When he began his U.S. Senate run in Maryland last year, Eric S. Wargotz was largely unknown. He still is.
Wargotz, 53, is the Republican nominee running against Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski. The wealthy physician has put more than $500,000 of his own into the campaign, yet he risks being outspent by a ratio of more than 20-to-1.
"You look at me, you say, 'My God, Eric, what are you, crazy?'" he recently told a tea party gathering in Montgomery County. "'How are you going to beat her with a couple hundred thousand versus a couple of million dollars?'"
It's a question Wargotz has some difficulty answering. And with the election less than three weeks away, his already slim prospects appear to be dwindling.
A recent poll found that four out of five Maryland voters didn't know enough about him to venture an opinion. The statewide survey, released this month by The Washington Post, showed Wargotz trailing the Democratic senator by 30 percentage points. Online election handicapper Nate Silver, after running 100,000 computer simulations, forecast his chance of winning next month's election at just 1 percent.
"We can do this," insists Wargotz, managing to sound buoyant about his prospects. "We can unseat entrenched incumbents who care more about their political lives than the folks who put them there."
The Ohio native is a member of the Board of County Commissioners in Queen Anne's, one of the state's least-populous counties. He runs a pathology practice in the Washington suburbs, and his wife, Cheryl-Ann, home-schools their three children, ages 9 through 13, at their waterfront home, complete with private tennis court, in the Queenstown area.
He defeated 10 similarly obscure candidates in last month's Republican primary, apparently on the strength of his personal bankroll. The largely self-funded candidate was the only one with TV ads, though he hasn't run any since.
A moderate conservative, he has shifted his party allegiances over the years. In an interview, Wargotz said he couldn't think of any major issues on which he parts company with the Republican Party. He does, though, support the use of medical marijuana, an outgrowth of his professional experience with cancer.
"You realize it has a greater palliative effect and antiemetic [nausea-easing] effect than a lot of the medications out there," he said.
Wargotz contends that Medicare, the federal health insurance program for those over 65 and certain disabled people, is unconstitutional. He wants Congress to repeal the new health care law or starve it of funding to force changes. He wants to make it harder for patients to reap outsize jury awards from doctors in malpractice suits. He also wants to put more emphasis on health savings accounts, an idea that failed to advance when Republicans controlled Congress and the White House, despite support from President George W. Bush.
A newcomer to statewide politics, he blundered when he told an interviewer last winter that he didn't think President Barack Obama was born in the United States. He brushes the topic aside now by saying that he doesn't question the legitimacy of Obama's U.S. citizenship.
Some former campaign staffers have described Wargotz as autocratic and overly demanding. Richard Cross, his communications director from September 2009 through March of this year, wrote on his blog that Wargotz "has gone through staff the way a fat kid devours Cheetos."
Wargotz wasn't an unpleasant person to work for, according to Cross. But like many doctors, "he's used to being the smartest guy in the room, as well as in an unchallenged position of authority over others."
With a county of only 36,000 voting-age residents as his base, he's struggled to build a grass-roots following around the state and generate the large sums of campaign money needed to unseat an incumbent senator. He said he sought financial help from the Republican National Committee, whose chairman, Michael S. Steele, is a former Maryland lieutenant governor and U.S. Senate nominee.
But in the 2010 fight for control of Congress, the national party's campaign committees are targeting contests regarded as competitive, and Maryland's Senate race is not among them.
"I think the national party is very narrow-sighted," Wargotz said. "It's fair to say I'm disappointed that we're not getting help from the national organizations."
Overshadowed by the Maryland governor's race, and with polls showing Mikulski potentially headed for a fifth election landslide in a row, the Senate campaign has been largely ignored.
"It's sad. Maybe this state isn't political enough to focus on more than one race at a time," said Don Murphy, a Republican consultant who advised Wargotz early in the campaign.
With the lack of news media attention, there has been little scrutiny of the challenger. For much of his life, Wargotz said, he was a political independent, becoming a Republican in the late 1980s or early '90s, then switching to the Democratic side for a time before re-registering as a Republican in 2002.
He has contributed to both major parties and to Democrats who represent Prince George's County, where his medical business is located. He gave to Democratic Rep. Steny H. Hoyer's 1998 re-election campaign, Federal Election Commission records show, and donated $1,000 to Democrat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's run for governor in 2002, according to the University of Maryland's Center for American Politics and Citizenship database.
"You know, very often we're asked to support candidates and write checks. And at the time, it had nothing to do with ideology," he said. "Fellow doctors who support people were rounding up checks, so I wrote that check, or whatever."
Since his 2006 election to the Queen Anne's board, Wargotz says he's meshed well with Democratic colleagues. One of them, Commissioner Paul L. Gunther, agrees, calling Wargotz "a caring individual" who "could work across party lines" in Washington.
As he makes his case to voters, Wargotz describes Mikulski as out of touch after more than three decades in Washington.
"When I started this over a year ago, it's because people were saying to me that they haven't seen her, she's not what she used to be, her constituent services have gone down the tubes, she's not doing for Maryland what she was when she started," Wargotz said.
It's as close as the challenger comes to making an issue of Mikulski's age (she would turn 80 during her next term).
Mikulski has "consistently voted to raise taxes and spending, and hasn't done anything to cut wasteful spending," Wargotz said. "She has become part of that bureaucracy of special interests and earmarks."
In his remarks to the Maryland Society of Patriots in Burtonsville, the Republican candidate urged tea party followers to "take a chance" on him, insisting that Mikulski is "not invulnerable."
"As long as there are people with minds out there who have a vote," Wargotz said afterward, "obviously there's a chance that we can win."
Eric S. Wargotz
Political affiliation: Republican
Residence: Queenstown
Office sought: U.S. Senate
Current position: Member, Queen Anne's County Board of County Commissioners
Occupation: Pathologist
Family: Married, three children.
Date of birth: Dec. 28, 1956
Place of birth: Akron, Ohio