MD-3 · House

The district, in brief

Maryland's 3rd district encompasses all of Howard County, much of Anne Arundel County including Annapolis, and parts of Carroll County. The lines are the map first used in 2022 and were not redrawn for this cycle. On these lines the facts record a 2024 presidential two-party margin of 24.5 points for the Democrat.

The incumbent is Democrat Sarah Elfreth, elected with 59.3% of the vote in 2024. She won the Democratic primary with 74.7% over four opponents, the nearest being Austin Dyches, a U.S. Army veteran, at 10.7%. The Republican nominee is Berney Flowers, a former inter-agency technical advisor for NORAD and USNORTHCOM who ran for the 2nd district in 2022 and for this district in 2024; he won a four-way Republican primary with 48.9%, ahead of John White at 25.8%, Ray Bly at 15.2% and Felix Seier at 10.1%. Seier, a U.S. Navy veteran, had first filed as a Democrat before switching to the Republican race. As of June 30, 2026 Elfreth had raised $1,139,858 with $335,826 on hand; Flowers had raised $9,860 with $2,016 on hand.

Every rater listed calls the seat D: Decision Desk HQ (July 14, 2026), the Cook Political Report (February 6, 2025), Inside Elections (March 7, 2025) and Sabato's Crystal Ball (April 10, 2025). The text records no district polls.

A paragraph quoting a model forecast from the day this brief was written is omitted; the current forecast is at the top of this page.

The facts, each beside its sentence

Not in the source: The text gives no presidential results for the district; the 2024 baseline comes from the facts only.; No district polls are recorded, and the model's basis says no district polls.; The endorsements section names no endorsers.; No general-election ratings finer than 'D' are given (no Lean/Likely/Safe).

Read from the district's section of Wikipedia's state page (CC BY-SA), archived as 088007af2650; written by claude-fable-5-1 (batch reader) on 2026-09-30 and checked mechanically: every quote occurs verbatim in the archived text, every number in the brief occurs in the inputs. No probability here is the reader's.

Who holds the seat now

Sarah Elfreth (Democrat), in this chamber since 2025, 1 term. Committees: House Committee on Natural Resources; House Committee on Armed Services.

From the congress-legislators dataset (CC0), archived as ae8cb9477c48. For a Senate race this lists both of the state's senators; the one whose term ends in the election year holds the seat on the ballot. For a House district redrawn for 2026 it is the member elected under the old lines with this number, who may be running elsewhere; the dossier above names who is running here.

How it has voted for president

A shift of 9.3 points toward the Democrats from 2016 to 2024. county returns placed on the current lines by 2020 block population; MEDSL county file (2016), an MIT-licensed county file (2020, checked against certified state results) and MEDSL precinct returns (2024). For a district split across counties this is an estimate, and where the state published the exact 2024 figure for these lines, that exact figure is the one the model uses.

Who are the voters?

Of about 532,733 adults 25 and over. In 2020 the district voted 63.1% Democratic (two-party) for president. With the same preferences and a 2022-style midterm turnout, it would vote 62.9% Democratic: the midterm electorate alone moves the margin 0.2 points toward Republicans. Group shares are estimated from how results vary across the state's census tracts (ecological inference, anchored to Pew's 2020 validated-voter figures) and calibrated to this district's actual 2020 vote; turnout is the Census survey's state rate by race and national rate by education, whose state samples carry margins of several points.

Not answered here: how each group will vote in 2026. These are 2020 preferences; this profile is description, not yet an input to the forecast.

The money

FEC bulk candidate summaries through June 30, 2026; $1,646 of independent expenditures for or against these candidates this cycle (FEC Schedule E, types 24E and 24A), which is the parties' and outside groups' own revealed view of whether this seat is in play.

The district in numbers

ACS 5-year 2023, the Census Bureau's own tabulation of this district (118th Congress lines). Unemployment is the BLS county series placed on the district by block population, not seasonally adjusted, so changes are same-month comparisons. Income, transfers and jobs are BEA county accounts placed the same way, compared with the average district. Every other figure is a named column of a named table in the Bureau's summary file, archived before it was read. This is what a reader knows about a district before looking at a poll; the model does not yet use it, and whether it should is a registered question.

Who is favoured, and by how much?

The 90% interval runs from +19.8 to +47.3 points, D-R. It is wide because this district has never been polled.

What is this built on?

A model trained on every contested House race 2012-2024 predicts this district's lean from its own record: presidential and House results on the current lines, incumbency, both candidates' prior offices, outside and party money before 1 October, demographics and public-assistance shares from the Census release before the election, local unemployment and income, and religious tradition. The national margin comes from presidential approval, the economy, the midterm penalty and the generic ballot corrected for its measured lean. Draws share national and state errors, so the seat total and this district come from the same simulation.

Not answered here: district polls, which are not yet folded in.

Why does the model say this?

Each figure is how far this district's predicted lean moves when that one feature is set to the typical value across 2026 districts, everything else held: 2024 presidential lean (D+26.0): 19.8 pts toward the Democrat; 2024 House lean (D+24.7): 8.7 pts toward the Democrat; experience gap (+4 levels, D minus R): 7.8 pts toward the Democrat; PAC money balance: 7.5 pts toward the Democrat; Democrat's experience (incumbent): 1.1 pts toward the Republican.

How sure is it, and of what?

Total sd 8.38 points, made of the seat's own volatility 90%, correlated polling error 10%. The decomposition is stored with the forecast rather than reconstructed, so a probability whose dominant input is a placeholder is visibly that.

Not answered here: a nowcast. 'If ballots were cast today' needs something that observes today, and for a House district nothing does. Publishing the election-day figure under both labels would make one forecast look like two.

How was this number made?

Run 0b33151b-a949-47f1-b845-564833a2b74d, house_district_prior/0.2.0, as of 2026-10-02. Promoted by a pre-registered gate: on 2016-2022 its Brier score was 0.036 against 0.049 for the previous method, and on a single 2024 run 0.023 against 0.032 (experiments/district_gate_result.md, with an independent review).