Gubernatorial races, others too early to call as polls close
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.
Comptroller Peter Franchot, former U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez and former nonprofit leader Wes Moore led in polling of the nine-person Democratic field. Former U.S. Education Secretary John King, former Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler and former Clinton White House official Jon Baron also invested heavily in their campaigns in the lead-up to voting.
Republican voters, meanwhile, were expected to choose between front-runners former state Commerce Secretary Kelly Schulz and Del. Dan Cox in the four-way GOP race.
Gov. Larry Hogan endorsed Schulz, who served in his cabinet, while former President Donald Trump has thrown his political weight behind the more conservative Cox. Term limits prevent Hogan from seeking a third term.
The first batches of unofficial results across those and other races were not available by The Sun’s print deadline, and clear pictures of the winners were not expected by the end of Tuesday night.
Earlier Tuesday, some voters faced delays as they waited for under-staffed precincts to open, but voting otherwise appeared to go smoothly amid an expectedly lower-turnout mid-summer primary election. Across the region abortion, school-safety and the environment were among the things on voters’ minds.
At least 385,000 voters had already cast ballots even before polls opened — either during in-person early voting or by returning mail-in ballots, according to the State Board of Elections.
Results from the roughly 172,000 early in-person ballots were expected to be released first.
Other results from Tuesday’s in-person voting were expected in the hours after polls closed at 8 p.m.
But election officials will not begin to open the hundreds of thousands of remaining mail-in ballots until 10 a.m. Thursday. That’s the period under state law in which those envelopes can be opened and the ballots scanned — a process that will take days, and in some cases weeks, as local election boards handle an influx of such ballots that became popular during the pandemic.
The candidates were bracing for a lengthy wait.
Light foot traffic at polls
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 recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings.
By the time polls closed Tuesday, they were surrounding themselves with supporters and staff, waiting eagerly to see if all their work would pay off.
Moore, a first-time candidate who became the premier fundraiser and attraction for endorsements among Maryland Democrats, was celebrating in Baltimore. Perez, who, along with his stint in the Obama administration was also the Democratic National Committee chairman and previously a Montgomery County councilman, was in Bethesda. And Franchot, a four-term state comptroller, was at his campaign headquarters in Bowie.
Cox, whose grassroots campaign has been primarily run by him and his family members, was in Frederick County, both his and Schulz’s hometown, while she was in Annapolis.
All had spent the day talking to voters at polling locations, where signs pointed to potentially lower turnout than in past years.
Traffic was light at many polling places, though 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 schools were motivating some voters who arrived at polling places in Baltimore early Tuesday.
Dawn Fuller, 57, a government contractor and Catonsville resident, said abortion rights are at the forefront of her mind this primary season. Though access to abortions appears safe 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.”
At Liberty Senior Center in Randallstown, Nadia Ankrah, a 33-year-old nurse and Randallstown resident, said her main concern this primary season is school safety, and 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 had been warning for weeks that the primary being pushed into prime vacation time — a result of this year’s redistricting process — was limiting their ability to recruit election judges.
“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 the 742 goal. Some polling sites were understaffed but none was prevented from greeting voters, she said.
In Carroll County, some judges quit with hours to go ahead of precincts opening, though with a relatively low turnout meant 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 top 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 the 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 increase 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 absentee ballot in 2018.
More than 200,000 of those ballots had been 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 results eventually come in, political observers are expecting the winning Democrat to gather 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 major filing deadline in April. His name was still on the ballot for Democratic voters, leaving the possibility that some voters could still pick him.
Baker was the runner-up in the same race four years ago. He garnered nearly 172,000 votes — 29.3% — to Democratic nominee winner Ben Jealous’ almost 232,000 votes, or 39.6%.