After raft of appointments, District 16 voters will finally get their say

Critics say Legislative District 16, in Montgomery County, is the poster child for everything that’s wrong with the current system for filling vacancies in the Maryland General Assembly.

Four times in a year and a half, from early 2023 to mid-2024, the district saw openings in its state Senate or state House delegation. Each time, the vacancies were filled by votes from the two dozen members of the Montgomery County Democratic Central Committee, rather than the voters in the district.

Democratic voters will finally have their say in the June 23 primary.

The district, based in Bethesda and taking in parts of Chevy Chase and Potomac, is usually a beehive of Democratic activity in inside-the-Beltway Montgomery County. Vacancies often attract a great number of candidates, and the district has produced several long-serving leaders who went on to bigger things, including former Attorney General Brian Frosh (D), former state Treasurer Nancy Kopp (D), former U.S. Rep. Connie Morella (R-8th), and Susan Lee (D), the current Maryland secretary of State.

It was Lee’s decision to take a job in the Moore administration after 21 years in the legislature that triggered the District 16 chain reaction. Her departure from the Senate paved the way for then-Del. Ariana Kelly (D), who was first elected to the House in 2010, to be appointed to Lee’s Senate seat.

Kelly’s ascension created a vacancy in the House, which was filled by now-Del. Sarah Wolek (D), a former federal official and University of Maryland professor, just days before the end of the 2023 legislative session.

When Kelly left the Senate in 2024 to become executive director of the Maryland Commission on Women, her seat was filled by then-Del. Sara Love (D). Love’s House seat was subsequently filled in a contentious appointment process by now-Del. Teresa Saavedra Woorman (D), a Montgomery County government staffer, who has held the seat since the summer of 2024.

Montgomery County Democratic Committee picks Woorman for District 16 vacancy

Now Love, who was first elected to the House in 2018, winning the Democratic primary by 12 votes, is facing voters in a Senate election for the first time, though she’s held the seat for almost two years. She’s heavily favored in the upcoming Democratic primary against her challenger, Lou James Bartolo, a registered nurse and health care administrator.

It’s the House primary in District 16 that is generating interest and unearthing old grudges – and is harder to predict.

One of the surprising things about this primary, considering it features two unelected and theoretically untested incumbents, is how few candidates there are, in an area with so many ambitious Democrats. Usually District 16 House races attract far more wannabes.

This four-way race for three seats features Wolek; Woorman; three-term Del. Marc Korman (D), the chair of the powerful House Environment and Transportation Committee and the only District 16 incumbent who has already won election to the office he’s seeking; and Tazeen Ahmad, chief financial officer of a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm with a long list of local civic and political activism, including a stint as president of the influential Women’s Democratic Club of Montgomery County.

The Democratic primary winners will face a lone Republican, Ann Guthrie Higston, a board member of the Montgomery County Taxpayers League, in the general election. The last time a Republican won an election in the district was in 1990, and that isn’t likely to change this year.

For this year’s primary, Love and Korman are running as a ticket, and yard signs touting their alliance can be seen throughout the district. Korman has finished first in the House primaries of 2022 and 2018, and most political professionals and party activists expect him to top the primary this year, too. That leaves the two appointed incumbents and Ahmad to slug it out for the other two slots.

When Korman and Love announced in the spring of 2025 that they would run together, they decided then not to anoint anybody else, given that their two House colleagues were appointees.

Love sworn in as newest senator from Montgomery County

“We knew we were going to run together – we had run together before,” Korman said in an interview. “This was a logical outgrowth of that. We wanted to let voters have their say” on the other House seats.

A curious byproduct of that decision means that the district’s two white incumbents are running as a team while three women of color scramble for the other two House seats. Some voters may believe that Korman is the district’s only delegate. But Korman said that the contours of the contest and the roster of contenders weren’t fully known when he and Love made their decision to team up exclusively.

In the three other Montgomery County districts that saw appointees to the House in the current legislative term, the incumbent senators have chosen to run on a ticket with their appointed House members.

‘A lot of people don’t realize who’s representing them in state government’

The District 16 candidates barely differ when it comes to articulating their priorities, which includes boosting education, accessible child care, economic opportunity, affordability measures, and better transit. All see part of their jobs as standing in opposition to the Trump administration – and protecting their constituents from the fallout from federal policies.

“Trump got me out of the federal government and got me involved in politics,” Wolek said during a recent online candidate forum sponsored by the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Democratic Club. “We still need to find the time to build Maryland in the way we want to see it.”

With so few differences, the race has essentially become a question of whether Ahmad can make the case that voters ought to fire one of the incumbents and hire her. It can also, indirectly, be seen as a referendum on the appointment process for legislative vacancies. (Ahmad applied to fill the House vacancy in 2023, when Wolek won the appointment.)

“A lot of people don’t realize who’s representing them in state government,” Ahmad told a roomful of two dozen voters at a high-rise condominium complex in Bethesda on a pleasant May evening. “We’ve got people there that you haven’t actually voted for.”

To fill House vacancy, Montgomery Democrats pick university professor and former Obama White House official

During appearances around the district, Ahmad ticks off her life story: Born in India, grew up in several countries, lived in District 16 for 40 years and raised a family there. She talks about her work with the Maryland Equal Rights Action Network, Interfaith Works, a leading Montgomery County philanthropy, and the Women’s Democratic Club, in addition to her professional credentials.

“When I see a need, I always try to do something about it,” she said at the condo meeting. “But one of the things about me is, I never try to do it alone. I always bring people along with me.”

Ahmad boasts a substantive list of supporters that includes U.S. Rep. April McLain Delaney (D-6th), former Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett (D), former Maryland Democratic Chair Susan Turnbull, several leaders of the Women’s Democratic Club, national political figures and unions like the Metropolitan Washington Council of the AFL-CIO, AFSCME Maryland Council 3 and the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689.

“In any other state, she would be running for Congress,” said former Somerset Mayor Jeffrey Slavin, a longtime Montgomery County Democratic leader and another Ahmad supporter. “She has all the skills and experience to run for Congress. She’d be a great member of Congress. In Annapolis, she’ll be ready to hit the ground running.”

But Ahmad has her critics, too.

During the online candidate forum, Woorman made an oblique reference to one of her opponents crossing a picket line, clearly targeting Ahmad. She was referring to a longstanding union boycott of the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel and Conference Center, which hosts several major public events in Montgomery County. Democrats and some other groups have been loath to cross picket lines there and have labored to find alternate venues for their events.

Ahmad explained that she attended a breakfast at the conference center at the request of one of her fellow Interfaith Works board members, and because she didn’t see picketers outside the hotel had simply forgotten that a boycott was under way. The unions chose to endorse her anyway.

Woorman, a public information officer for the Montgomery County government, also took aim at Ahmad’s job as an executive with the bipartisan Capitol Hill Consulting Group lobbying firm.

“I don’t have a daytime job supporting corporate lobbyists,” she said.

At the same Democratic club candidate forum, Ahmad was sharply questioned by an activist about a newsletter her campaign put out that seemed to suggest that she was already a sitting legislator and eager to continue working “with colleagues” in Annapolis. Ahmad asserted that the item was “a typo” and that she was in no way trying to imply incumbency.

The activist who asked the question, Judith Hallett, was not satisfied.

“I’m a retired Latin teacher who’s always insisted on precise, grammatical English – and that excuse doesn’t sit well with me,” Hallett said.

Taking sides

But incumbency has its advantages: The three current House members have been endorsed by Gov. Wes Moore (D), CASA in Action, the Maryland State Education Association and several other unions.

Wolek has endorsements from several District 16 icons, including Frosh, Kopp, Turnbull and former state House Majority Leader Bill Frick (D), along with Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich (D), and former Maryland House Speaker Adrienne Jones (D-Baltimore County).

Woorman’s supporters include the current House speaker, Joseline Peña-Melnyk (D-Prince George’s and Anne Arundel), a Latina immigrant like Woorman who has been a mentor to the younger lawmaker and headlined a recent fundraiser for her.

Woorman’s appointment to the House in summer 2024 came after an attempt to derail the candidacy of another one of the applicants, Diana Conway, a well-respected party activist and community leader who, like Ahmad, had been president of the Women’s Democratic Club of Montgomery County. Court records were circulated surreptitiously to media outlets in the days leading up to the central committee vote, showing that Conway had been arrested for drunken driving in Frederick County a decade earlier.

Woorman was a member of the central committee then – as many appointed legislators across the state are at the time of their appointments – and there’s little suggestion the panel’s vote would have gone differently without the dossier drop on Conway. But the way the appointment went down continues to rankle some Montgomery County political insiders, and some of Conway’s supporters are hoping for revenge.

Woorman has pointed out that she supports legislation that would require special elections for most legislative vacancies – though those bills have run aground in Annapolis over the last several years for a variety of reasons. She noted that the appointment process in Maryland dates back “to when FDR was president.”

“It’s long past time that we update it,” she said.