Larry Hogan, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Maryland, won’t vote for Donald Trump for president. In 2020, Hogan cast his ballot for Ronald Reagan. Reagan, as Democratic candidate Angela Alsobrooks was quick to remind Hogan on Thursday in the only debate of the campaign, is “a deceased individual.”

If your campaign is mainly about proving that you are a strong guy who will stand up to your own party’s domineering presidential candidate, yet you can’t bring yourself to make the hard choice and vote for a president with a pulse, maybe you’re not quite ready to be the senator from independence.

That was Alsobrooks’s basic argument throughout the debate, just as it has been through a blizzard of TV ads portraying Hogan as a Republican who would vote with a Republican majority in the Senate, no matter how much he despises Trump.

This was a pleasant, educational debate. Both candidates were calm, likable and pretty straightforward for politicians. They purported to respect each other and said nice things about each other. (They also called each other liars, but these days, we’ll take what we can get.)

Still, voters can be excused if they come away from this debate a bit confused about political parties and their meaning right now. Hogan is a lifelong Republican who served two terms as........

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