Politics

After legal fights, counter-campaigns and bureaucratic wrangling all year long, as things stand today, abortion questions in 10 states are heading to ballots in November. After abortion rights were upended federally in June 2022, Kansas voters got a chance to weigh in on a ballot measure that was something of a test balloon just a couple of months later. Defying expectations, nearly 60% of voters rejected an anti-abortion constitutional amendment.

As has been widely reported, power bills are going up for Maryland families. One key reason is that the latest capacity auction for PJM, the electric grid that includes Maryland and the rest of the mid-Atlantic, resulted in wholesale prices more than nine times higher than in previous years. That could translate into rate hikes as high as 24% for households.

Baltimore’s experiment this spring in publicly financing political campaigns wasn’t without controversy. For the first time in May’s Democratic primary, a handful of Baltimore candidates were able to draw on city funds to power small-dollar campaigns, an effort to level the playing field of expensive elections by providing matching funds to campaigns that eschewed large donations or support from corporations, labor groups and political action committees.

Baltimore leaders publicly explained on Thursday how the city intends to spend money received through opioid lawsuit settlements. Mayor Brandon Scott said the pharmaceutical companies are responsible for the opioid crisis. “These companies flooded our communities with addictive opioid pills with reckless and deadly abandon, leading to widespread misuses, addiction and, tragically, thousands upon thousands of overdose deaths,” Scott said.

Vice President Kamala Harris said she was “deeply touched” by a photo of her young grandniece, in pigtails, watching her speak at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week. Though Harris hasn’t emphasized it — she said she is running to be president for “all Americans” — the photo captured the potential of her candidacy to make history.

To Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich, the future of development and economic vitality in the county lies with the life sciences and technology industries. But to get a stronghold in those industries, the county must have an economic and development landscape more like Northern Virginia, Elrich said Tuesday evening at an event sponsored by the business platform Bisnow in Bethesda.

Donald Trump is scheduled to campaign Thursday in Michigan and Wisconsin as the former president ramps up battleground state travel heading into the traditional Labor Day turn toward the fall election. Trump’s intense focus on recapturing states he won in 2016 but lost narrowly in 2020 continues with stops in the middle of Michigan and western Wisconsin.

Even though the Maryland Green Party first won official recognition in the state in 2000, party chair Brian Bittner was happy to call it the “new” party in the state this week. That’s because state election officials certified that the party had collected more than the 10,000 petition signatures needed to be officially recognized by the state as a political party, a designation that allows it to place candidates on the ballot without having to go through a petition process for those.