Blue wave euphoria? Why it hasn't reached this corner of Baltimore.

In April 2016, one year after the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody, church elder Clyde William “C.W.” Harris climbed to the roof of his office building in West Baltimore and refused to come down. He would stay put, he announced, until at least 500 people voted in the city’s mayoral primary, set to take place in just over a week.

“I stayed on the roof for four nights and five days,” Mr. Harris, pastor at Newborn Communities of Faith, says with a note of pride.

This year, Harris may need to do more than hold a rooftop vigil to get his congregants to the polls. At stake in November’s midterms is the chance to elect Maryland’s first black governor and a window for Democrats to retake a majority in Congress. But turnout requires hope, and in the swath of Baltimore that Harris both serves and calls home – the same community where Mr. Gray was arrested and died three years ago, and where the violent protests that followed took place –