The candidates’ forum featuring Democrat April McClain Delaney and Republican Neil Parrott in their race for Maryland’s 6th Congressional District seat started out cordial.
By Dana Munro
“It’s interesting to hear my opponent sit here and say, ‘I don’t want to villainize people.’ What about the lies that you put out at me on your mailers? Unbelievable and disgusting,” Parrott said, speaking to both the audience and to Delaney, who sat next to him.
“Not lies, not lies. They’re not lies,” Delaney shot back, her words overlapping Parrott’s while some members of the audience jeered.
The exchange underscored larger tensions in what polls show will be a close race to fill the seat being vacated by Rep. David Trone (D-Md.), revolving in large part around the subject of the Delaney campaign mailers that angered Parrott: issues affecting women.
With the election fast approaching, Delaney — a former Commerce Department communications official in the Biden administration — has been tearing into Parrott’s record while he represented Washington County in the Maryland House of Delegates.
Multiple mailers sent by her campaign depict Parrott in dark and sepia tones alongside text referencing votes he took and legislation he proposed on issues such as domestic violence and abortion.
One of Delaney’s mailers highlights a 2022 House vote on a bill that expanded the rights of spouses to file sexual assault cases against each other.
Parrott, 54, had taken issue with the bill’s inclusion of fourth-degree offenses — which the state defines, in part, as “sexual contact with another without the consent of the other.”
“I mean you just pat them in the wrong way, they take it sexually, inappropriately; that’s marriage,” Parrott said on the House floor after the vote was taken and the bill moved over to the state Senate. “Those things are protected in marriage and this law gets rid of that. This is ridiculous.”
The legislation ultimately failed to pass that year. But another version that did not include fourth-degree offenses became law the following year, when Parrott was no longer in office.
Asked about the bill after Sunday’s forum, Parrott defended his stance.
“I’m all about making sure that women have the defense that they need,” he said in an interview. But “having workplace sexual harassment laws in marriage doesn’t make sense.”
Federal Election Commission filings show that Parrott has received a combined $7,000 in campaign donations from the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America Candidate Fund and the Family Research Council Action PAC, which supports “pro-family candidates” who will “promote the sanctity of life,” according to its website.
But Parrott declined to state his position on abortion — another issue highlighted by Delaney’s campaign — and how he would vote on the topic should he be elected to Congress and presented with the opportunity.
In 2011, he co-sponsored an unsuccessful state House bill that would have established “the right not to be deprived of life” for all humans starting “from the beginning of their biological development.”
“That shouldn’t even really be an issue as we’re running for Congress. It’s not something I’m concentrated on,” Parrott said during the interview about his position on abortion today. “As a congressman I’m not going to be really dealing with that.”
The deflection mirrors a larger trend for Republicans as Democrats across the country seek to tap into voter anger over the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to reverse Roe vs. Wade. Republicans have struggled to find consensus on that topic — particularly in bluer states such as Maryland — and have attempted to steer the discourse toward issues the party is more united around, including border security.
Parrott has primarily focused on immigration issues during his campaign and pivoted to the topic numerous times during the forum.
“We’ve got to secure the border. That’s going to be the very first thing that I do,” he said, adding he would advocate to cut federal funding to “sanctuary counties.” “We need to build the wall. We need to build electronic surveillance above the wall, below the wall. We need to make sure that it’s secure.”
According to recent polling, the race appears to be close. The district boundaries were redrawn in 2022 to include more of Frederick County and less of Montgomery, making it more purple than blue, though the Cook Political Report still rates it as a likely Democratic seat.
Both parties have highlighted the race’s importance.
In late September, the National Republican Congressional Committee added Parrott to its “Young Guns” roster. The program “mentors and supports” promising conservative candidates, according to its website.
That same month, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added Delaney to its “Red to Blue” program, which is designed to offer “organizational and fundraising support” to a select group of Democratic candidates, according to its website.
Parrott has criticized Delaney, who lives in Potomac, for not residing in the district, which stretches from Garrett County in the west to the edge of Montgomery County in the east. And he has pointed out to voters that Delaney has no legislative record.
Delaney, 60, conceded that she doesn’t live in the district but said she spends a lot of time there and has many connections there. House members are required only to live in the state that they represent.
About her legislative experience, Delaney said she helped shepherd pieces of legislation through Congress during her time working at a media reform nonprofit and helped oversee large federal programs while at the Commerce Department.
“I’ve been around the executive branch, the legislative branch and the judicial branch as a lawyer for over 30 years,” she said.
Delaney, whose husband, John, represented the district in the 2010s, cites the rollback of reproductive choice as a motivation for her to run for the seat. Reproductive health, affordable day care and other issues important to women would be priorities for her, she said.
“I want to work on policies to deal with our reproductive freedoms so that girls are not coming from West Virginia into Allegany” County to receive care, Delaney said during the forum about her desire to help restore the federal protections that Roe v. Wade guaranteed. The current status of state-by-state regulations is like “some dystopian ‘Handmaid’s Tale,'” she later said in an interview.
Lonnie Rogers, 76, said she agrees with Parrott’s positions. The Hagerstown resident, who is a Parrott campaign volunteer, said she admires the respect he shows his wife April and the prominent role she has played in her husband’s campaign.
Rogers, a retired emergency room nurse who was at Sunday’s forum, said reproductive health is an important issue for her. She said she doesn’t support a total ban on abortion, nor does she support late-term abortions, which are extremely rare.
“Something has to be available and safe so I’m not going to take the position of absolute no,” on abortion, Rogers said.
She doesn’t know Parrott’s exact stance on the issue, she said, but believes he’ll advocate for a middle ground.
“He’s a negotiator,” Rogers said, adding that she believes Democrats have been too focused on abortion at the expense of other important topics, such as border security.
Jan Daffern, 70, said she is motivated by the focus on women’s issues.
The retired minister who lives in Frederick said that, in the late 1980s, she marched in D.C. in support of reproductive choice, with her mother beside her and her son in a stroller.
What’s happened since is “a sad story,” she said, referring to the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe v. Wade.
At the Hood College auditorium, the energy from both parties was palpable.
About 100 people sat in the audience — Delaney’s camp on one side and Parrott’s on the other — with several of them shouting out their support as what was meant to be a sober policy-oriented discussion onstage escalated into personal attacks.
Delaney gesticulated frequently throughout Parrott’s final remarks before the two began to argue. She then threw her hands up and Parrott abruptly stood and headed offstage, leaving a panel of college students stunned.
Sara Malec, a Hood College associate math professor who helped lead the forum, tried to salvage what remained of decorum.
“I would like to thank people for remaining civil,” Malec said, as people began heading for the exits. “Until five minutes ago.”
