Angela Alsobrooks’ attorney has reached out to Washington, D.C., and Prince George’s County to address potential real estate tax underpayments, as Alsobrooks sought to explain the “inadvertent” errors that have put her U.S. Senate campaign on the defensive.

Political analysts debated whether there would be lingering effects from Alsobrooks wrongly claiming tax credits that are supposed to apply to a homeowner’s primary residence.

“I think for Alsobrooks the big question is whether she can explain it in a plausible way,” said Michael Towle, the political science department chair at Mount St. Mary’s University. “There doesn’t always seem to be a clear pattern to how voters will respond to legal issues, as we have seen with former President Trump.”

According to letters sent to both jurisdictions Saturday by attorney Peter Kolker, Alsobrooks — the Prince George’s County executive who is running against Republican former Gov. Larry Hogan for an open Senate seat — claimed the homestead credit on a home she was renting out in Prince George’s County and another rental property in Washington that had belonged to her grandmother, Lelia Bright.

Alsobrooks also was receiving a senior citizen tax credit that had applied to Bright and shouldn’t have continued when Alsobrooks assumed ownership and began paying the mortgage on the family home after her grandmother, who is now deceased, left the home in 2005.

“Ms. Alsobrooks was unaware that these continued during her ownership since the tax bills were issued in Ms. Bright’s name after the property had been transferred to Ms. Alsobrooks,” said a letter that Kolker wrote to a Prince George’s County-based tax assessment supervisor. “Ms. Alsobrooks wishes to correct this error by paying any tax differential that would have been appropriate during her ownership of the property as she did not reside in it and was not eligible.”

CNN, which first reported the tax errors, said that between 2005 and 2017, Alsobrooks was able to save nearly $14,000 in taxes on her home in Washington.

“I’m sure Larry Hogan will use it in ads,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “Voters don’t like it when public officials don’t pay their taxes. But all by itself, this wouldn’t be enough to defeat her. In the Trump era of scandals, it takes a lot of incoming missiles just to dent a battleship.”

The tax credit circumstances were different in Prince George’s County than in Washington, D.C.

In Prince George’s County, Alsobrooks’ campaign said, she moved from one home to another in 2015 and neglected to transfer the homestead credit. That meant, the campaign said, that she was incorrectly accepting a tax credit on her former home — which she was renting out — but losing out on the credit in her new home.

Because the new home is assessed at a higher rate, “she ended up paying more in taxes than she would have had the credit transferred over. Nevertheless, Angela is working to repay any credits received on the old property,” said Connor Lounsbury, Alsobrooks’ senior adviser.

According to the campaign, Alsobrooks received at least $2,600 in homestead deductions on the former property between 2020 and 2024 but would have gotten an estimated $4,892 if she had correctly transferred the credit.

Hogan’s campaign declined to comment Monday. On Sunday, Blake Kernan, a spokesperson for Hogan, said in a statement that Alsobrooks had taken advantage “of tax credits reserved for the poor and elderly. It’s deeply disturbing that Angela Alsobrooks thinks the rules don’t apply to her. … She claims to be unaware of tax laws it was her job to enforce.”

Alsobrooks and Hogan are seeking the seat held by the retiring Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin. In opposing Hogan, Alsobrooks has depicted him as critical to the GOP’s chances of controlling of the Senate, in which Democrats have a 51-49 majority.

“Right now, her campaign is focused on chipping away at Hogan’s generally positive reputation in the state among Republicans, independents and Democrats,” said Flavio Hickel, an assistant political science professor at Washington College on the Eastern Shore

Hickel said voters are not as familiar with Alsobrooks as Hogan and the tax issue could cause “confusion among voters that are not paying attention enough to absorb the nuance of this story or that it might be an honest oversight.”

Homestead tax credit issues have surfaced before. A decade ago, a Baltimore Sun investigation found that hundreds of city homeowners were improperly receiving the credit on second homes and rentals, including Wes Moore — now Maryland’s governor — in 2013.

At the time, Moore told The Sun he wasn’t aware of any issues with the home’s taxes.

“We would never willingly try to receive a credit for something we did not earn or wasn’t justified,” he said. “We really just did not know.”

The Sun’s investigation found that homestead troubles were a common problem in part because there is no formal way to notify the state that you no longer live in your home.