Former governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan, is running for Maryland’s vacant Senate seat this November and is hoping to become a champion for Israel in the U.S. Senate.

Hogan has not held political office in Maryland since 2022, when his second term as Maryland governor ended. He was the third most popular governor in the United States, with a 70% approval rating when he left office, according to a 2022 Morning Consult poll. Hogan has nonetheless remained active in politics. He briefly considered running for president at the urging of his dear friend, Senator Joseph Lieberman, z”l. Ultimately, he decided not to do so and endorsed Nikki Haley for president instead.

Peter Kurz has two foremost passions in life: Israel and baseball. As a ten-year-old from the Upper West Side in New York City, he traveled to Israel for the first time in 1967, and began his lifelong love of the Jewish state. Two years later, in 1969, the New York Mets won the World Series, defeating the Baltimore Orioles, which solidified his love of baseball.

Despite making aliyah in 1976, Kurz did not abandon his passion for the American national pastime. Yet Kurz’s penchant for baseball has often been a lonely experience for him in Israel, a country where basketball and soccer are substantially more popular. He has dedicated much of his professional life to changing the perception of baseball among Israelis. In 1998, he began coaching the sporadic local Israeli Little League team and worked his way up to secretary-general, president of the Israel Baseball Association, and now general manager of the national Israeli baseball team.

It’s not uncommon for a candidate who loses an election to cry foul, claiming fraud or voter intimidation as a means to reverse the results in their favor. Generally speaking, a candidate is in a very weak position if his or her only hope for winning the election rests on voter fraud. Most of the time, nothing ever materializes from such accusations. On occasion, the losing candidate will file a lawsuit seeking court intervention to overturn the results. These kinds of cases are difficult to prove and are often unsuccessful.

In November 1994, Ellen Sauerbrey, the Republican candidate for governor, narrowly lost to Paris N. Glendenning by a margin of 5,993 votes. Soon thereafter, Sauerbrey was in court asserting that certain voters, primarily in Baltimore City, listed addresses that were connected to abandoned or razed buildings and that the whereabouts of these voters could not be confirmed. In the end though, Sauerbrey’s lawyers could only prove that 3,600 votes of the entire vote count were fraudulent, which was certainly not enough to sway the election in the other direction.

The fireworks were on display in full force at the first Republican debate of the 2016 primary season in Charleston, South Carolina, on January 14. I was privileged to be in the debate hall and later in the “spin room.” After going through airport-style security directed by the secret service, I, along with crowds of other people with tickets in hand, entered the North Charleston Coliseum Performing Arts Center and excitedly awaited the start of the debate. At around 8:50 p.m., RNC Chairman Reince Preibus took to the stage and poured enthusiasm into the packed house. Before announcing the moderators, he passionately proclaimed, “We are the party that is diverse. The other side is boring, old, and stale.” He then assured the audience that the RNC is committed to whoever is the Republican nominee, putting to rest any speculation that the RNC would not back Donald Trump should he become the nominee of the party.