In her quest to succeed Ben Cardin in Congress, Angela Alsobrooks will ask Maryland Democratic primary voters to elevate her from Prince George’s County executive to U.S. senator. That would be a historic promotion.

Over the last century, no one has gone from county executive to one of the state’s two Senate seats in Washington. All but one of Maryland senators of the last 50 years served in the U.S. House of Representatives first.

I’m not suggesting her lack of congressional experience is disqualifying. Far from it. Alsobrooks is a serious candidate who has an impressive record in local governance that already has earned her significant endorsements from Democratic leadership. But her candidacy is worth noting for the way it goes against Maryland’s electoral history.

Since the election of J. Glenn Beall in 1952, the only exception to the House-first rule was Joe Tydings, who was the U.S. Attorney in Baltimore before deciding to run for the Senate in 1964. Those who followed — Mac Mathias, J. Glenn Beall Jr. (son of J. Glenn Beall), Paul Sarbanes, Barbara Mikulski and Maryland’s current senators, Cardin and Chris Van Hollen — served in the House and waited for an opportunity to run for the Senate.

If Alsobrooks were to win the May 2024 primary and the following general election, she would be the state’s second female senator (after Mikulski) and the first Black Marylander to win a seat in the Senate.

She would also make that historic leap I mentioned — from local office to “the world’s most exclusive club.”

Allow me to share a little of this history. My survey of Maryland senators over the last century shows this: All male but one, all white, many of them lawyers.

Of those who served in the Senate during the early to mid 20th Century, only one went directly from the private sector, a position in an influential law firm, to the Senate. The rest had engaged in some form of public service. Herbert R. O’Conor, for instance, was a two-term Maryland governor, and three other senators held government administrative positions before launching their campaigns. The latter were part of the very old school of Maryland machine politics during the Great Depression and World War II.

By the 1970s, a different trend held: Maryland voters appeared to favor those with experience in the House as their senators.

Angela Alsobrooks seeks the Democratic nomination to succeed Cardin from her position as the executive and former state’s attorney of Maryland’s second-most populous county. (Prince George’s current population is somewhere around 947,000, according to U.S. census estimates, about 100,000 people shy of Montgomery County’s population count.)

The other day in Baltimore, Alsobrooks took me through her years as a prosecutor (2011-2018) and as county executive (since 2018) — details coming in future columns — and she said that public service, especially in the courts, had given her a deep understanding of Marylanders’ problems and needs.

The question about the leap she wants to make — from local office to the Senate chamber — is one she said she gets all the time. She answered the question with a good one of her own:

“How do you represent people you don’t understand? I have the sense that there are people in the Senate who scarcely understand the lives and the daily concerns of hardworking everyday people. And I think that, if you’re going to make policies that absolutely affect the livelihood and the future of people, you should certainly understand the practical impact of those policies. I can say that I do.”

Alsobrooks argues that all of what she has done over the years, from being a prosecutor in domestic violence cases to funding affordable housing initiatives as county executive, would inform her approach to federal legislation.

Her candidacy made me curious about the composition of the U.S. Senate: What were the members of the current body doing before they took office?

A report last year from the Congressional Research Service showed that 47 of the 100 senators had previously served in the House.

Thirteen of the senators had been governors; 16 of them attorneys general of their states, and three had served as secretaries of state. Nine had previously been employed as prosecutors. Three of them had served as U.S. ambassadors. Four were physicians, one an optometrist. Two were ministers, two were software company executives, six were farmers, two were bankers, and one had been a geologist. Seven senators had been mayors.

The CRS report notes that the professions the senators reported were not necessarily the ones they practiced immediately prior to election. So it’s hard to declare the promotion Alsobrooks seeks to be nationally unique. But, should she succeed, she will have busted through the House-first rule established with the results of senatorial elections here over the last 50 years.

Alsobrooks’ chief rival for the Democratic nomination, David Trone, represents Maryland’s 6th District in the House. He’s already outspent her in the campaign by a 10-1 margin.

So we have a business owner and third-term member of Congress with lots of money running against an experienced local official with, so far, not as much funding. One candidate looks to take a time-tested step to the Senate from the Rayburn House Office Building, the other an unprecedented leap from the county executive’s office in Largo. This could be the most intriguing political contest in Maryland in years.