Mayor Martin O'Malley easily won a second term in yesterday's election as city voters gave him a decisive victory that firmly establishes him as Baltimore's pre-eminent power broker and positions him to launch a serious bid for governor.
After one term as mayor, the 41-year-old former prosecutor and city councilman has risen from a local political long shot in 1999 to what some polls suggest is the state Democratic Party's best hope at recapturing the governorship in 2006 from Republican Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.
"The fact that nobody with any real resources ran against him means he's unchallengeable in Baltimore," said Matthew A. Crenson, a Johns Hopkins University political scientist. "Baltimore is the tough case in Maryland. If he can make things work here, it says to the rest of the state that `You guys are easy compared to Baltimore.'"
GOP critics and some political observers doubt whether the rest of the state will have such an optimistic assessment of O'Malley's work in Baltimore, citing the city's intractable homicide rate and its continuing problems in city schools.
O'Malley won with a nearly 7-to-1 margin over his little-known Republican challenger, Elbert "Ray" Henderson, which came as no surprise in a city with far more registered Democrats than GOP voters. While O'Malley did not expect the same 90 percent margin he won with in 1999, he came close.
"Thank you to the people of Baltimore for continuing our progress. It is progress that has not been easily won," O'Malley told the hundreds who packed the Democratic rally in the downtown Wyndham Hotel's International Ballroom. "Eight Baltimore city police officers have given their lives for this progress."
O'Malley was surrounded by beaming family members and an ecstatic cast of the top Democratic leaders from the city and state as the mayor thanked Baltimore residents for their help.
"You, too, are a part of Baltimore's comeback," he said.
In the neighborhoods
On steps in front of a Federal Street home yesterday afternoon in East Baltimore's Oliver neighborhood, three good friends - Emmett Halford, Allen Lewis and James Terry - agreed that the city was improving. They each voted for O'Malley but said they hope he focuses more of his second term on Baltimore's public schools.
"He's definitely kept his word" about fighting crime, said Halford, 47, a contractor who lives in the Federal Street rowhouse. A few blocks from his home is the site where a drug dealer killed the seven-member Dawson family, one of the worst crimes during O'Malley's tenure.
