With Friday being the candidate filing deadline for the 2020 elections in Maryland, we’ll have some sense of who is lining up with which presidential candidate, as people sign up to run to become delegates at the political conventions.
This endorsement feels a little more significant, at least symbolically, than others: State Sen. William C. Smith Jr. (D-Montgomery) announced that he is backing former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg for president, and will seek to become a Buttigieg delegate at the Democratic convention in Milwaukee.
In a statement, Smith said Buttigieg is “ready to confront the challenges that did not exist decades ago.”
“Our country is changing and we need a leader that is prepared on day one to not only lead but unite Americans from all walks of life,” Smith said. “It’s more important for my president to have a vision and a plan for the next generation than to have spent a generation in a broken and polarized Washington.”
Smith, who chairs the Judicial Proceedings Committee in Annapolis, served in Afghanistan as a Naval intelligence officer for about eight months last year. Buttigieg also served in the Navy in Afghanistan, in 2014.
Smith will run as a Buttigieg delegate in the 3rd congressional district.
Josh Kurtz
Founding editor
Founding Editor Josh Kurtz is a veteran chronicler of Maryland politics and government. He began covering the State House in 1995 for The Gazette newspapers, and has been writing about state and local politics ever since. He was an editor at Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, for eight years, and for eight years was the editor of E&E Daily, which covers energy and environmental policy on Capitol Hill. For 6 1/2 years Kurtz wrote a weekly column on state politics for Center Maryland and has written for several other Maryland publications as well. Kurtz regularly gives speeches and appears on TV and radio shows to discuss Maryland politics.
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