The Rev. Heber Brown III was not among the 76 percent in Baltimore who backed the O’Malley/Brown ticket or the 75 percent who voted for Ben Cardin.

Brown, 26, the coordinator of Baltimore’s Young Clergy for Social Change, was exactly what the Democrats feared — an African-American who, rather than settle for “the lesser of two evils, a strategy that has not proved to benefit the masses of my people” chose neither major party.

Those fears didn’t bear out. The state’s two majority African-American jurisdictions, Baltimore and Prince George’s County, supported Democrats by at least a 3-to-1 ratio.

But African-American leaders like Brown said that while Republican efforts to peel away black voters fell flat in an election driven by anti-war and anti-GOP attitudes, the Maryland Democratic Party shouldn’t misinterpret that loyalty as approval for a statewide ticket featuring just one African-American, Lt. Gov.-elect Anthony Brown.

African-Americans deserve a larger voice in statewide politics, Brown said, echoing calls from former NAACP Chairman Kweisi Mfume, who lost in the primary election to Sen.-elect Ben Cardin by about 20,000 votes, and Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, who told Maryland Democrats Thursday that future tickets needed to be more diverse.

“But whether the Democrats will really get the message is unclear — because they won,” Brown said. “If they would have lost, the message would have been much clearer.”

Democratic candidates swept statewide races with at least 75 percent of the vote in Prince George’s County, which is home to one third of Maryland’s African-American population, and with similar margins in Baltimore.

But after two African-Americans, Mfume and Stuart O. Simms, a Democratic candidate for attorney general, lost in the primaries, Democrats worried that black voters would sit this one out.

Perceived or real, the threat of losing a chunk of the black vote compelled Democrats to campaign hard in majority African-American enclaves. High-wattage Democrats Bill Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama descended on Prince George’s County days before the election, urging voters not to vote along racial lines.

“You have to directly appeal to the interests of the people who you need to turn out. You have to energize your base voters. It’s not just about race, but about the people who you think are going to vote for you,” said Maryland Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., who represents part of Prince George’s County.

Some experts said the shellacking was evidence that talk about disaffection within the African-American community was overblown.

“The black voters have spoken quite clearly. They overwhelming said the Democratic Party is the party that represents their interests,” said Peter Shapiro, former chairman of the Prince George’s County Council. “There’s definitely more the Democratic Party needs to do. On the other hand, it’s a fairly diverse pool of leaders throughout the state.”

Black Democrats in local races fared well.

The state’s two largest jurisdictions will both have black executives come January. Isiah Leggett’s victory marked a first for an African-American running for executive