In the Where Are They Now Department:
Probably very few Marylanders remember a guy named Tom DeVor. In 2002, as a 28-year-old Bethesda resident and operative with the Republican National Committee, he challenged then-state Sen. Brian E. Frosh (D-Montgomery), now the state attorney general. He received about 28 percent of the vote.
Now, just a few days after the 2018 election, the very same Tom DeVor, older and presumably wiser, has declared his candidacy for Congress in 2020 — in Texas’ 7th District, based in Houston. DeVor has lived in Texas for several years.
Opportunity knocked for DeVor — and presumably for other Republicans — on Election Day, when the district’s longtime Republican congressman, John Culberson, was defeated by attorney Lizzie Pannell Fletcher, a Democrat. Culberson had served since 2000, but his district was one of many that has been trending Democratic and finally flipped.
“I love the Congressman and hope to make him proud,” DeVor wrote on Twitter when he filed his candidacy papers on Nov. 16. “However, I am not a big fan of @realDonaldTrump. True Republicans will make the country better.”
Whether DeVor, a sales account manager, is the man to win the district back for the GOP — or whether anyone can — is very much an open question. When the district as currently constituted was initially drawn in the mid-1960s, its first member of Congress was a Texas oilman and Republican activist named … George Herbert Walker Bush.
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.
Related Articles
The outreach to potential victims in Maryland’s two other Catholic dioceses is a sign that the state is expanding and intensifying its probe.
The Prince George’s County executive is eclipsing her primary rivals when it comes to endorsements from elected officials on their home turf.
Eight Republican delegates sought an investigation citing donation irregularities highlighted by a controversial partisan filmmaker.
Creative Commons Attribution