Wes Moore leads the closely watched race to secure the Democratic nomination for governor, but with hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots yet to be counted, the race appeared too close to call on Tuesday/Wednesday. After the Thursday/Friday release of the first wave of mail-in ballots, media outlets have begin “calling” the race for Moore.
Nine Democrats are vying for the chance to succeed term-limited Republican Governor Larry Hogan. According to unofficial early voting and election day results, Moore has 37 percent of the vote, Former US Labor Secretary Tom Perez sits at 27 percent, and Comptroller Peter Franchot has 20 percent.
Friday update: Following a substantial count of mail-in ballots released on Thursday and Friday, multiple news outlets have declares Moore to be the winner of the primary.
Other candidates include former US Secretary of Education John King, former Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler, former nonprofit executive and federal official Jon Baron, former Obama administration official Ashwani Jain, and perennial candidates Ralph Jaffe and Jerome Segal.
Wes Moore is an author, entrepreneur, television producer, and US Army veteran. Moore served as CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation from 2017 – 2021.
Tom Perez, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, served as the US Secretary of Labor, Maryland Secretary of Labor, and Montgomery County Council Member.
Peter Franchot was elected Maryland’s 33rd Comptroller on November 7, 2006, and sworn into office on January 22, 2007. Franchot won re-election on November 2, 2010, November 4, 2014, and November 6, 2018. Before his election to statewide office, Mr. Franchot served twenty years in the House of Delegates, representing Montgomery County.
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Please note that vote counts are incomplete. Election officials still have to count mail-in and provisional ballots. For context, more than 500,000 Marylanders requested a mail-in ballot for this year’s primary, and those remaining votes are likely to be material to many contested races. However, local boards of elections cannot begin to canvass mail-in votes until Thursday, July 21. Therefore, for editorial purposes, MACo coverage will describe any races where the top runner-up remains within 10 percent of the apparent winner(s) as “pending” and those results as “apparent.”
MACo’s election coverage and analysis rely on unofficial results published by the State Board of Elections. Official results will follow after a full accounting of pending votes. Given delays in processing an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots, MACo advises readers that any close unofficial results are subject to realignment in the days ahead.
