Angela D. Alsobrooks overcame relatively low statewide name recognition and a deep-pocketed opponent to emerge victorious in Maryland’s closely watched Democratic U.S. Senate primary. The win sets the field for a contest expected to help determine the chamber’s balance of power in November.

Born and raised in Prince George’s County, Alsobrooks, 53, was the first Black woman to be elected county state’s attorney and later county executive. She captured 54 percent of the vote as of Wednesday with an estimated two-thirds of ballots counted and late-returned mail-ins outstanding. If she wins the general election in November, she’ll become the first Black person to represent Maryland in the U.S. Senate — and the fourth Black woman to join the chamber.

One of those Black women, Vice President Harris, has been a mentor to Alsobrooks since her time as the county’s top prosecutor, where she oversaw a decline in violent crime and championed certain alternative justice efforts.

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“Angela worked hard for this,” said Susie Turnbull, an early endorser of Alsobrooks’s Senate bid, and former chair of the Maryland Democratic Party and vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. “She energized and inspired people with her message of inclusion and she recognized the need to talk about the future.”

Her victory fulfills many hopes Turnbull said she has for a Congress that is more representative of the United States.

During Alsobrooks’s nearly 15 years in elected office, she has elevated other Black women to positions of power, many of them also breaking boundaries along the way.

But on the campaign trail, she deftly navigated her history-making bid while rarely explicitly discussing race, instead focusing most conversations about representation on gender. She talked about motherhood (her daughter is a college student) and the opportunity to become the first congresswoman representing Maryland since Sen. Barbara Ann Mikulski (D), who retired in 2016. Alsobrooks said that Marylanders should be able to see themselves in a congressional delegation that is largely White and entirely male.

The daughter of a former Washington Post distributor and receptionist, Alsobrooks is a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority, a historically Black American sorority and a graduate of Duke University. She received her law degree from the University of Maryland’s Francis King Carey School of Law.

As executive, she secured investment to expand Metro service with the Blue Line corridor, whipped up state resources to boost local health-care access and championed efforts to relocate the FBI headquarters to Prince George’s, among other wins. She also oversaw the opening of several mental health facilities in the county, redirecting $20 million to build a behavioral health center in Lanham with funds originally intended for a new police training facility.

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But conflicts emerged as her time in office grew, most publicly with a bloc of liberal lawmakers on the all-Democratic county council over education policy, youth violence and the county’s embattled police department.

As she sought to grow her political profile statewide, Alsobrooks faced fresh challenges. Missed revenue projections and rising costs pushed her in March to propose freezing more than 800 county positions, cutting agency budgets and drawing down rainy-day funds to fix a projected $171 million budget shortfall for the 2025 fiscal year.

She found herself confronting this grim reality as former governor Larry Hogan’s surprise entrance into the race escalated national attention on what had been an overlooked contest for a reliably blue seat. Suddenly, national GOP dollars were flowing into Maryland as Alsobrooks’s chief rival, three-term congressman Rep. David Trone, was already outspending her 10 to 1.

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On the campaign trail, she charged Trone — a co-owner of the national retailer Total Wine & More — with trying to buy the seat. Trone was unapologetic about spending more than $61 million of his own money on the contest and touted his independence from donations, super PACs and corporations. The contest sharpened in its waning weeks, with supporters on both sides trading jabs over ads and public statements, and some state leaders calling for party unity.

The matchup between Hogan and Alsobrooks in the general election this fall will probably dredge up old battles between the two, who sparred publicly over coronavirus pandemic response strategy during her first term as county executive and his second term as governor.

The pandemic hit the majority-Black county hard, surfacing systemic issues related to funding and health-care resources. Alsobrooks received both praise and criticism for the county’s pandemic response, the latter from Latino leaders who said she left their communities behind — concerns she has dismissed in interviews. She was likewise criticized for an overall lack of Latino representation in her cabinet.

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Alsobrooks started her career as the first full-time prosecutor overseeing domestic violence cases in the Prince George’s state’s attorney’s office, a critical job in a county that often ranks among the highest in Maryland for domestic-related homicides. She left that office to lead the county’s revenue authority, a quasi-governmental organization, which serves as a real estate development and development finance agency in addition to managing and operating programs and facilities in partnership with other county agencies.

When she was elected state’s attorney in 2010, Alsobrooks increased funding for the office, hired more attorneys and focused on diversion programs for first-time offenders. Crime in the county declined about 50 percent during her tenure, which was in line with national trends at the time.

The coronavirus pandemic consumed much of her first term as executive, as did tensions over racial justice and police reform efforts. While the nation reckoned with the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Prince George’s grappled with the death of William Green, a Black man who was shot six times by a county officer while he sat in the front seat of a police cruiser with his hands cuffed behind his back.

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That officer was charged with murder within days of the shooting — the first time in county history — and eventually led to the resignation of the county’s police chief, a $20 million settlement to Green’s family and pledges from Alsobrooks that she would overhaul the department. Alsobrooks hired a new reformist chief, assembled a police reform work group and invested in mental health services.

But community organizers and some lawmaker colleagues grew skeptical of Alsobrooks’s commitment to those reforms as her office took what they viewed as contradictory positions on juvenile justice policy efforts and other legal disputes, including allowing the spending of at least $17.6 million to fight a lawsuit filed by Black and Latino officers accusing the department of workplace discrimination.

Nicole Asbury contributed to this report.

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