Free Republic

Democrat Kweisi Mfume won a special congressional election in Maryland on Tuesday and will replace the late Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) for the rest of his term in the state’s 7th district. Cummings, who chaired the House Oversight Committee, died at 68 in October 2019. His office told news outlets that he died due to “complications concerning longstanding health challenges.” Following Cummings’s death, over 30 people—including some two dozen Democrats—announced bids for the seat he had held since 1996. Mfume defeated Republican Kimberly Klacik to win the seat, with The Associated Press calling the race after 8 p.m. local time....

Republican strategist Kimberly Klacik said after winning the primary election to run for the late congressman Elijah Cummings’s old seat in Baltimore that she won because of her “grassroots efforts," and she added that some of President Trump’s policies will help her historically blue district. “What I try to remind people is if you take a look at President Trump — take a look at prison reform, First Step Act, he’s actually just rewinding and fixing what was broken with that crime bill that led to so much mass incarceration that you really see in the greater Baltimore area,” Klacik...

The widow of late Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said on Monday that she will launch a campaign to win her husband’s seat as representative of Maryland’s 7th Congressional District. Maryland Democratic Party Chairwoman Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, 48, initially told The Baltimore Sun that she would formally announce her campaign on Tuesday, nearly a month after her husband died of cancer on Oct. 17 at age 68. Rep. Elijiah Cummings served nearly two decades in Congress and played an integral role in the early stages of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump as the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform...

President Trump has his first Democratic challenger in the 2020 presidential election: Rep. John Delaney of Maryland, who announced his bid Friday. "The current administration is making us less prosperous and less secure," Delaney wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post on Friday. "I'm running because I have an original approach to governing and economic policy that can put us on a different course