ENDORSEMENT: Maryland Gubernatorial Election
Sorting through the wheat and the chaff is not a difficult process.
When selecting a candidate for Governor, the first place to stop is the general ideology. As we are conservatives, that immediately disqualifies Democrat Governor Wes Moore and Green Party nominee Andy Ellis.
Sorting through the wheat and the chaff in the Republican Primary is not a difficult process. In a state where any schmuck can pay $290 to put their name on the ballot for Governor, a lot of thoroughly unqualified candidates are appearing as gubernatorial choices for Republican voters this year. When you consider that somebody not raising any money, has no endorsements, or who started as somebody else’s running mate, that immediately eliminates Carl Brunner, L. D. Burkindine, Douglas Larcomb, Michael Oakes, Nancy Jane Taylor, and Shannon Wright.
That leaves three “front-runners”: Dan Cox, Ed Hale, and John Myrick.
If Dan Cox had run the campaign he is running this year back in 2022, he would not have suffered a historic defeat at the hands of Wes Moore. Cox’s 2026 campaign has eschewed Trumpiness, conspiracies, vaccines, chemtrails, and a host of other issues that his campaign could be bringing up. Cox, miraculously, is running a disciplined campaign focused on real issues facing real Marylanders.
Unfortunately for Cox, voters were not born yesterday. The damage of 2022 is very real, and voters remember the Republican bloodbath he created. They also remember his failed campaign from 2022 gave Moore the “mandate” he claimed to raise taxes and fees and to blow the surplus Larry Hogan left him. Additionally, a tirade about vaccines, chemtrails, or helicopters can happen any minute.
Ed Hale, meanwhile, spent decades writing checks to Democrats, called himself a lifelong Democrat as recently as May 2025, and only switched his registration to Republican in August of that same year when his challenge to Wes Moore in the Democratic primary looked like a dead end.
That is not a conversion. That is a calculation. Conservative voters in a Maryland Republican primary deserve better than a man who funded the other side for most of his adult life and is now asking them to hand him a gubernatorial nomination.
The rest of his record does not help the case.
In 2011, he was charged with bringing a loaded gun in his carry-on bag at BWI Marshall Airport, and was granted probation before judgment and ordered to pay a fine. That same year, he stepped away from 1st Mariner Bank, the institution he founded, after it had been struggling for years, with Hale remaining its largest shareholder until its eventual sale. His biography, such as it is, includes a claimed decade as a CIA asset, with Hale describing his global shipping businesses as the perfect cover for moving operatives into places like Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. Whether you find that story credible or not, it is not exactly the resume of a straightforward conservative reformer. Maryland Republicans have real problems to solve. Ed Hale is a sideshow to those.
That leaves John Myrick. Myrick, however, has a few things going against him. One is the fact that Myrick looks like and talks like the extra who gets cast as “generic Republican” in a movie. But more critically, his fundraising is anemic. Myrick raised less money than Kurt Wedekind, who was disqualified four months ago. His most recent campaign finance report lists him with only $4,106 cash on hand. That’s anemic for some Central Committee races, much less a candidate for Governor.
In the 1985 adaptation of Brewster’s Millions, Montgomery Brewster launches a protest vote for None of the Above in response to two less than great candidates. None of the Above ultimately wins that race. While that may not be an option in Maryland’s primary election system, we do subscribe to the basic premise.
The bottom line is this: None of the candidates can defeat Wes Moore in the general election. And, even worse, none of the candidates can make a credible case for conservative leadership in anything resembling an effective manner.
To that end, The Duckpin endorses NOBODY for Governor. If you are a conservative, none of them have done enough to show that they can credibly make a case for conservative governance.