The Incumbent: Larry Hogan, Republican
In April, a national Morning Consult poll reported that Gov. Larry Hogan had the second-highest approval rating among governors in the country—a finding that came as no surprise to followers of Maryland politics. The 62-year-old Republican has maintained extraordinary support from state voters, typically posting approval ratings in the mid-60s since his win in 2014. Hogan’s secret in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-1? He blends a dog-loving, Everyman persona with savvy political instincts, carefully picking his battles in General Assembly and avoiding entanglements in President Donald Trump’s seemingly endless capacity for controversy.

According to the late April Goucher Poll, the percentage of registered voters likely to vote for Hogan in November remains in the mid-40s, with roughly a quarter of voters still undecided. While all the action this month is in the June 26 Democratic primary, it is only a prelude to what will be a no-holds-barred general election race in November. A Hogan win would certainly garner him national attention in what is expected to be a blue wave nationally.

---

The Contenders
The question heading toward this year’s primary has been: When will the Democratic candidates distinguish themselves from each other? And who, if anyone, will jump out in front of the crowded field? (Polling numbers as of 2/22/18. Forty-seven percent of people polled voted “undecided.”)

Rushern Baker III
The Prince George’s County Executive has held a lead, although not a commanding edge, from the start. A sharp, committed manager, Baker, 59, restored confidence in the P.G. County government following the corruption scandal of predecessor Jack Johnson and has boosted economic development. In 2015, Governing magazine named him one of the top public officials of the year. Polling at: 19%

Ben Jealous
A decade ago, Jealous became the youngest president and CEO of the NAACP, earning kudos for returning the historic civil rights organization to relevance and registering voters. Charismatic and unapologetically progressive, Jealous, 45, has garnered endorsements from U.S. senators Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker, as well as several local unions, including the Maryland State Education Association. Polling at: 10%

Richard Madaleno Jr. 
Vice-chair of the state senate Budget and Taxation Committee and a legislative leader in the Maryland General Assembly, Madaleno should be better known across the state than he is. A married father of two, Madaleno, 53, of Montgomery County, is vying to become the state’s first openly gay governor. He will contend for the progressive vote with Jealous. Polling at: 2%

Alec Ross
A technology policy expert, Ross, 46, served as senior advisor for innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Ross came to Baltimore—where he resides with his wife and kids—after graduating from Northwestern University. He taught at a West Baltimore middle school for two years, and later co-founded One Economy, a non-profit that delivers internet access and technology education to low-income communities. Polling at: 3%

Jim Shea
Shea, 65, grew up in Baltimore County, where his mother worked in the public school system. He has never held elected political office, but he did lead the largest law firm in the Baltimore metro area. He has promised to bring a Fortune 500 company to Baltimore, keep the Preakness here, and he picked City Councilman Brandon Scott, 33, as his running mate. Polling at: 2%

Krishanti Vignarajah
A Sri Lanka-native and daughter of two Baltimore City schoolteachers, Vignarajah, 38, served as Michelle Obama’s policy director, helping the former First Lady launch the popular Let Girls Learn initiative. A Woodlawn High School graduate, she earned a law degree from Yale University and is the only woman running in the Democratic primary in a state that has never elected a female governor. Polling at: 2%

---

Editor’s note: The print version of this story included information about Kevin Kamenetz’s planned run for governor. Baltimore magazine sends heartfelt condolences to his family, friends, and constituents.

Anyone with siblings knows that besting a brother or sister in sports or winning your parents praise is like a nagging intuition that only grows with age. Thiru and Krishanti Vignarajah are living proof that sibling rivalries never die. One is running for Baltimore state’s attorney and the other is vying to unseat Gov. Larry Hogan. As the children of two immigrant Baltimore City Public School teachers, Thiru and Krishanti are the epitome of the American dream.

After their parents fled civil unrest in Sri Lanka, they sought refuge in the Edmondson Heights neighborhood in Baltimore City. Thiru went on to pursue law at Harvard—becoming the editor of the Harvard Law Review “before Barack Obama made it cool.” And his younger sister, Krishanti, studied political science and molecular cellular and developmental biology at Yale, eventually becoming the policy director for Michelle Obama at the White House. Although wildly successful, the pair says that there was never any pressure from their parents to go to college and do well.

“If you ask my father, he would tell you, they didn’t really know of the Ivy League, and they always kind of encouraged us to realize our potential,” Krishanti said. “But it was never sort of pressure. It was never, ‘You will go to a top notch academic institution.’ I think there was an expectation that we would make something of ourselves and find some way to give back.” 

Neither Krishanti nor Thiru had ever thought about running for public office. For Thiru, it was the Uprising in 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray that piqued his interest in politics. As a former Maryland deputy attorney general, he witnessed firsthand how the increased violence and homicide rates in Baltimore were tearing communities apart.

“It was just gut wrenching and heart breaking,” Thiru said. “I suddenly realized that it was not going to get better unless we had real leadership in the role of the state’s attorney. I just couldn’t sit back and watch anymore.”

For Krishanti, she was asked to run following a keynote address at the Western Maryland Democratic Summit in April 2017 (and was eight months pregnant at the time). A political consultant approached her and said, “You’re not going to like me in five minutes. You’re going to hate me in five months,” and showed Krishanti a crumpled piece of paper with names on it.

“She says, ‘None of these candidates could beat governor Hogan. Fortunately, I’ve just found my candidate. I just need to wait until she delivers her baby,’” she recalls. “It kind of gave me pause. Part of that pause was that, coming out of the Obama administration, and having so many of the accomplishments we worked so hard to achieve either already reversed or threatened to be reversed, made me believe that we needed to be part of the resistance and opposition. Part of it was I was nearly nine months pregnant.”

Now, nearly six weeks away from the primaries, the brother and sister are ready to acknowledge their familial ties within the race. After keeping their relationship out of the race in an effort to “keep the focus on the issues at hand,” Thiru freely prattled on about his admiration for his little sister and all of her accomplishments.

“She’s extraordinary and we have a sibling rivalry like everybody else but there’s no one I would trust more with the biggest responsibilities on the Earth,” he said. “She is as humble as she is brilliant, she is as hardworking as she is charming.”

Neither sibling can ignore the elephant in the room—if they both win their respective seats, will there be a conflict of interest? Baltimore is known for its history of political families—Mitchells, Cardins, Mosbys—but aside from having a longer name, Thiru believes that they are the same as other families that have served. 

“If a brother and sister didn’t disagree, nobody would believe it,” he joked. “There will be issues and subjects in which we may disagree, and we’ll talk about it and we’ll move forward. In some respects, that’s what I would say about a person in government that wasn’t family.”

When the fancy titles are stripped away, and politics are out of the picture, Thiru and Krishanti are just Woodlawn High graduates who enjoy being on the water or taking in a game at Camden Yards. At the end of the day, they are just a brother and sister, who are hoping for the best outcomes for each other in the June 26 primary.

“I’m inspired and proud of what Krish is doing,” Thiru said. “There is a moment that is seizing the country and I think both of us feel this calling. It’s rooted in our unique experiences, we have walked our distinctive paths, but if not now, when? If not here, where? If not us, who?”

When news broke earlier this month that the popular Obama-era initiative Let Girls Learn may become a casualty of the most recent round of federal budgeting, one Baltimorean was especially jarred. As the former director of policy for former First Lady Michelle Obama, Krishanti Vignarajah helped the administration launch the initiative in 2015. We caught up with the Woodlawn High School graduate—who now runs her own company, Generation Impact, and is expecting her first child (a daughter)—to talk about the status of Let Girls Learn, and why it’s worth saving.

Let’s start with the basics. What is Let Girls Learn and how does it work?
It’s an initiative that President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama launched in March of 2015 to support adolescent girls’ education, at home and abroad. We ultimately had seven agencies integrally involved, ranging from the State Department and our development agency, USAID, to the Department of Labor, Peace Corps and the Department of Agriculture. 

Let Girls Learn supports girls’ education in three different ways. The first is through governmental support, everything from the building and renovation of schools to “second chance programs” for girls who’ve dropped out, to science and tech camps that bring together teenage girls from around the world. But we also appreciated that the U.S. couldn’t do it alone, and so we built an international coalition of governments ranging from Japan and Pakistan, to South Korea and the United Kingdom. But . . . even an international coalition of governments couldn’t solve a problem as large as nearly 100 million adolescent girls out of school worldwide, so we partnered with about 100 private sector companies and organizations, ranging from IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Girl Scouts, and Lands’ End, to universities like Georgetown and Cambridge to help us support girls in completing middle and high school.

What was your involvement in the creation of Let Girls Learn?
Mrs. Obama had been really quite moved by the Boko Haram kidnapping of over 200 girls in Nigeria. So she raised the question of what could we do to address this heartbreaking situation of girls getting kidnapped simply for going to school. Obviously, for both the President and the First Lady, the issue was personal, both because each of their success stories was in part driven by education, but also being the parents of two daughters, the incident hit close to home. We recognized that there was some ongoing programming that the U.S. government already supported, but that there was clearly a need to step up our efforts. So, I basically tried to figure out how could we address the issue of girls’ education, in a real and enduring way.

Why focus on girls not boys?
The reality that we see, both at home and all across the world, is that girls often fall behind—particularly when it comes to middle and high school. And so you end up seeing in some places dramatically lower completion and graduation rates for girls compared to boys. What we realized is that there’s no smarter investment in the future of America than investment in girls’ education.

How so?
When you talk about diverting resources from young girls, you’re really talking about divesting from the next generation of America’s leaders, the next generation of innovators, entrepreneurs, and astrophysicists. And they’re coming from everywhere—small towns, inner cities. They’re going to be the daughters of immigrants and working-class parents. So that’s why we knew that this was a priority. The investment in these girls is not just an investment in them, but an investment in their families, communities, and countries. We know, for example, that . . . for each additional year of high school, a girl’s earning potential goes up as much as 25 percent. Another example: Girls who attend school have healthier families. A Lancet study, for example, found that increasing girls’ education was responsible for more than half the reduction in child mortality between 1970 and 2009. I could go on and on.

So what does it cost the U.S. government per year to run this program?
We ended up investing $1 billion. Unfortunately, even that large amount is still far from what’s needed, because the tragic reality is that we still have 130 million girls out of school around the world.

One billion dollars sounds like a lot of money. For comparison’s sake, what are some other budget line items?
So, for example, our HIV/AIDS funding through PEPFAR, which President Bush created, receives about $7 billion. The State Department budget is about $50 to $51 billion, while the Defense Department budget is about $600 billion.

In terms of soft diplomacy, is Let Girls Learn one of the best investments we can make? You know, winning hearts and minds and all that.
Absolutely. [Secretary of Defense] General [James] Mattis has said this, ‘If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition ultimately.’ In some cases, it’s pennies on the dollar compared to the other investments we make. But you absolutely get the best bang for your buck.

As of today, it is unclear what the status of Let Girls Learn is. Initial reports suggested it was cut, then the State Department released a statement saying that the program will remain intact, but may get rebranded.
As you can imagine, I sort of scrambled to try to find out what was happening and what was potentially on the chopping block. I’ll tell you I think there is a lot of confusion about what exactly is being contemplated. In my mind, what is absolutely clear is that educating the next generation of women cannot become a casualty of partisan politics.

Do you worry that the Trump administration is just trying to avoid bad publicity here and fully intends to quietly end the initiative?
I realize that there’s always a chance with a new administration that an initiative like Let Girls Learn could have a bull’s-eye on it because it was so closely identified with the [former administration]. But . . . it would just make no sense. President [George W.] Bush, for example, launched the Millennium Challenge Corporation as a new approach to development and to substantially increase HIV/AIDS funding through PEPFAR. When we came into the White House, we realized the importance of these programs and actually increased funding for them. And the idea that something is bad just because it’s what a prior administration has done is at odds with the legacy of the White House.

On Thursday, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) introduced the Keeping Girls in School Act, which aims to preserve some aspects of Let Girls Learn, should the Trump administration decide to jettison the initiative. 
Of course, I appreciate any effort to safeguard the significant achievements we made through Let Girls Learn. But it’s too bad if we need legislation to protect an initiative intended to ensure girls get an education—this issue should be above the fray of politics.

What if the Trump administration decides to keep the program but rebrands it? Why would changing that name and that brand be such a loss?
We launched Let Girls Learn in over 50 countries around the world. And as you can imagine, when Michelle Obama says ‘Let Girls Learn,’ people hear it and it means something. We had successful public service announcements that we put out that had everyone from Meryl Streep to John Legend making the case to let girls learn. Likewise, when we launched a social media campaign asking people to respond to the question ‘What did you learn in school?’ we got an overwhelming response. It ended up trending number one [on Twitter] domestically and number three internationally. We had everyone from David Cameron to Prince Harry to Beyoncé all supporting this cause. To rebrand and remove all of that would threaten to take away all of the awareness we’ve raised.

So, you’re saying there’s a lot invested in the brand already. It’d be like trying to rename Nike or something.
It’s like relabeling Coca-Cola and instead calling it Brown Fizzy Water. If you think there’s no cost to that, you’re failing to appreciate what Coca-Cola has built.