Sorry for your beginnings... But I have found no profit in voting for anything from the Northeast - Which includes Maryland as part of the DC Complex. Getting pretty jumpy about folks from Virginia too.
Generally speaking, I will look at folks from the South and the Midwest, but prefer a Western man a bit more. The last man I had any faith in from the Northeast was Alan Keyes. 
When and where I grew up there, it was farmers and watermen, fishing, crabbing, tobacco, livestock. Washington DC may have been only 50 miles away, but I grew up at the end of a mile of gravel road, getting only three TV stations if the wind was right and the antenna was pointed in the right direction. DC was as alien as Mars.
We hunted, deer and ducks, and filled the larder with those, along with farm fresh eggs, fish from the river (and crab, clams, and oysters) and ate like kings by the sweat of our brows. I don't regret my beginnings at all, just what has happened to the State.
My folks still live at the end of a half mile of gravel road (same house, the land has been in the family since the 1600s). They're still conservative, and that's how I became politically aware at an early age. They fought the corruption for years, and are in their 90s now.
Where I grew up still looks much the same, just the rules are different. Those rules are why I continue to live where I do now, and I'm constantly stumping to keep that crap out of here.
I don't see the electorate changing here like it did there--there is no Federal power center to draw idiots from elsewhere, and the climate helps keep that riff-raff out.
Most of that change back there is due to the expansion of the Feral Government, with the DC bedroom communities expanding out far beyond the District and altering the electorate with lobbyists and activists and federal employees including staffers for rabidly liberal elected folks from elsewhere. They brought their politics from yonder, and have inflicted them on a Southern State. (MD is south of the Mason/Dixon line and was occupied by union troops during the war.
(My ancestors fought for the South, with Lee in Va.)
