The ink was barely dry on the results of Tuesday’s blue tsunami when former Maryland Republican Party Executive Director Adam Wood announced his run for Maryland GOP Chairman.
In a text message to WBFF Reporter and former Baltimore City Council Candidate Gary Collins at 10:30 pm last night, Wood said denounced the GOP’s performance as “incredibly disappointing”, saying “Fairness was literally on the ballot this year. If we can’t message that as a party, we have failed.”
Wood’s remarks may sounds obvious to somebody who hasn’t paid attention to the real problem.
Wood came to Maryland as Nicolee Ambrose's campaign manager after a string of losses in North Carolina and some time as a mail boy for Congresswoman Renee Ellmers. Wood is also dating Ambrose, which explains a lot, really.
Wood’s tenure as Maryland Republican Party Executive Director was a clown show at best, featuring press banned from state party conventions and an inability to spell Maryland.
Wood left after he decided to run for the Maryland State Senate. A race, by the way, he lost by double digits in the District 42 primary.
But let’s go back to Wood’s firing. As I wrote at the time:
….Wood’s departure creates a vacancy in the single most important role in the state Republican Party less than 11 months before the gubernatorial general election. An election that Wood’s incompetence has left the Maryland GOP woefully unprepared for.
While the Maryland Republican Party was recruiting candidates, creating its strategy, and crafting its messaging for the 2026, Wood and his girlfriend were plotting Wood’s doomed campaign for State Senate. That ultimately means that the person most directly responsible for the “completely unacceptable underperformance by us as a party” was Adam Wood himself.
Even if you want to ignore those realities for a moment, let’s look at the candidates the Adam Wood worked for in this year’s general election. Wood and his “Wood Comprehensive Services” worked for five candidates during this General Election:
Jim Rutledge (Attorney General)
Berney Flowers (Congress, District 3)
Dave Crawford (Anne Arundel County Executive)
Jim Fredericks (Anne Arundel County Sheriff)
Mike Burke (Baltimore County Sheriff)
The results of those elections were, in order, defeats by 34%, 31%, 17%, 14%, 27%. If Wood were the genius he wants people to believe he is, don’t you think one of those candidates would have overperformed? Don’t you think at least one of those campaigns would have had some sort of positive momentum?
Adam Wood led Dave Crawford to a “baseline GOP” performance that is that worst campaign for a GOP County Executive Candidate since gadfly Louise Beauregard in 1986. A trained chihuahua could have accomplished the same thing without charging the Crawford campaign $10,500 like Wood did.
And let’s also not forget that the Flowers campaign, consulted by Adam Wood, gave us the stupidest AI ad in campaign history.
But on top of all of that, Wood announcing his campaign for Chairman at 10:30pm on election night, complete with a website, shows Central Committee members that he knew the Maryland GOP would lose, but instead of trying to fix anything, he teed up a personal announcement. Allowing the state party to fail to make yourself look better is a self-serving move right out of the Nicolee Ambrose playbook.
The Maryland Republican Party underperformed last night, even though it’s not as disastrous as it looks since Republicans did win a few key Board of Education races. But the strategy in place was largely one created by Adam Wood in the first place. While Wood, like his girlfriend always does, tries to absolve himself of blame, the strategy ultimately started and ended with him. While he was not around to implement it, it was Adam Wood’s incompetence that put the MDGOP in the position it was in.
Electing Adam Wood as Maryland Republican Party Chairman would be like hiring an arsonist as a Fire Chief. You don’t fix the problems with the Maryland Republican Party by hiring the cause of them. While I do believe that Nicole Harris needs to be replaced, even two more lackluster years under her leadership would be better than an incompetent boob like Adam Wood.