It’s probably not very often, if ever, that a Republican nomination to head a federal agency is compared to a Democratic mayor’s race in Baltimore, but that’s where I’m going here. It’s not crazy; I swear it makes sense. Just stick with me, and you’ll see.

When I lived in Baltimore in 2016, then-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake decided not to run for reelection. She was an accidental mayor, the city council president who ascended to the top job when a criminal scandal forced the mayor to resign. Rawlings-Blake served the second half of Sheila Dixon’s term, then won her own in 2011. She was never really good or comfortable in the job she found herself in, so she announced she wouldn’t seek reelection.

This led to a feeding frenzy of Baltimore politicians scrambling for the gig. Half the city council announced they would be running in the mayoral primary, meaning there would be an incredibly high turnover rate in the city’s power structure the following year, simply because half the power players were all running for one job that only one of them would win.

I viewed this as a great opportunity for the city to reset. It’s not often that there are so many open seats in government. Baltimore was in a bad place; the power of incumbency and the Democrat machine didn’t allow for many changes by voters, but this was voluntary — every council member running for........

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