Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Rep. David Trone (D-MD) is seen in the U.S. Capitol, April 18, 2024.
This Tuesday’s primary election in Maryland features the most hotly contested Democratic Senate primary in the country, pitting Congressman David Trone against Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks for the seat being vacated by longtime Sen. Ben Cardin.
Trone, whose fortune derives from his ownership of the big-box chain store Total Wine, has led in polling for most of this year on the back of his gargantuan self-funding, pouring $57 million of his own money into the race. To the party’s top brass, that’s been a major part of his appeal as a candidate, particularly since the popular Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan has entered the race and will run off against Tuesday’s Democratic victor in November.
But in the final weeks of the race, Trone made a series of missteps that, accompanied by a massive final ad drop by Alsobrooks, has put her surging ahead in the most recent Emerson poll.
Trone’s slide began in April when he accidentally used a racial slur in a congressional hearing, drawing the anger of the Congressional Black Caucus, whose members then began lining up behind Alsobrooks, who could become the first Black woman to be elected to the Maryland Senate seat. After that incident, the well-respected Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin also endorsed Alsobrooks, as did the Washington Post editorial team. Trone received even more blowback after putting out a new ad calling Alsobrooks’s leading supporters in the state “low-level,” even though they included the state’s other Democratic senator, Chris Van Hollen, and former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. It might not have been the smartest move to attack the entire state delegation for the Senate seat you’re running for.
The stakes of the race are high for Democrats, who need to hold onto the seat to have any shot at keeping their Senate majority. Hogan is well known in the state and still relatively well regarded, especially in suburban areas. In a solidly blue state, his appeal to voters is his self-styling as a Never Trump Republican who rhetorically rails against the MAGA flank of the party.
The task for the Democratic challenger, be it Trone or Alsobrooks, will be to puncture Hogan’s narrative and show that he’d be a reliable R vote in the Senate for a party completely captured by the Trumpian strains of the conservative movement.
There’s plenty of material in Hogan’s legacy as governor to pull that off, especially in an election year when reproductive rights will be a top concern for Maryland voters. As governor, Hogan vetoed a bill to expand funding and resources for abortion in the state and then held up funding for those initiatives when they finally passed. Though Trone is firmly pro-choice, one potential problem is that his company, Total Wine, made major campaign contributions over the years to many anti-abortion Republicans who’ve even backed national abortion bans.
But Trone’s problems run deeper. According to several Democratic strategists, the way to defeat Hogan, along with highlighting his record, will be to paint him as an out-of-touch plutocrat like Donald Trump. Both are wealthy real estate moguls who have used public office to enrich themselves and their donors over the public’s interest. In an explosive investigation from 2020, journalist Eric Cortellessa found that Hogan had blocked funding for Baltimore’s Red Line public-transit system and then diverted those funds to public-works projects in the vicinity of his own real estate holdings, upping their value. Responding to those revelations, the legislature actually passed a financial transparency law the following year.
If Trone wins the primary, he might not be in the best position to make this case, since he’s part of that same rich-man’s club. He’s a monopolist who built his business empire by flouting the law and orchestrating a nationwide influence operation to systematically gut the anti-monopoly regulations that stifled his business ambitions.
This body of law is known as the three-tier system, organized at the state and local level in the wake of Prohibition. The three-tier system puts restrictions on liquor markets to prevent concentration across production, distribution, and retail, in the interests of competition and public health (alcohol still being among the leading causes of death).
Trone paved the way for his company’s rise by chipping away at three-tier legislation, thereby amassing the fortune he’s been using to effectively buy political office.
I’ve written about some of the shady dealings in Total Wine’s history as the Amazon of liquor retail. In short, the story is that Trone ran into serious legal troubles in the 1990s because he set up straw companies run by family members to skirt laws against chain liquor stores. His response was to lobby state legislators and finance legal cases or ballot initiatives to do away with this patchwork of laws, which constrained chains and enforced minimum-pricing laws. Those restrictions were impediments to Total Wine’s strategy to become a big-box retailer that could use scale to extract bulk discounts from distributors in order to deliver extremely low prices, just as Walmart had done, and push out independent stores.
As one of the two largest retailers in the country, along with Costco, Total Wine is the premier access point for brewers and winemakers to reach consumers. The company’s control over the liquor market is so great that very few industry players have been willing to speak to me on the record about Total Wine’s business practices because of fear of retaliation from Trone. “No one can risk being put in the penalty box or kicked out of the store’s [business network],” one representative for distributors told me.
This backstory sends troubling signs for how a Sen. Trone would approach the issues of corporate power over our markets and our politics. He’s taken good stances on a number of progressive causes like union organizing, higher taxes for the wealthy, and even increasing the minimum wage. He’s received support from the building trades and the Maryland State Education Association for that reason. But his silence on other important policy areas like antitrust is cause for concern.
At the start of the race, Total Wine was enmeshed in a legal dispute with the Federal Trade Commission for being unwilling to cooperate with the commission on an antitrust investigation into its closest business partner, the distributor Southern Glazer’s. Trone contends that he has had no involvement with Total Wine since he was elected to his House seat in 2018. But that claim is called into question by scores of previously unreported court documents and public records. They show that Trone clearly remains intimately involved in managing the daily operations of his company, which is officially run by his brother.
In 2021, for instance, Trone became embroiled in a dispute over an order delivery at one of his stores in Tempe, Arizona, that became so heated that he threatened “to execute” the delivery workers. They filed police charges against him, which were later dropped. The point is that Trone made a cross-country trip to visit one of his stores in Arizona to oversee a very standard exchange of goods.
This kind of involvement is not an uncommon occurrence for Trone since taking office in 2018. According to emails and other communications documented from an employee discrimination lawsuit filed in 2021, Trone is in constant contact with managers and employees across his stores, coordinating everything from office supplies, order shipment dates, and staff turnover. He’s so involved in operations that he once instructed employees to fix the shop sign at one store because the word “Wine” was not illuminated. That particular instance took place while he was a candidate for the House, but related communications followed all the way up through the pandemic.
Since taking office, he’s continued fighting regulations on Total Wine at the state level. In 2022, amid his own re-election to Congress, Trone and his brother individually contributed a million dollars to a campaign in Colorado organized to support a ballot initiative that year to relax state licensing laws, which would have allowed Total Wine to open an unlimited number of stores in the state. The initiative was modeled on similar Trone-funded measures that had passed in other states, though this one failed at the ballot box.
This doesn’t suggest that Trone would be an entirely hands-off, disinterested senator when legislation related to his specific industry or to market concentration generally came before the Senate.
