McClain Delaney, Trone spar over immigration, abortion, wealth in 6th Congressional District race

Potomac Democrats are top contenders to win seat representing part of MoCo

June 19, 2026 12:09 p.m. | Updated: June 19, 2026 12:10 p.m.

April McClain Delaney and David Trone. Photo credit: Courtesy photos

“Whatever it takes.”

That’s how much Potomac businessman David Trone in late February told Bethesda Today he would be willing to spend out of his own pocket to recapture his former seat in Congress representing Maryland’s 6th District.

With four days to go until Tuesday’s primary election, he appears to be following through on that pledge.

As of June 3, the last day covered by the latest round of campaign finance reports filed with the Federal Election Commission, Trone (D) had loaned his campaign a total of $25 million this election cycle — putting him on track to break his own record for self-funding in a U.S. House race, assuming the loans aren’t repaid. Such loans by candidates rarely are.

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Trone, the co-owner of national alcoholic beverage retailer Total Wine & More, represented Maryland’s 6th District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2019 to 2025. He opted not to seek re-election to his House seat in 2024, instead running unsuccessfully for an open U.S. Senate seat—a campaign financed by a near-record $63 million from his personal fortune.

U.S Rep. April McClain Delaney (D), also of Potomac, won election to the vacant 6th District seat that year. Now seeking a second term, McClain Delaney also has committed personal money to her campaign, though not to the same extent as Trone. The most recent round of campaign finance reports puts her election-cycle loan total at $7.4 million.

McClain Delaney, an attorney and the wife of former 6th District Rep. John Delaney (D), has seized on the size of Trone’s campaign spending as evidence that he will be unaccountable to voters in her district.

“I think that you actually should have to raise money,” McClain Delaney told Bethesda Today in a late May interview. “Because when people give you a dollar, they’re investing in you … if they give me $10, they’resaying, ‘I’m buying what she’s selling.’ ”

Personal fortunes

Their personal fortunes have underwritten a virtually non-stop series of 30-second TV spots, in which the two candidates have lobbed charges at each other involving such hot-button issues as abortion and immigration. Delaney has accused Trone of enabling hardline conservatives such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, after Trone got into the race in late 2025 blasting Delaney for votes for Republican-sponsored bills early in the second term of President Donald Trump.

The district includes all of Frederick, Washington, Allegany and Garrett counties as well as a swath of Montgomery County that starts in Gaithersburg and is home to about a quarter of the county’s voters.

The district is both economically and politically diverse. Allegany County is among Maryland’s poorest counties and voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Montgomery County is among the state’s wealthiest, and Democrats here outnumber Republicans 4-1.

Trone insists many 6th District voters see his willingness to spend personal money on political causes as a net positive.

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“I don’t belong to country clubs, that’s not my thing. I don’t own golf clubs, that’s not my thing,” Trone told Bethesda Today in late February. “There’s a lot of things you can spend money on, but to spend money to change this country for the better …. and make yourself fully independent — my opponent doesn’t do that.”

Both candidates have characterized one another in campaign materials and in interviews as being billionaires. A Bloomberg News analysis in 2023 placed Trone’s family fortune at $2.4 billion.

McClain Delaney told Bethesda Today her personal net worth is closer to $100 million, but acknowledged she and her husband have additional non-liquid assets. Earlier this month, Forbright bank, founded by John Delaney, was valued at $900 million, according to a Reuters report. Delaney owns about 4% of the bank’s shares, and available documents in recent years have suggested his net worth may approach $250 million.

Ultimately, McClain Delaney said, Trone is making a distinction without a difference to voters in the district.

“If you’re worth $50 million or a billion, there is a huge disparity there, but for the person who can’t even pay their rent it’s all the same,” she said.

A campaign about votes

For his part, Trone sees the discussion of his personal wealth as a distraction from real issues in the 6th District race.

“We’ve really worked hard to make this campaign about her votes,” he said of McClain Delaney in an early June interview with Bethesda Today.

One of those votes targeted by the Trone campaign was McClain Delaney’s support for the Laken Riley Act.

In one of her first actions as a U.S. representative, McClain Delaney joined Republicans and 47 other Democrats in voting in January 2025 to pass the bill requiring the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to detain undocumented immigrants accused or convicted of certain property crimes. She was the only Maryland Democrat to support the legislation.

Critics of the act argue it allows the federal government to violate immigrants’ due process rights in pursuit of Trump’s aggressive deportation goals.

Reflecting on her vote in late May, McClain Delaney said she could not have known in early January 2025 that the policy would be carried out by the “lawless” and well-funded U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that exists today.

She has since taken a harder line against ICE, pushing back against a planned immigration detention center in Washington County and voting against the Republican-led Stop Illegal Reentry Act of 2025. Trone argues his entrance into the 6th District race in December 2025 prompted that shift.

“I would not vote for it now,” McClain Delaney told Bethesda Today of the Laken Riley Act. “Having said that, I did take a survey before I voted on that, and many, many of my constituents wanted that vote and thanked me for it afterwards.”

While it is considered Maryland’s most competitive congressional district, the 6th District leans left, with nearly 30,000 more registered Democrats than registered Republicans as of June 6, according to State Board of Elections data. But McClain Delaney says she was elected to represent all of her constituents, even those who did not vote for her. That philosophy has helped her turn some Trump voters in Western Maryland, she said.

“If you keep showing up, you start having trust,” McClain Delaney told Bethesda Today.

Does Trone agree that being an effective representative for a “purple” district at times requires crossing the party line?

“That’s a big old hell no,” Trone told Bethesda Today on June 3. “[McClain Delaney] is voting and acting like a Republican, like a Trumper, and we can’t stand for that. That’s why we’re here.”

Trone has also taken aim at McClain Delaney for her vote to pass the fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, which funds the U.S. military. The bill passed out of the House with an amendment to block the Pentagon’s policy of providing paid leave to service members who travel for an abortion, but the amendment was later dropped in negotiations.

In campaign advertisements, Trone has touted his family foundation’s support for the Women’s Health Center of Maryland in Cumberland in Allegany County, which also serves people from states such as West Virginia that have strict limits on services the clinic provides including abortion and gender-affirming care.

Following her vote on the National Defense Authorization Act, McClain Delaney issued a statement saying she was “deeply disappointed that some of my Republican colleagues chose to inject partisan, barely germane amendments into this bill.”

She said she voted against each one of those amendments, but supported the overall bill because “at its core, it honors those who serve, protects the families who stand behind them and secures our nation’s safety and wellbeing.”

Asked in late May about Trone’s contributions to the Western Maryland clinic, McClain Delaney said she finds her opponent’s focus on his philanthropy “weird.”

“He talks all the time about West Virginia women coming into the Allegany clinic. Listen, I’m very pro-choice. I’ve had four babies. I almost died of an ectopic [pregnancy],” she said. “But [Trone] has put millions, two or three million dollars, amplifying the fact that he made a $50,000 or $100,000 donation … . He could have put the millions and millions [into the clinic] and actually really help them do the things they need to do.”

Which endorsements matter?

In his June 3 interview with Bethesda Today, Trone also highlighted his endorsements from the National Organization for Women PAC and Reproductive Justice Maryland as evidence that he is the more pro-abortion rights candidate in the race.

“It’s great we have women in the race. But we’re the one that supports, ironically, and are endorsed by, ironically, all the women’s groups,” Trone told Bethesda Today on June 3.

Though Trone has won some key organizational endorsements, McClain Delaney has more heavy-hitters on her side — among her endorsers are Gov. Wes Moore (D), House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-California), House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) and all eight other Democrats – two senators and six House members — in Maryland’s federal delegation.

“They all have served with him, and they all endorsed me for a reason. I’m a team player, and I believe that you have to work together,” McClain Delaney told Bethesda Today in late May. “I think Trone is very much not a team player here, and is doing it for his own reasons. But I’m not sure that is going to be the successful ticket to actually get stuff done for people in Montgomery County, or across this district, or across the state for that matter.”

Trone dismissed McClain Delaney’s comments about his relationships with former colleagues in Congress and at the state level. He said the more relevant endorsements come from elected leaders in the district, such as Frederick County Executive Jessica Fitzwater (D), who is supporting his campaign.

“Folks don’t really understand how the club — the club of congressmen — works. All the incumbents always endorse the other incumbents,” Trone told Bethesda Today on June 3. “When I was the incumbent, all of them endorsed me. Now she’s the incumbent, so they endorse her. It means nothing.”

Other disagreements

There are other policy differences between McClain Delaney and Trone. Unlike McClain Delaney, Trone has said he would not have voted for House Resolution 488, which denounced “the antisemitic terrorist attack in Boulder, Colorado,” in June 2025 and expressed gratitude to law enforcement officers, including ICE personnel, for responding to the incident.

“Thanking ICE in the middle of this tragedy all across our country, that’s a betrayal to our district. That’s a betrayal to our Democratic progressive values,” Trone told Bethesda Today in late February.

McClain Delaney was not the only Maryland Democrat to vote in favor of the resolution — she was joined by Reps. Sarah Elfreth (D-Dist. 3) and Steny Hoyer (D-Dist. 5). Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Dist. 8) of Takoma Park voted no along with Reps. Glenn Ivey (D-Dist. 4) and Kweisi Mfume (D-Dist. 7). Rep. Johnny Olszewski Jr. (D-Dist. 2) voted present.

Speaking about the resolution in late May, McClain Delaney stood behind her vote.

“I’m sorry, I don’t care who you are — if you are helping rescue people maimed by a Molotov cocktail, you get your gratitude,” she told Bethesda Today.

Trone and Delaney also disagree about term limits for members of Congress. Trone co-chairs the national nonprofit U.S. Term Limits with Florida Gov DeSantis (R). The pair in October 2025 penned a New York Times op-ed titled “The Real Lesson of the Shutdown: We Need Term Limits.”

McClain Delaney told Bethesda Today in late May that she is “not for term limits per se,” believing Congress should focus on other aspects of the electoral process such as campaign finance reform. Still, McClain Delaney, now 62, said, she would likely be “done” after three or four terms.

“I want to be able to have another chapter after this,” she said.

Despite their policy differences, there is overlap between the two candidates. Trone, 70, and McClain Delaney embody a rags-to-riches mythos, with both having been raised on farms in rural parts of the country — he in Pennsylvania, she in Idaho.

Neither one lives in the 6th District — members of the U.S. House are required to live in the state, but not the district they represent — but both believe they have something unique to offer voters there. Their homes in affluent Potomac lie about 10 miles outside of the current district lines.

“I understand business better than anybody in the United States Congress, and I’m unbelievably progressive. That [makes me] a bit of a unicorn,” Trone told Bethesda Today in late February.

Trone’s progressivism was less pronounced during his six years representing the 6th District: Progressive Punch, which rates members of Congress based on their votes, placed Trone in the ideological center of the House Democratic Caucus. Trone has said McClain Delaney votes with Trump 22% of the time, citing a figure from the political media organization VoteHub.

Much of Trone’s focus in Congress was on building bipartisan coalitions to pass bills to combat the opioid epidemic, which killed one of Trone’s nephews and has had an outsized impact on western Maryland and other rural areas across the country.

McClain Delaney said her background in the nonprofit sector has taught her how to convene different stakeholders in the public and private spheres to “get things done.” An attorney, she spent 15 years as director of the Washington office of Common Sense Media, an organization that focuses on online safety for children.

“I think that’s how you have to approach it in this Congress, because it’s easy to get things done when you’re in the majority,” McClain Delaney said in late May. “It’s really hard when you’re in the minority, and you have to think creatively about who you work with, or how you’re able to uplift an issue.”

Asked whether she thinks Democrats will remain in the minority following the mid-term elections, McClain Delaney hedged.

“I think the wind is at our back,” she told Bethesda Today. “But we don’t want to mess it up.”

Apart from McClain Delaney and Trone, there are six other candidates seeking the Democratic nomination in the 6th District this year. They include Montgomery County residents Alexis Goldstein, Ethan P. Wechtaluk and George Gluck, along with two Frederick County residents and a Washington County resident.

There is also a Republican primary for that party’s 6th District nomination, with Chris Burnett of Gaithersburg, an attorney and Marine veteran, and perennial candidate Robin Ficker of Boyds as the leading contendersout of three GOP candidates.

For more information about candidates in the upcoming election, check out Bethesda Today’s 2026 Primary Election Voters Guide.

Louis Peck, a contributing editor for Bethesda Magazine, can be reached at lou.peck@bethesdamagazine.com.

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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine