I’m pretty sure Dan Cox knows his chances of beating Wes Moore when the polls close and the count begins.
He’s going to lose.
Yet the Republican decided to run against a Democratic governor who seemed unbeatable at the start of 2026 and still looks that way with only hours left until the polls close.
So why do it? Why run a race knowing the almost certain results?
“I am a Marylander, first and last,” Cox said recently. “I am an American, first and last.”
It’s about the best explanation I’ve heard him offer. And it’s a good one.
Read More
No one likes to lose. But in an election, that’s what most candidates do.
Wednesday will be about the winners. There will be talk of plans and promises fulfilled, prerogatives and priorities set.
But for today, let’s thank the losers.
They are dreamers, the diehards, the discounted optimists who, despite all evidence, just. Won’t. Give. Up.
“Miracles happen,” said Tonya Sweat, a write-in candidate for Prince George’s County executive.
Sweat is so convinced that she is the right woman for the job that this will be her third time losing.
“That’s what you say,” she said.
She lost to Angela Alsobrooks in the 2022 Democratic primary. When Alsobrooks won a seat in the U.S. Senate two years later, Sweat lost a 2025 special election to Aisha Braveboy.
Sweat wouldn’t take no for an answer, even when her petition to get on the ballot as an unaffiliated candidate was rejected. She registered as a write-in alternative.
“It’s 10 letters,” she said, “five and five.”
What does she stand for? Hope.
She has platforms and policies and said people were enthusiastic as she campaigned near early-polling sites. She believes recent questions over community grants present an opportunity for an outsider.
“I did it because we’ve fallen into a political rut in Prince George’s County,” Sweat said.
How do you explain the candidates journalists blandly dub “perennial”?
Not outsider, insurgent or grassroots. Not self-financed, upstart or even little-known.
It’s someone who frequently runs for elected office and rarely wins. In Maryland, Robin Ficker defines the term.
This year, he’s the Republican candidate for Congress in the 6th District, hoping to unseat freshman Democrat April McClain-Delaney.
Since winning a spot in the House of Delegates in 1978, he’s lost bids for the U.S. Senate, the House, Montgomery County executive and the County Council.
Along the way, Ficker was disbarred — he unsuccessfully asked for his law license back after winning the June primary.
He was, for a time, the most famous heckler in the NBA, so adept at rankling visiting teams in Washington that the home team moved his seat and created the “Ficker rule” prohibiting interference with players and coaches.
Every election, his “Two Cents” signs sprout along Maryland roadsides, touting his unfulfilled pledge to cut two pennies from the state sales tax.
Maybe it’s ego more than hope, or, at age 83, a lifelong inability to see that no is the answer.
“You haven’t written a single thing about this campaign, and you want to write about some old stuff?” Ficker asked when I called.
“Goodbye!”
Running is not the same as expecting to win.
“I’m not stupid,” Cheryl Riley said. “I get the odds.”
She is the Republican candidate in the 8th District, running against Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin. He may be Maryland’s most popular member of Congress.
A constitutional scholar who’s written books on his tumultuous time on Capitol Hill and how government works, Raskin regularly proves himself to be the wittiest member of Congress. Yet Riley doesn’t think he’s been good for Montgomery County, the bulk of the district.
Two years ago, she lost to Raskin in a year that gave her party control of Congress and the White House. It wasn’t even close.
Riley is worried about schools and crime, and the cost of living is on every candidate’s checklist.
“What’s happened to my county?” she said.
If her campaign seems better suited to a County Council run, she tried that too and lost.
“I don’t go into anything that isn’t all the way,” Riley said. “A huge part of that is thinking it’s possible against all the odds.”
Maryland isn’t a land of election upsets.
Oh, there have been a few.
Eight years ago, Calvin Ball was the longtime Howard County Council chair. When he was first elected in 2006, he was the youngest person ever to win a council seat.
It wasn’t a surprise that Ball challenged incumbent Republican Howard Kittleman. Kittleman was popular and well-financed in a county that voted blue in national elections but remained stubbornly purple in local offices.
It was surprising that Ball won with 52% of the vote and then expanded his victory in a rematch in 2022.
Today, Democrat Vanessa Atterbeary faces no Republican in the race to replace Ball, and Kittleman has left the GOP.
Democratic registration dominance and gerrymandering explain why Maryland so often gets lopsided election results. The numbers, the candidates’ ideas and the national zeitgeist explain why Cox will lose.
Maybe more serious candidates are out there, unwilling to spend time and money on a race they know is over before it starts.
Four years ago, Cox said he was surprised he lost so badly to Moore, who beat him 2-to-1.
“Our internal data demonstrated a massive shift of swing voters our way and a huge turnout of Republicans — neither of which is reported to have occurred,” he wrote in an election night statement.
Almost everyone else saw it coming. I wonder if he got a refund from the polling firms that gave him hope for a last-minute surge.
Hope can be so cruel.
In every county, there are candidates like Sweat, Riley and Ficker. There are other Dan Coxes.
No matter the outcome when the last ballot is tallied, they should be proud that they gave us a choice.
An election with one candidate is the only thing worse than an election with no hope.
Choice is what makes it a democracy.
Comments
Welcome to The Banner's subscriber-only commenting community. Please review our community guidelines.