CUMBERLAND, Md. — Three years after proposing that their rural counties secede from the state, western Maryland Republicans want to clarify that they never really wanted to leave.

The 2021 proposal by state lawmakers to join neighboring West Virginia was less a serious plan, they say, than a primal scream at being stuck in a heavily Democratic state and a congressional district pairing them — like mismatched roommates — with a tony portion of suburban Montgomery County that they say possesses “different values.”

Their frustration came not only from feeling like outliers, but being consistently outvoted in U.S. House elections by a population-dense suburb that is geographically and philosophically miles away.

But while the conservative, remote counties of Garrett, Allegany and Washington continue to feel alienated from much of Maryland, they believe the Nov. 5 election presents a pivotal opportunity: the chance to elect one of their own.

The Revenge of Western Maryland, it might be called.

The 6th Congressional District incumbent, wealthy Montgomery County Democrat David Trone, opted to seek the Senate rather than run again. Analysts forecast a tight contest between Montgomery County Democrat April McClain Delaney — the wife of former Rep. John Delaney — and Republican Neil Parrott, a former state delegate from Washington County making his third straight bid for the seat.

With Republicans holding a narrow House majority — 220-212 with three vacancies — the 6th District race will help determine which party gains control of the chamber. An independent poll released in early September by Gonzales Research & Media Services showed Parrott ahead 41% to 39% with 20% undecided. That was within the 5.6% margin of error for the survey of 317 likely voters.

Not since Allegany County Republican J. Glenn Beall Jr. — 54 years ago — has a candidate from one of the three panhandle counties, wedged between West Virginia and Pennsylvania, won election in the 6th Congressional District. The odd-couple district stretches from Montgomery County, a very blue Washington suburb, through purple Frederick County and into the far western region known for mountains, farms, rumbling trucks, lost manufacturing jobs and a scarcity of Democrats.

In its politics, the western counties are akin to West Virginia, which, like them, voted handily for Republican Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

To get to West Virginia, residents of Cumberland, the Allegany County seat, need only cross a light-blue, Potomac River bridge the length of a football field, and they are in Ridgeley, West Virginia. Montgomery County is a little more than 100 miles away.

“Culturally, western Maryland is very different,” said Frostburg Mayor Todd Logsdon, a member of the Allegany County Republican Central Committee. “It’s a lot more Midwestern than anything else, a very post-industrial, Rust Belt kind of thing. But you get to the (Washington) beltway area — the DMV area — and it’s metropolitan. It’s very Northeastern.”

Western Maryland lawmakers have periodically complained about what they regard as excessive regulation from Annapolis. They objected, for example, in 2017 when hydraulic fracturing, a method of drilling for natural gas also known as “fracking,” was banned statewide, arguing that the state was taking away a potential economic lifeline for the area. The ban’s supporters cited health and environmental concerns.

“They’re building a steel mill in West Virginia,” Republican state Del. William Wivell of Washington County said admiringly in an interview, referring to a project that broke ground in 2023. “What do you think the odds are that Maryland would see a steel mill?”

But even those involved in the 2021 secession proposal say it was not the right remedy for western Maryland.

In October 2021, a handful of state legislators from the three counties sent letters to top West Virginia officials asking whether they might annex their westernmost piece of the panhandle and make it a permanent part of the Mountain State.

Fleeing Maryland for West Virginia would have been a legally complicated, politically arduous process requiring lawmakers’ approval in both state capitals and Congress.

“From my perspective it was a mistake,” Jason Buckel, the state House minority leader from Allegany County who was initially involved in the plan, said Tuesday.

Buckel was interviewed at his law office in Cumberland’s tree-lined Washington Street Historic District, which features elegant, restored homes, some dating to the 19th century. Once a transportation hub, Cumberland’s economy has eroded for years as its manufacturing industries have declined.

According to Buckel, western Maryland lawmakers, in discussing how to improve the local economy, heard about a 2020 pitch by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican, to entice conservative pockets of Virginia to join West Virginia after Democrats had made election gains in Richmond. Some proponents of the plan, which did not succeed, labeled the effort “VEXIT,” a nod to the United Kingdom’s split from the European Union known as “BREXIT.”

In Maryland’s case, Buckel thought it might be helpful in 2021 to conduct a nonbinding secession straw poll among the three counties’ residents and send a message to the rest of the state about “how disenfranchised sometimes people feel here because of the neglect.”

Buckel said he was on a hunting trip in South Dakota when he returned to find letters had already been sent to West Virginia officials. “This isn’t what we agreed to,” he said.

The secession letters were denounced by many state leaders as a stunt.

“Let them go,” joked University of Baltimore professor John Willis on Wednesday when asked about the lawmakers’ flirtation with West Virginia.

Western Maryland’s political problem is that “they’re not big enough for their own congressional district” so the region must be merged with other areas that may not be as conservative, said Willis, who was secretary of state in the Democratic administration of former Gov. Parris Glendening. “They just want a Republican congressman,” Willis said.

For years, Montgomery County candidates have used their personal wealth — and a district map favoring Democrats — to win the 6th District.

The district is served by the pricey Washington, D.C., media market, and candidates who don’t self-fund sometimes struggle to pay for campaign ads to get their messages out. “It’s tough reaching everybody,” said Wivell, the state delegate.

Republicans gained ground following the 2020 census when state lawmakers subtracted a portion of Montgomery County in redistricting and added voters in Frederick County, where voter registration is more evenly split between the parties. The new district was drawn by state Democrats after a judge rejected their initial version of the state’s congressional map as “a product of extreme partisan gerrymandering.”

The district’s pronounced geographic split was evident in the Gonzales firm’s poll, conducted Aug. 24-31, showing McClain Delaney leading 61%-19% in her home county of Montgomery, while Parrott was up 75%-15% in the three western counties. She led 44%-29% in Frederick County, which is between McClain Delaney’s and Parrott’s strongholds and has almost equal numbers of Democratic and Republican voters.

The poll said the election “will likely be decided” in Frederick County, which has rapidly gained population — particularly Democrats — in recent years as suburbs have pushed outward into once-rural areas.

But Republicans’ 6th District prospects are boosted by the absence of Trone, the Montgomery County Democrat who spent more than $12 million of his own money in winning a third term in 2022. He opted to seek the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin and lost in the May primary to Angela Alsobrooks, the Prince George’s County executive.

Trone, a co-founder of the Total Wine & More retail chain, and his Democratic 6th District predecessor, multimillionaire former Rep. John Delaney, both live in Potomac, which is home to gated mansions and has a median household income of $218,710 — about three to four times more than the western counties.

McClain Delaney, a communications attorney hoping to succeed Trone, has emphasized abortion rights and women’s safety, and calls Parrott hard-right “extreme.”

Parrott has said during campaign events that he knows the district because he is from there and criticizes her for living in a Potomac neighborhood just outside the district line.

Parrott, who did not reply to Baltimore Sun interview requests, previously lost to Trone twice, most recently by 54% to 45% in 2022. His campaign has been aided financially by the House Freedom Fund, which supports right-wing House candidates such as Florida’s Byron Donalds and Colorado’s Lauren Boebert.

In an interview, McClain-Delaney called the district “a microcosm of America. It’s red, blue, it’s suburban, urban and rural.”

She stressed that she understands western Maryland partly because of her upbringing. She was born and raised in rural Idaho.

“I’m a potato farmer’s daughter,” she said.

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