The Race for Hoyer’s Seat Is the Real Election
Maryland 5th District Congressional Candidate Harry Jarin sits down in an exclusive interview with TANTV News Editor-in-Chief and Host of TANTV Civics & Political Voices, Adedayo Fashanu.
The June 23 Democratic primary for Maryland’s 5th Congressional District is not a primary in any conventional sense. The district — anchored in Prince George’s County and extending through Charles, Calvert, and St. Mary’s counties — is rated Safe Democratic by every major election forecaster. Whoever walks out of this primary almost certainly walks into Congress. That is the race.
Steny Hoyer held this seat for 44 years. He served as House Majority Leader. He was one of the most powerful legislators in Washington, and his absence leaves a vacuum that more than 20 Democratic candidates rushed to fill.
Harry Jarin was the first.
“Congress couldn’t solve basic issues, and people gave up hope,” Jarin told TANTV’s Civics and Political Voices. “The old guard in Washington had decades to fix the problems we’re now drowning in. Democrats lost because too many voters stopped believing we could actually deliver for them.”
Who Is Harry Jarin?
Jarin is a small business owner, volunteer firefighter, and economics graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He filed for this race in 2025 — before Hoyer had even announced his retirement — making him one of the longest-running candidates in the field.
He is not a career politician. He has no prior elected office. His partner worked at the DNC for years, which gave him, as he put it, “a front-row seat to how the party operates on the inside.”
What he saw did not impress him.
“Going to events at the White House or the Treasury Department, talking to people who were very high-ranking in the administration,” Jarin said, “I would then go back to my community in Maryland, back to my firehouse, and listen to the conversations around me. It was very apparent why the Democratic Party is failing to communicate with voters we need to win.”
That disconnect — between official Washington and everyday Prince George’s County — is the core of his campaign.
The Money Argument
Jarin raised $426,971 as of March 31, with $278,396 cash on hand. That puts him ahead of state senator Arthur Ellis and ahead of others in the field’s second tier. But it also reveals a structural challenge: of his total, $200,000 came from a personal loan he made to his own campaign, with roughly $31,000 from individual donors.
He addressed this directly when pressed.
“My campaign is entirely financed with my own money and individual contributions — and that’s it,” he said. “I don’t take any money from corporate PACs or groups like AIPAC.”
The contrast he is drawing is pointed. Front-runner Adrian Boafo — the 31-year-old state delegate from Bowie personally endorsed by Steny Hoyer — has over $6 million in outside money backing him. That includes an estimated $3.17 million from the cryptocurrency super PAC Protect Progress and $1.2 million from AIPAC’s United Democracy Project — the same organization that spent heavily to defeat progressive incumbents in primaries across the country.
“These groups are not doing this out of charity,” Jarin said. “They are going to expect something in return. And as Senator Chris Van Hollen pointed out earlier this week, the amount of money being spent here dwarfs what any of the candidates actually raised themselves.”
The implication is hard to miss. Boafo raised approximately $460,000 in Q1. More than 10 times that amount has been spent on his behalf by outside groups. TANTV has previously reported on how developer and PAC money is reshaping Democratic primaries across the DMV, from Montgomery County executive races to congressional districts across the region.
“The Fix Is In”
The biggest feedback Jarin says he hears from voters is resignation.
“They say, ‘Look, I’m happy to support you, but I feel like the fix is in,'” he told TANTV. “There’s a feeling of helplessness. Voters feel like whatever they do isn’t going to matter.”
He called it a toxic signal for American democracy — one that falls particularly hard on Democratic voters who have already been told, for a decade, that their party is fighting for them.
“The impression voters get when $6 million is spent in a primary is that the Democratic Party is just as corrupt as the Republican Party,” he said. “And part of this is how our media is structured — voters find it very hard to parse that out.”
Jarin ties this critique directly to the Boafo-Oracle controversy. A Jacobin investigation found that Boafo lobbied the Department of Homeland Security while Oracle was pursuing a cloud-services contract with ICE. Oracle now advertises providing AI-driven border surveillance to DHS. Jarin and several other candidates signed a joint letter calling on Boafo to denounce Oracle’s ICE contracts — a story TANTV covered in depth as part of its reporting on where the MD-05 candidates stand on AI, data centers, and tech accountability.
Boafo has not directly addressed the specifics of those lobbying contacts.
The Kitchen Table
On the issues, Jarin’s framing is deliberately practical. He is running in a district where federal workers, military families, and commuters feel the weight of national policy in immediate ways — in their paychecks, on their commutes, and in their healthcare decisions.
On housing and transit, he argued for transit-oriented development as a dual solution to both the housing shortage and the commuting crisis. He called for zoning reforms, citing a California by-right density law as a federal model worth adopting, and proposed dense housing around Odenton and Bowie Marc Rail stations. The Prince George’s County executive race has surfaced many of the same housing pressures bearing down on working families across the county.
“Every other week in Charles County, they take a farm and turn it into a new subdivision of single-family housing,” he said. “And the number one issue voters raise with me in that part of the district is traffic. The traffic is unbelievably bad — especially now that federal workers are being forced back to the office five days a week.”
On healthcare, Jarin supports what he calls a public-option model — not mandatory single-payer, but a universal system in which Medicare is available by default at the point of service, modeled on the Australian Medicare system. He stopped short of endorsing the full Medicare for All bills introduced in Congress since 2009, though he expressed support for the concept in principle. His position contrasts with that of candidate Wala Blegay, who told TANTV in a separate interview that she supports Medicare for All and has pushed for accountability on healthcare access in Prince George’s County.
“As a firefighter, I see people all the time who have fairly manageable medical conditions but can’t afford to stay on their medication consistently,” he said. “Eventually, that manageable condition turns into an emergency, and that’s when they call 911 and we show up. We all end up paying for that one way or another.”
On federal workers — the district’s most urgent economic issue — he went beyond talking points. He called DOGE’s cuts politically motivated and argued that Democrats failed to communicate the real value of what federal workers do.
“Recently, the federal government discovered a screwworm in Texas cattle that had been eradicated in the 1960s,” he said. “There was a USAID program that prevented the spread of this pest from Central America. DOGE cut it. Here we are. And we as Democrats didn’t do a good enough job explaining why that program mattered.”
ICE, Immigration, and Community Fear
Immigration enforcement is not an abstract issue in Maryland’s 5th District. Prince George’s County — home to some of the largest Central American immigrant communities on the East Coast — has seen documented ICE operations across Langley Park, Hyattsville, and Riverdale.
The county has moved to establish legal protections, as TANTV has reported, including the Prince George’s County immigration firewall limiting local cooperation with federal enforcement. Montgomery County has gone further, advancing the Unmask ICE Act requiring agents to display identification during operations in the county.
Jarin supports abolishing ICE and replacing it with a system that enforces immigration law without what he called the “militarized secret police” culture that has produced videos of masked, unidentified agents detaining — and in one Minneapolis case, killing — a U.S. citizen. The human stakes of ICE detention are not theoretical in the DMV. TANTV has reported on the case of Ludovic Mbock, a Cameroonian asylum seeker held in the Baltimore system for 18 years. And just this year, a federal judge halted construction of a new ICE detention facility in Hagerstown, citing procedural violations.
“My grandparents came to this country in the 1950s. They were Holocaust survivors. They were Jewish refugees from Europe,” Jarin told Adedayo Fashanu. “I recognize that this country has been a safe haven for people from all over the world. And we are in another cycle of anti-immigrant sentiment — and it is a really critical time in American history.”
The Generational Argument — and Its Limits
Jarin’s central pitch is generational change. He argues that Democratic leadership is still operating as if the Republican Party is the same institution that existed when Hoyer entered Congress in 1981.
“The Republican Party has been completely co-opted by a white supremacist fascist movement, which is MAGA,” he said. “And Democratic politicians, especially those in leadership, are still operating as if we can trust Republican politicians to operate in good faith. We can’t anymore.”
But the generational argument runs into a structural problem in this specific district. The Democratic primary base is overwhelmingly in Prince George’s County. Jarin lives in Edgewater, Anne Arundel County — outside the district’s dominant political geography. Boafo has PG County roots and Hoyer’s entire machine. Wala Blegay, the grassroots progressive who polled at 11% in a Baker internal survey, is a sitting PG County Council member whose full TANTV interview covers Gaza, AI, ICE, and the data center debate in detail.
Jarin’s answer to that geographic disadvantage is the social media argument. He says he has built his volunteer operation almost entirely through direct messages on Instagram and TikTok — and that this represents not just a campaign tactic but a governing theory.
“I wrote an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun before Hoyer even announced retirement on this exact issue,” he said. “The Democrats haven’t made the adjustment to the digital age. Republicans have been much better at it. Continuing to operate in the media environment the same way we did 30 or 40 years ago is simply not working.”
The Bigger Picture
Prediction markets give Jarin roughly 3% odds of winning the primary. Boafo sits at 73–78%. Baker and Dunn sit in the mid-teens. The race has attracted millions in fundraising and outside spending that dwarfs almost any other open-seat House primary in the country this cycle.
But Jarin’s argument, underneath the fundraising numbers and the poll deficits, is not really about whether he personally wins. It is about what a Boafo victory — built on $6 million in outside money, a Hoyer endorsement, and AIPAC infrastructure — tells the Democratic Party about what it is becoming. The AIPAC playbook is not new to the DMV: TANTV has covered how the same outside money networks targeted competitive primaries elsewhere in 2026, with mixed results.
“If the money wins here,” he told TANTV’s Adedayo Fashanu, “voters will look at that and say: this whole thing was bought and paid for. And that feeling — that toxic feeling of helplessness — is a big warning sign for our democracy.”
Early voting started June 11. The primary is June 23. Whoever wins almost certainly goes to Washington.
The question Maryland’s 5th District is answering right now is not just who replaces Steny Hoyer. It is whether the voters of Prince George’s County, Charles County, Calvert County, and St. Mary’s County believe the next member of Congress is chosen by them — or for them.
Visit his campaign at HarryMD5 or follow him at @Harry.jarin on all social platforms.
This interview was conducted as part of the TANTV Civic & Political Voices Network — designed to connect civic leaders, public officials, and trusted community voices directly with the residents they serve. Network members include Wanika Fisher, Ethan Wechtaluk and more… Watch the full interview at tantvnews.com and on YouTube.
