes aim at Trone, 68, for his age and wealth. Without naming him, she rails against the average age of a senator being 64 years old and with a net worth of $16 million. “That’s not me,” she says in the ad, while painting herself as a relatable member of the “sandwich generation” — someone who is juggling the financial burdens of raising her teenage daughter while also caring for aging parents. Trone, who has centered his campaign around criminal justice reform and using his business connections to help elevate Maryland, wears his ability to self-fund as a badge of honor. He says it allows him to spend more time taking his message directly to voters and leaves him unbeholden to special interests. | 
Trone has spent $23 million of his own money on his Senate bid so far. | Andrew Harnik/AP | At a campaign event in Baltimore over the weekend where most of the attendees were Black, Rep. Kweisi Mfume spoke to the crowd about why now is the time to elect Alsobrooks. He invoked two other times Maryland had the opportunity to elect a Black senator but failed to do so. He points to his own primary contest nearly two decades ago, where he came up short against Cardin after the retirement of then-Sen. Paul Sarbanes, and then to 2016, when Van Hollen defeated Rep. Donna Edwards, who is Black, for the Democratic nomination in another open seat contest. “I had three endorsements in the entire state of Maryland,” Mfume said of his 2006 race, where he says he raised less than a million dollars, but came in second in the primary out of a field of 19 candidates. “I saw what happened to Donna Edwards … who also thought we could break through,” Mfume continued. “She got out there and ran for the United States Senate. And we did not work as hard as we could work. And many of us worked against her, if the truth is being told.” Recent internal polling from the Trone campaign shows him leading with likely Democratic voters in Maryland 45 percent to 34 percent over Alsobrooks. It’s something Alsobrooks acknowledged last month in an interview with a local Baltimore station. |  Alsobrooks, pictured in 2012, trails Trone in the latter campaigns's recent internal polling. | Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP | The contest is now a three-month sprint to the May 14 primary. Without a doubt, we’ll be keeping tabs on this race that’s taken on increased importance for Democrats and Republicans hoping to gain control in the U.S. Senate. All the best,
The Recast Team
| | | UNCOUNTED MILLIONS: THE STORY OF GABRIEL COAKLEY Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Trymaine Lee’s newest podcast on MSNBC, “Uncounted Millions,” is a deep exploration about how a man named Gabriel Coakley is thought to be the first Black man to be paid reparations from the federal government. Lee explains how he discovered Coakley’s story and weighs in on why modern-day reparations on the federal level have been difficult to achieve. He spoke to The Recast ahead of the series debut on Thursday. ◆◆◆ This interview has been edited for length and clarity. THE RECAST: The focus of this season examines a topic that is politically controversial. And you are exploring this through, not from the standpoint of whether reparations should be paid, but rather through the lens of a Black family and how they were able to secure payment themselves. Tell me about this and how you came to discover this story? LEE: Honestly, man, this might be the greatest story never told. Or at the very least the greatest reparations story never told. Reparations has been a fascination of mine for a very long time, because you can't help but wonder, what if the federal government would have taken care of Black folks, made Black folks whole after the Civil War and emancipation. You think about how the racial wealth gap would have been nil, homeownership rates between Black and white Americans likely nil, down from the quality of the air we breathe and the water that we drink. But in reporting out this story of what this country has been willing or not willing to do in terms of cash restitution for slavery, we discovered the story of Gabriel Coakley. Many of us have heard about the compensated Emancipation Act of 1862. It was a time when the federal government paid reparations for slavery, but to white enslavers. THE RECAST: But Coakley was a Black man who owned land in Washington, D.C. How did you find him? LEE: So initially, I wanted to get a better sense of who these white folks were who got reparations and ended up finding this list of 1,000 or so people, white folks who had been paid restitution. And among that list, were some Black folks, which was mind blowing! And then come to find out that they weren't actually Black slave owners. They were Black people who purchased the freedom of their family members and loved ones as a form of protection. He bought them, then didn’t claim them as free. There was a loophole. If you didn't claim them as free, then they couldn't be sold off, they couldn't be kidnapped because they were essentially his property. So to discover that there were Black folks who also got reparations for slavery, and then to discover a man by the name of Gabriel Coakley, who was a free man — and we haven't figured out how he was free — but he was able find a loophole in the law, was the first one to file for restitution, and actually won. This payment would forever change the trajectory of his family line, generation by generation. And so it begs the question of what if the whole of Black America would have been paid reparations? THE RECAST: So just connecting this to our present day politics here. Why do you think it's been such a difficult task to not simply get reparations passed on a federal level but even to have a conversation about it. As you know, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), and before her, former Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan, introduced H.R. 40 in Congress going back decades. But the legislation rarely goes anywhere after it gets introduced. Why do you think there has been such a resistance to take it up on the federal level? LEE: The United States federal government isn't against the idea of reparations. The United States and federal government are against the idea of reparations for Black people. The federal government has paid reparations to Native American tribes for seized land, the United States federal government has paid the victims of Japanese incarceration in internment during World War II. There is a prevailing sense that Black people who descended from enslaved people in this country are not worthy, and [do] not deserve reparations, despite the centuries of tortured servitude through slavery, the violence that was heaped upon Black people during failed reconstruction, through Jim Crow, through the Civil Rights era, right through the 1980s of mass incarceration till the day. And there's also a sense, when you look at the most recent polling, asking the general population, whether reparations are a good thing or bad things, whether the United States should pay reparations — even with those numbers kicking up during the the era of the George Floyd protests in 2020 and beyond, those numbers have fallen again. So the general population doesn't believe Black folks deserve reparations. And so the lawmakers haven't shown any willingness to even engage with the idea of studying it. H.R. 40 is about studying this issue and to draft proposals on how to address it.
| | | ICYMI @ POLITICO
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Republican nominee Mazi Pilip and Democrat Tom Suozzi, facing off in a high-profile special election, are eschewing their party's de facto leaders. | Courtesy of News 12 Long Island | Santos Who? — Long Islanders are voting to replace the expelled Rep. George Santos today. POLITICO’s Nick Reisman, Emily Ngo and Jeff Coltin break down why the leading Democrat and Republican in the New York special election have both avoided talking about their respective parties’ presidential frontrunners. The Dems’ Plan B — Special counsel Robert Hur’s scathing assessment of President Joe Biden’s mental acuity thrust the issue into the spotlight. For those wondering about the prospects of replacing the sitting president on the 2024 ticket, POLITICO’s Charlie Mahtesian and Steven Shepard break down the politics and procedural hurdles. Biden, the TikToker — U.S. lawmakers have long cast TikTok as a nefarious online platform. But after Biden made his debut on it shortly after the Super Bowl, he racked up more than 6 million views — making him the first major Democratic presidential candidate to embrace TikTok. More from POLITICO’s Rebecca Kern, Hailey Fuchs and Brendan Bordelon. New GOP Leader? — Current chair of the Republican National Committee Ronna McDaniel is reportedly stepping down, at Trump’s urging, soon after the South Carolina GOP primary this month. Trump is already backing a pair of folks to replace her — Michael Whatley, the current North Carolina GOP chair, and the former president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. More from POLITICO’s Alex Isenstadt.
| | | THE RECAST RECOMMENDS Boston, which claims to be the birthplace of American democracy, is grappling with its own history as the first place to legalize slavery. The debate over whether city leaders should push for legislation to pay reparations to Black residents is the subject of a GBH podcast series dubbed “What Is Owed.” It debuts Thursday. It’s been days, but the Super Bowl was everything and shattered records in the process. ICYMI: Usher’s halftime show featured Alicia Keys, Ludacris, will.i.am and … roller skates.
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| Also, Queen Bey’s fusion of country and gospel excites the masses in “Texas Hold ’Em” and “16 Carriages,” two new tracks from her forthcoming album “Renaissance Act II.” A florist and a musician are irreversibly drawn together in Tia Williams’ “A Love Song for Ricki Wilde,” set against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance. In “Upgraded,” a new Prime romcom, Ana Santos (Camila Mendes) tells a white lie to impress a potential love interest, posing as the director of an auction house. Ambika Mod stars in “One Day,” which traces the love story of Emma and Dexter over more than twenty years, available on Netflix.
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| TikTok of the Week: Something to make your heart swoon
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