Democrat Valerie Ervin has traveled a long road to become a candidate for governor of Maryland. If she had complied with one man’s wishes years ago, she might not have set foot on the path at all.
“When I ran for the [Montgomery County] Council the first time, a very well-known African-American man, political leader, sat me down and he said, ‘There is already an African-American man running, and you can’t run because we need to make sure he wins,’ recalled Ervin, who would be the first black woman — or woman of any color — to occupy the governor’s chair.
“And I ran anyway. And I won.”
Ervin’s bid for governor is exceptional, even in an election year that’s brought new attention to women and minorities competing for office at all levels of government. In a sit down with Glamour, the longtime political activist acknowledged the conflicts generated by an opportunity born of tragedy.
Originally a candidate for lieutenant governor of Maryland, Ervin decided to move to the top of the ticket after the sudden death of her running mate, Kevin Kamenetz, just weeks before the vote. “One day we saw him; the next day, he was gone,” she said of Kamenetz, the 60-year-old Baltimore County executive who died May 10 after going into cardiac arrest.
Ervin had just days to decide whether to remain in the already-packed Democratic primary field and run in Kamenetz’s stead — and to choose a ticketmate of her own. She took the plunge, teaming up with Marisol Johnson, an El Salvador-born former member of the Baltimore County School Board.
When she filed her papers, “I could feel something in me that reminded me of all the people who went before me, who didn’t have the same kind of opportunities that I did,” said the University of Baltimore-educated Ervin, a 61-year-old former union organizer and advisor to the progressive Working Families Party.
She says she thinks not only of trailblazers — the Shirley Chisholms, the Fannie Lou Hamers — but those closer to home: “I’m inspired by the women who came before me in my family,” Ervin said. “They cleaned other people’s houses and took care of other people’s children and saved their money to make sure I went to college and had opportunity.”
Ervin, who has two adult sons and four grandkids, is not the only black woman seeking an American governorship at a time when there are no sitting black governors anywhere in the U.S. (and women run just six statehouses). But her situation is radically different from that of candidates like Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, whose Democratic primary win just secured her a place in the history books and secures her a shot at the top job.
To start, Abrams claimed victory in a one-on-one primary fight. She had a considerable war chest, enjoyed financial support from outside spending groups and drew marquee endorsements from major Democratic Party figures.
Ervin and Johnson, meanwhile, are not even the first two-woman team in an already packed and diverse field. Being Kamenetz’s ticketmate does not equate to Ervin having access to money he raised for the primary. What’s more, ballots already printed for Maryland’s June 26 primary list Kamenetz as the candidate for governor and Ervin as his chosen lieutenant—not the Ervin-Johnson ticket.
Donna Duncan, assistant deputy for election policy at the Maryland Board of Elections, told Glamour in a phone interview that votes for Kamenetz will be tabulated as counting for Ervin and that the state’s 2.14 million active registered Democrats will be informed about the change of circumstances in multiple ways, including via notices in polling booths and through social media.
Ervin, naturally, isn’t satisfied with those provisions, nor with official arguments that reprinting ballots in time for the election just isn’t feasible.
She isn’t alone in her assessment. Election expert Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at UC Irvine and a noted scholar of election law, wrote this week that it’s a “dicey” scenario in which the public is told a vote cast for one candidate will be logged as a vote for another.
“If absentee ballots are already out, how do we know if voters wanted to vote for the old or new candidate?” he asked Glamour. “Perhaps someone needs to seek a court order to delay the primary until new ballots can be printed and distributed. Usually candidate replacement rules are written so that replacement must occur before ballots are distributed.”
But Stella Rouse, director of the Center for American Politics and Citizenship at the University of Maryland, said the administration of the election seems to be in tune with legal precedent.
“The circumstance of her losing her running mate so near the filing deadline is definitely unfair, as she does not really have time to get her name out into the broad public domain, and thus is also limited in her ability to raise money,” Rouse said of Ervin via email.
“I can understand that she would like to at least be given the same starting position (so to speak) as her late running mate and to pick up where he left off, but she is not him and [Maryland] election law dictates how this is handled.”
Even as she objects to the conditions of the June vote, Ervin says her campaign’s ground game is in motion. Grounded in pledges of support for a $15 minimum wage, paid family leave, universal childcare and debt-free college, her bid will rely heavily on getting Maryland women of color to turn out, reprising the influential role the demographic has increasingly played in both primary and general elections.
Running in a state poised to become majority minority, and as someone who self-describedly got politicized “by being just a pissed-off mother,” Ervin is not soft pedaling issues of race or gender, from her choice of running mate to the “Black Girls Vote” button on her lapel to a campaign website that calls out “the white supremacy, bigotry, and violence sweeping our nation.”
“Something is happening in the country. These primary elections are all about women, and a lot of them are about women of color, and the white male power structure is freaking out,” she said. “And so the fearlessness [with which we] approach the campaign is what’s really got people a little off kilter.”
Considering the myriad challenges she faces in her sudden ascent to the top of the ticket, Ervin is hardly a sure thing for the Democratic nomination, much less Maryland’s governorship. Still, she said, “I have this one moment to be a voice, whether I win or not. Of course I would love to win, but even if I don’t, I think my voice and Marisol’s voice has been elevated as part of [the] story of Maryland.”
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