As I write this, Andy Harris has begun a full-day campaign announcement tour throughout the First District. Beginning in Bel Air this morning, Harris slated stops in Annapolis and Easton before wrapping up in Salisbury at the East Coast Iron facility at 300 Moss Hill Lane this afternoon at 5:00.
Yet Harris won’t be finished with his day as there will be a meet-and-greet reception afterward at Adam’s Ribs (219 S. Fruitland Boulevard in Fruitland.)
It seems like the Lower Shore will get special attention this time around as Harris ran at his weakest through this area – in three of the four Lower Shore counties he ran worse than he did in Frank Kratovil’s home of Queen Anne’s County. Winning or at least trailing by single-digits on the Eastern Shore is key to Harris’ strategy – his losing margin varied from 2.1% in Cecil County to 32.9% in Kent County (former Congressman Wayne Gilchrest’s home base.) On the Lower Shore Harris trailed by 8 to 19 points in 2008.
My guess is that Harris will have a field day attacking Frank Kratovil’s record, one advantage he didn’t have two years back. Early polls suggest First District voters are clamoring for change, but we haven’t seen the full-throttle attack on Harris the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and their Big Labor/trial lawyer allies will surely bring over the summer and early fall. It was effective last time so Democrats will undoubtedly go back to the same playbook.
One thing I’d like to see from Harris is stressing the alternatives to those items Kratovil has faced in Congress and running a more positive campaign. This time, though, he should have little opposition on his side to call “liberal” and that would make a general election contest easier. Train the big guns where they belong.