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It’s not Triple Crown season (if that’s even still a thing…..more on that in a minute), but it has been an eventful week for the newly socialist Preakness.

Yesterday, Churchill Downs announced that a new thoroughbred horse racing series was being initiated, consisting of six races. And the Preakness isn’t in it.

Just days after state officials announced they had finalized an $85 million deal to acquire the rights to the Preakness Stakes, they learned that Pimlico had been excluded from a new championship racing series organized by the other two Triple Crown tracks.

Churchill Downs Inc. and the New York Racing Association Inc. announced Monday that they are launching a six-race, five-month Thoroughbred Championship Series to be run at Churchill Downs, Belmont Park and Saratoga Race Course. Three-year-old thoroughbreds that compete in the series will get points across the season, with a $5 million prize pool for the series, in addition to individual race purses.

Officials with the two organizations said the championship series, which is scheduled to start in 2027, is designed to create a season-long competition that will encourage the best horses in the field to compete against each other repeatedly. Races at Churchill Downs will be broadcast nationally on NBC while races at NYRA tracks, Belmont and Saratoga, will be broadcast on Fox.

It is hardly surprising that the Preakness was left out of this new series. After all, Churchill Downs was poised to purchase the intellectual property to the Preakness when Wes Moore executed Maryland’s right of first refusal to match the company’s offer and make the Preakness Stakes a socialist enterprise. If Churchill Downs can’t control it, why bother including them in their brand new organized effort to push the Triple Crown into obscurity?

But Governor Moore has already fired a salvo back at Churchill Downs. He has announced that the Preakness will now no longer be 14 days after the Kentucky Derby. It will be…22 days after the Derby and held on a Sunday.

In a historic shift for Maryland’s premier sporting event, Gov. Wes Moore announced that the Preakness Stakes will move back on the calendar starting in 2027, sliding eight days to the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend.

The decision pushes the second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown from its traditional slot two weeks after the Kentucky Derby to a three-week gap. State leaders and racing officials say the extra recovery time is vital to protecting Maryland’s massive public investment in thoroughbred racing by ensuring top-tier horses—including Kentucky Derby winners—continue competing at Pimlico.

I cannot fathom the level of intelligence (or lack thereof) whichever mental midget in the Moore Administration come up with this stupid idea. In an effort to switch things up we’re now moving it to a holiday weekend?

In his official statement, Moore and the First Lady try to put lipstick on this pig:

“The state of Maryland and Preakness are stepping into an exciting new era; and I am delighted that the Maryland Jockey Club has renewed its media partnership with NBC and Peacock,” said Gov. Moore. “The continuation of our partnership and the new schedule ensures optimal and accessible coverage for everyone from horseracing experts to casual fans, as our administration makes historic investments to leverage the iconic race as a cornerstone of Maryland’s history, culture and economy.”

“Preakness Weekend is more than a race—it is a celebration of more than 150 years of Maryland history, Baltimore, our proud equine tradition, and the communities that make this event so special,” said First Lady Dawn Moore. “This new schedule honors that extraordinary legacy while opening an exciting new chapter—elevating the Black-Eyed Susan Stakes, bringing even more attention to Maryland on the national stage, and creating new opportunities for local businesses, families, and racing fans.”

But again…..Memorial Day weekend. People have plans on Memorial Day weekend. People go to the Ocean on Memorial Day weekend. People around the country are attending college and high school graduations or visiting family. They are not gonna sit down on a Sunday evening and watch a horse race, espsecially on a weekend where the Preakness will be at best the third most popular sporting even in the country behind the Indianapolis 500 and the Coca-Cola 600 (and, locally, probably behind College Lacrosse Championship weekend).

What this does (again) is highlight Wes Moore’s poor leadership and lack of critical thinking. As I have been saying for well over ten years now, keeping the Preakness in Maryland is nice to have but is not vitally important to our state economy. And for well over ten years, Maryland politicians have plowed money into the horse racing industry in order to prop up a dying industry that has fewer and fewer participants and fans everything. And depsite all of that, Wes Moore has spent well over half-a-billion dollars in public funds socializing Marlyand’s horse racing industry into a state controlled entity. An entity that has no real, legitimate reason to be a government owned and operated enterprise.

Wes Moore would probably have propped up the horse and buggy industry in 1910…

The best thing Maryland could have done was to not spend all of this taxpayer money on buying the Preakness, buying Pimlico, buying Laurel, and pouring good money after bad. The next best thing Maryland can do is to extricate the state from this situation as soon as possible. Wes Moore may have made a generationally stupid decision, and while that can’t be undone the time for corrective action is as soon as humanly possible. Maryland must divest itself of its Horse Racing assets before we lose every more money on this bad, bad deal.

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When we first ran our General Election Predictive Metric, the Universal General Election Probability Model, after the California, Maryland, and Texas primaries, we forgot one important outlier for two of those states: third-party and independent candidates.

Our model has been updated to reflect that. The original two-candidate version of the model converts a margin into a win probability with a logistic curve. That works fine when there are only two names on the ballot. It falls apart the moment you add a Green Party nominee or a Libertarian, because there’s no clean way to express “Candidate A minus Candidate B” when there are four candidates instead of two. The fix: every candidate gets a value score built from the same inputs (structural lean, pWAR delta against replacement level, environment, incumbency, funding, scandal, turnout), and the values get converted to probabilities through a softmax function instead of a single logistic curve. Same architecture, same weights, now built for a real ballot instead of a hypothetical binary.

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The Senate could vote this week on the Protect College Sports Act of 2026. The bill cleared Senate Commerce 19-9 back on June 18, a comfortable bipartisan margin, and after weeks of further revisions…

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It took about two months to negotiate a page-and-a-half memorandum of understanding between the United States and Iran. It took three weeks for that understanding to fall apart completely. Ali Vaez, …

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The B&O Railroad Museum is no longer the B&O Railroad Museum. As of this morning, it’s the National Museum of Railroad History & Innovation, a name so forgettable I had to look it back up twice while…

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Rob Manfred handed Bryce Harper a gift. Snubbed by the fans and the players in the vote for the All-Star Game his own franchise is hosting for the first time in 30 years, Harper got in anyway, tapped…

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Democrats in Maine were finally able to convince an alleged sexual predator to remove himself as a U.S. Senate candidate in Maine. It took the seventh credible accusation of sexual violence for local…

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Chris Van Hollen took a trip to New Hampshire last month, and he wants everyone to know it wasn’t quite what it looked like. “I went to New Hampshire because I was invited, but I would say kind of ki…

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America, it’s your 250th birthday. I’m not sure any of us wanted it to look like this.

America is a nation that is currently in decline. We have abandoned our allies. We have abandoned our commitments…

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Over the past several months, we’ve published pWAR scores for races up and down the ballot, using the Political Wins Above Replacement framework to evaluate candidates as something more useful than a name on a yard sign. pWAR measures candidate quality: who outperforms their environment, who bleeds votes their party should be keeping, who is a genuine electoral asset and who is a liability wearing a jersey. It answers the question the party establishments consistently refuse to ask — is this person actually better than a generic placeholder?

The problem with stopping at pWAR is obvious. A candidate with a great score in a terrible structural environment still loses. A candidate with a terrible score in a rock-solid partisan fortress still wins. pWAR, on its own, tells you about candidates. It doesn’t tell you about races. The Universal General Election Probability Model is the bridge.

Here’s how it works. Every input to the model gets converted into margin points, which are summed and run through a logistic probability curve calibrated by race level. The inputs are: structural partisan lean (the biggest driver by design, because most races aren’t competitive), the political environment, the incumbent factor, the funding gap, any scandal or controversy adjustment, the turnout factor, and the pWAR delta between the two candidates. That last one is the direct handoff from the primary analysis. The pWAR delta, multiplied by a level-specific weight, tells the model how much candidate quality moves the needle given the structural realities of the race.

The level calibration matters. At the presidential level, the environment and the race are functionally the same thing, so the environment weight is 1.0. At the local level, name recognition and candidate quality dominate because national waves barely penetrate a city council race, so pWAR weight rises to 1.0 and environment weight drops to 0.20. Governor races sit in the middle: sigma of 7.5 (meaning the logistic curve needs meaningful margin accumulation before probability shifts sharply), pWAR weight of 0.80, environment weight of 0.65. Structural lean still dominates. But in a genuinely competitive race, the other variables can and do move the outcome — and that’s exactly what the model is designed to show.

Let’s run three of them.

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The musical group Milli Vanilli was famous for exactly one thing: not actually performing the music attributed to them. It is, therefore, fitting that Fab Morvan of Milli Vanilli was among the acts w…

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Ed Hale spent the better part of a year telling anyone who would listen that he couldn’t beat Wes Moore. He said it out loud, on camera, at his own campaign announcement. “There’s no way I could win …

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Maryland’s primary election is this Tuesday, Jun 23rd. There has been scant public polling on any of the key races Maryland voters are deciding on Tuesday. While some supporters (and even some candid…

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In politics, you are what your public records say you are. And for most of us, the images we use for social media profiles say a lot about how we want others to us.

Patti Stueckler is running for Calv…

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At no point did I think Senate President Bill Ferguson was facing serious trouble from his Democratic Primary Challenger Bobby LaPin…

…until yesterday.

Democratic leaders have quietly developed plans t…

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We previously wrote about Frederick County Republican Central Committee Candidate Kate Taylor in regards to hercanoodling with a white nationalist. Taylor is also, apparently, deeply concerned about …

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Elon Musk officially became a trillionaire last week. The number is so large it barely registers as real. A trillion dollars. If you spent a million dollars a day, every day, it would take you roughl…

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