BALTIMORE — Both the Democratic and Republican nominations for Maryland governor hung in the balance Tuesday evening as a prolonged, competitive and crowded primary campaign season ended without a clear front-runner on either side.
Early voting numbers and initial batches of in-person votes during the day Tuesday showed former nonprofit leader Wes Moore leading the crowded nine-person field, followed by former U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez and state Comptroller Peter Franchot.
Republican voters, meanwhile, were expected to choose between front-runners of former state Commerce Secretary Kelly Schulz and Del. Dan Cox in a four-way GOP race. Initial returns showed Cox narrowly leading Schulz in the in-person voting.
The outcomes of both races were not expected by the end of Tuesday.
At least 385,000 voters had cast ballots before polls opened — either during in-person early voting or by returning mail-in ballots, according to the State Board of Elections.
But election officials cannot open the hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots until 10 a.m. Thursday. That’s the start of the period under state law in which those envelopes can be opened and the ballots scanned. It’s a process that will take days, and in some cases weeks, as local election boards handle an influx of such ballots, which became popular during the pandemic.
The candidates and their supporters were bracing for a lengthy wait Tuesday night.
“I’m thinking tonight, without counting the mail-in ballots and things like that, I think we’re going to leave out of here feeling pretty good,” Moore supporter Daniel Jordan, 65, of Upper Marlboro, said at the candidate’s primary night party at R. House in Remington.
Jordan, who said his wife has known Moore for years, said he supported Moore partially because of his career experience, particularly in the nonprofit world and in the military.
Dan Ryan, a homebuilder in Frederick, said from Schulz’s primary night event in Annapolis that he supports her because he’s a supporter of Gov. Larry Hogan, who endorsed Schulz.
“I think she will just take it to the next level,” Ryan said.
Schulz spoke to her supporters shortly before 10:30 p.m.
“As all of you know, right now, we are behind in this race, but it is not over,” Schulz said. “The fact is that all of the votes won’t be counted until Thursday. We knew this. We knew this going into today.”
She added, “In America, and in Maryland, we count every vote. Every single one of them.”
The early returns as of 10 p.m. Tuesday showed Cox leading Schulz 56% to 41%. Among the Democrats, Moore led with 37% compared to Perez’s 26% and Franchot’s 21%.
Former U.S. Department of Education Secretary John B. King, who was among the leading fundraisers and spenders in the Democratic field, conceded at his election night party. Former Clinton White House official Jon Baron also dropped out, acknowledging he will not be the nominee.
“Sadly, at this point, it will not be us,” King said over Facebook Live at 10 p.m.
In another contested race — the 1st Congressional District Democratic primary — former state Del. Heather Mizeur defeated former Foreign Service Officer R. David Harden to face Republican incumbent Andy Harris in November. Mizeur led Harden 69% to 31% with more than half of precincts reporting as of 10 p.m.
‘Patience is key’
The governor’s race, the highest-profile contest facing voters this year, culminated in an unusually large field of well-funded candidates who boasted significant political resumes.
Together they spent millions getting their messages out to voters — focusing on rising crime, the economy and education for more than a year while abortion, guns and the environment became focal points in the final weeks after new U.S. Supreme Court rulings.
By the time polls closed Tuesday, candidates were surrounding themselves with supporters and staff, waiting eagerly to see if their work would pay off.
Moore, a first-time candidate who became the premier fundraiser and attraction for endorsements among Maryland Democrats, was in Baltimore, where supporters were eating hors d’oeuvres while MSNBC played on a projector.
Supporters of Perez, a former Democratic National Committee chairman and Montgomery County councilman in addition to his time in the Obama administration, packed a sweaty rooftop of a Bethesda sports bar an hour after polls closed.
Travis Sneed, the brother-in-law of Shannon Sneed, Perez’s running mate, said he feels positive about the eventual outcome, despite the wait for returns.
“Patience is key. I think they’ll push through,” Travis Sneed said of the anticipated day or weeklong wait for election returns. “I’m treating it like my stocks. I don’t look every day.”
At Franchot’s event in Bowie, supporters were gathered around a television showing returns while the four-term state official mingled with the crowd.
Julian Min, a Baltimore Police Department homicide detective and Franchot supporter at the candidate’s party, said he’d volunteered for Franchot and appreciated how the comptroller sought input from the Asian American community, including the Korean Society of Baltimore. Min is the president of that group.
“He’s just out there,” Min, 50, said of Franchot’s approach to campaigning. “He came to us.”
Cox, whose grassroots campaign was primarily run by him and his family members, was in Frederick County, both his and Schulz’s hometown, while she was in Annapolis.
At a fire and rescue company meeting hall in Emmitsburg, Cox thanked former President Donald Trump as he told a crowd of several hundred supporters that he was winning an hour after the polls closed and returns showed him ahead, 52% to 44%. Cox, who was endorsed by Trump, has embraced election fraud theories spread by Trump in 2020.
Voters head to the polls
All the candidates had spent the day talking to voters at polling locations, where signs pointed to potentially lower turnout than in past years.
Foot traffic was light at many polling places, although voters like Joel Evans, a Randallstown resident and student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said they were eager to cast ballots in person, instead of by mail.
Evans cast his ballot at Liberty Senior Center in Randallstown.
“Voting in person is more important than just mailing in because when you come in, people are seeing you vote. It’s not behind closed doors,” Evans, 21, said. “If people see you do it, then they will most likely do it, as well.”
Issues, including abortion rights and education, motivated some voters who arrived early Tuesday at polling places. Dawn Fuller, 57, a government contractor and Catonsville resident, said abortion rights were at the forefront of her mind. Though access to abortions appears secure in Maryland, she remained concerned about laws restricting them elsewhere as she cast her ballot at Woodbridge Elementary School.
“You don’t really know,” Fuller said. “I mean, unless you go out and vote for the people you think will stop doing that stuff.”
Also at Liberty Senior Center in Randallstown, Nadia Ankrah, a 33-year-old nurse and Randallstown resident, said her main concern this primary season was school safety, specifically school shootings.
“You don’t want to take your child to school and then be afraid, wonder, ‘Are they going to come back?’” Ankrah said.
At some polling locations, a shortage of election judges delayed their scheduled 7 a.m. openings or kept them understaffed throughout the day. Local elections directors warned for weeks that the primary — delayed by legal challenges to redistricting — was pushed into prime vacation time, thereby limiting their ability to recruit poll workers.
“It’s one of those situations where, ‘We told you so,’” said Baltimore City Elections Director Armstead Jones. “Everybody is short.”
Harford County Elections Director Stephanie Taylor said the county was more than 150 judges short of its goal of 742. Some polling sites were understaffed, but none was prevented from greeting voters, she said.
In Carroll County, some judges quit just hours ahead of precincts opening, though with a relatively low turnout, precincts were staffed adequately, said Katherine Berry, the county’s election director.
Nikki Charlson, deputy administrator for the State Board of Elections, said the number of locations that had delays was “not a lot.”
Despite the challenges of administering this year’s primary, it was still a smooth process for most voters.
Bonnie Rice, an 84-year-old Linthicum resident who said her priority as a Republican voter was tax increases, voted at a new polling site because of redistricting. She said it was easier to cast her ballot than it had been in years.
“There was no line, and then they had someone waiting at the door for me,” Rice said.
How many people voted?
Official turnout numbers will not be known for days, though political observers had predicted lower-than-usual numbers because of the delayed primary and because fewer people showed up for early voting compared to previous years.
During the last gubernatorial election, in 2018, 29% of Democrats and 22% of Republicans turned out in a primary in which Hogan was unopposed for his party’s nomination for a second term and Democrats had a competitive intraparty race to go up against him. Two years later, when the presidential election headlined the ballot, 42% of Maryland voters showed up for the primary.
This year, about 4.8% of the nearly 3.8 million eligible voters cast ballots during early voting. That was fewer than the 6.2% of voters who turned out for the same period in 2018, though some attributed the decline to the newfound interest in mail-in voting.
More than 500,000 voters requested mail-in ballots this year — far above the mere 30,000 who voted by mail ballot in 2018.
More than 200,000 of those ballots were received by local boards of election by the end of the day Monday, according to state data. Not all of the remaining mail ballots will be returned, but those that are postmarked by July 19 and received by July 29 will be counted.
And with huge swaths of voters telling pollsters they remained undecided as voting began, those mail-in ballots could make all the difference.
As the returns eventually come in, political observers are expecting the winning Democrat to garner as little as 30% of the vote — a factor of such a sprawling group of candidates where nobody had been able to pull away with a significant lead.
Only one major candidate, former Prince George’s County Executive Rushern Baker, dropped out after the filing deadline in April. His name remained on the ballot for Democratic voters, and early returns showed he had pulled in around 4% of the vote, which was more than other major candidates like King, Baron and former Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler.
Baker was the runner-up in the same race four years ago. He garnered nearly 172,000 votes — 29.3% — to Democratic nominee Ben Jealous’ almost 232,000 votes, or 39.6%.
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(Baltimore Sun reporters Christine Condon, Darcy Costello, Jean Marbella, Lilly Price, Jeff Barker, Caitlyn Freeman and Baltimore Sun Media reporters Dan Belson and Jason Fontelieu contributed to this article.)
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