FREDERICK, Md. — The count in Frederick County has cost Republican state Sen. Bill Folden his seat. Democrat Lara Westdorp leads the District 4 Senate race in unofficial results from the Maryland State Board of Elections, and Folden said Saturday he planned to call her and concede.
The mail-in count decided District 4
Folden won Election Day voting by a wide margin, 18,678 votes to 13,433, and Westdorp took early voting 8,000 to 6,704. Mail-in ballots broke heavily her way, 7,370 to 2,524, enough to erase Folden’s lead.
Westdorp’s total stood at 28,803 votes in the board’s last refresh, late on Friday night. Folden had 27,906. The margin between them is 897 votes — 50.75% for Westdorp, 49.17% for Folden — and provisional ballots do not appear in the figures yet. Counting is still under way.
Her campaign put out a statement on Saturday morning. Westdorp noted there that ballots are still being counted, and she said she is confident she will be the winner. “I am humbled by the number of voters that chose to trust me to be their voice in Annapolis,” she wrote. “This win clearly demonstrates the power a community wields by coming together to fight for their futures.”
Folden told The Banner he had no regrets about his service or his campaign, and that he believed voters had cast their ballots as “a repudiation of Trump and his policies.” “There was nothing that me or the team that I ran with could have done differently.”
“It wasn’t a blue wave; it was a blue tsunami.”
He said he was ready to move on and was never defined by the senator’s title. “It was an opportunity to make things better for my home community and for Maryland, and we fell short this time,” he said.
Folden, a retired police officer and former sheriff’s deputy, was elected to the Senate in 2022 after serving a term in the House of Delegates, and he sat on the Judicial Proceedings Committee. Westdorp was chief of staff to former state Sen. Ron Young, has served on county government boards and owns a reflexology business in Frederick.
Westdorp’s win grows the Democratic majority in the Maryland Senate to 35 of the chamber’s 47 seats. The Senate Democratic Caucus backed her campaign, and a new slate founded by Democratic women senators raised $175,000, most of it going to support Westdorp, The Banner reported. “We also recognized a strong candidate in Frederick County that others might have overlooked,” said Sen. Cheryl Kagan, one of the slate’s organizers.
Several races in the Maryland House of Delegates were still uncalled on Saturday as ballot counting continued, but Democrats were likely to expand their majority in that chamber too, The Banner reported.
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