Baltimore County women are running for something — actually, a lot of things

The county is making up for lost time now.

With the County Council’s expansion from seven seats to nine, the electoral contests have attracted four women candidates, three of them Black leaders. For the state General Assembly, two women of color are running their first races for state delegate. Two more — Jennifer White and Michele Guyton — are running to keep their delegate seats.

“The fact that we have this many women stepping up to the plate to change the narrative for Baltimore County is just so exciting,” said Diana Emerson, executive director of Emerge Maryland, the state chapter of a national effort to encourage more Democratic women to run for office.

White and Guyton are Emerge alums, along with Congresswoman Sarah Elfreth and state Comptroller Brooke Lierman. State prosecutor Sarah David, also an Emerge graduate, is challenging longtime incumbent Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger. So is a third opponent — Baltimore City prosecutor Lauren Lipscomb.

Baltimore County’s women candidates join a regional surge.

Four women are running for county executive in Howard County, all but assuring the new leader will be a woman for only the second time in history. Jessica Fitzwater is Frederick County Executive. And Baltimore County has its first woman executive in Kathy Klausmeier, who was appointed after her predecessor, Johnny Olszewski Jr., was elected to Congress in 2024.

Emerson graduated from high school in Randallstown and remembers seeing few women in local politics. When she became Emerge Maryland’s director last year, she said: “I was trying to figure out how to get women to the table in Baltimore County.”

Fink found no takers.

“I could not convince them that an organization that trained women to run for office was necessary,” she said. “It surprises me when year after year, I would go back in, and lay some groundwork for the advancement of women, and I would just keep getting rebuffed.”

What’s changing now, several candidates said, is that national issues are coming home. Women care about affordable housing, SNAP benefits, and individuals being deported without due process. Men care about those things, too, but women are often in the decision-making seat in the home regarding safety, feeding and housing.

Those issues prompted Jyoti Mohan to jump into the race for state delegate of the district that includes northern Baltimore County. Nino Mangione, a conservative Republican, has represented the area for seven years, but he’s leaving to run for a council seat. Mohan, a history professor and nonprofit organizer, is a Democrat, but she doesn’t think that means she should be counted out.

Her style would be a departure from the Trump-loving Mangione. Raised on talk radio at a station his family owns, the scion of wealthy developers describes himself as fighting “the WOKE policies of the radical left.” As a delegate, he opposed a 2023 law requiring Medicaid to cover medically necessary gender-affirming care. He also introduced a bill, which failed, that would have banned “sexually explicit” books in school libraries.

None of those issues, Mohan said, help struggling families, who likely care more about saving farmland and transportation networks than they do about which library books should be accessible to students.

Del. Kim Ross, who was appointed to her position and is running to keep it, said she wondered if the County Council redistricting process would have been less acrimonious if women were on the dais. The councilmen sniped at one another, accused each other of drawing secret maps and having clandestine meetings, and were less than transparent with the public.

Black women, meanwhile, advocated for more representation.

Linda Dorsey-Walker worked on creating a council map to help Woodlawn keep a Black representative. Sharonda Huffman organized press conferences about the maps. Women in charge of the ACLU and the NAACP outlined the benefits of more diverse representation.

“Think back to all the women who were testifying, and all the issues that they raised. That is a window into how women might have managed that,” Ross said.

Baltimore County has not had a female council member in nearly a decade. Only five women have ever served since the council was established in 1956. This year, four women — Shawn McIntosh, Arkia Wade, Sharonda Huffman and Makeda Scott — have filed to run in the newly created districts. All but McIntosh are Black women, which the council has never elected. Only two Black men have ever served, and they only got that opportunity after redistricting carved out a Black district two decades ago.

Similarly, Del. Sheree Sample-Hughes is the only Black woman and the only Democrat representing the Eastern Shore, so she takes calls from residents from all over the nine-county area who seek her out.

“People need to have that extra level of support knowing their voice will be heard,” Sample-Hughes said. “It’s a tall order. No one else has nine counties, right? So I can’t intimately be on top of every subject that comes up, but I am trying to communicate that they collectively have my support.”

Emerson said she looks forward to the next several months to see who else enters the race.

“It’s unfortunate that it’s taken Baltimore County so long,” she said, “but now we have the women in place, and we have to support them so we get across the finish.”