Angela Alsobrooks Wants to Be Maryland’s First Black Senator

Angela Alsobrooks, Maryland’s newly chosen Democratic nominee for Senate, is familiar with firsts.

With her election in 2018 as executive of Prince George’s County, a populous suburban area bordering Washington, Ms. Alsobrooks became the first Black woman to hold that role.

Now she has the chance to become the first Black senator to represent Maryland, which is more than 30 percent Black. If she wins this fall, she would also become the sole woman in Maryland’s congressional delegation, and the second woman ever to represent it in the Senate.

And she would be only the fourth Black woman, after Carol Moseley Braun, Kamala Harris and Laphonza Butler, to serve in the Senate — from any state.

In a campaign that became increasingly tense over the past few weeks, Ms. Alsobrooks leaned heavily on the importance of racial and gender representation in government, seemingly in hopes that her historic candidacy would counter the flood of cash being spent by her opponent, Representative David Trone.

Mr. Trone put more than $55 million of his own money into the race, making it the most expensive Senate primary ever in Maryland.

“As women, we don’t want people talking about us and making decisions about us without us,” Ms. Alsobrooks told The New York Times as Tuesday’s election approached, referring to abortion rights, one of the biggest issues of this year’s campaigns.

Before she was elected as the county executive in 2018, she also was the county’s top prosecutor, and before that she was an assistant state’s attorney focused on domestic violence.

Race was a major theme in her Senate primary, both because of the potential firsts that Ms. Alsobrooks represented and because Mr. Trone, who is white, was accused of racism after he used a racial slur in a congressional hearing (He apologized and said he had used the word inadvertently).

She received the support of most of Maryland’s congressional delegation, as well as Gov. Wes Moore — the state’s first Black governor — and Black women in other states.

In the general election, she will face a formidable opponent: Larry Hogan, the state’s popular former Republican governor.