Republican gubernatorial nominee Dan Cox and Gov. Wes Moore (D) will share a stage for their only debate of the election on Oct. 6 on Maryland Public Television. A new poll released Tuesday by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County finds Moore with a comfortable double-digit lead over Cox.
According to the poll, Moore would pick up 51% of likely voters while Republican Dan Cox was favored by 24%. Another 14% didn’t know, while 11% was divided between other candidates. Mileah Kromer, director of the UMBC Poll, said, “If anything, what’s notable is that sometimes incumbents will pick up an anti-incumbency bias – people who are just sort of frustrated with incumbents in general. You’re really not seeing a lot of that here. The numbers very much look like you would expect, given the demographic characteristics of the state and the disproportionate fundraising numbers between the two candidates.”
The poll comes with four weeks left in the campaign season. Nearly 600,000 voters have already received mail-in ballots. Early voting begins Oct. 22 and ends on Oct. 29. The survey is based on interviews with 776 Marylanders who said they were likely to vote. It was conducted from Sept. 22-27 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5%. The roughly 2-1 margin is reminiscent of the 2022 race between Moore and Cox.
Moore and Cox are scheduled to square off Tuesday afternoon in what is expected to be the only head-to-head debate of their rematch. Todd Eberly, a political science professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, said the UMBC poll casts doubt on how much the debate will matter to voters. “It would be hard for me to imagine anything that could happen in that debate that would alter the trajectory of this race,” Eberly said. “Even if Cox had a fantastic debate performance, I don’t see how he closes that gap, or in any way really improves the clear problem he has winning over Democratic voters.”
Two third-party candidates on the ballot are not included in the Maryland Public Television debate. Green Party nominee Andy Ellis and Working Class Party nominee Cathy White each got 3% in the UMBC survey, below the 10% threshold set by MPT to qualify for the debate.
Moore does best among Democratic voters, 72% of whom said they support the incumbent. Cox picked up three out of every four Republican voters in the UMBC survey, along with 4% of Democratic voters and 14% of the unaffiliated voters. In Maryland, where Republicans are heavily outnumbered, a GOP candidate running statewide needs to pick up about 90% of the voters in their party, along with roughly three in 10 Democratic voters and more than 55% of unaffiliated voters.
Kromer said, “Our poll suggests that Dan Cox is not rebuilding the Larry Hogan coalition. It’s very clear. He’s getting most, almost all the support from Republicans that are his party base. Unaffiliated voters are the required pathway to victory for a Republican statewide candidate.”
Republicans are “running against an incumbent who is polling at 51% in this poll in a Democratic state – an incumbent that, at least according to this, is currently only winning over about three quarters of Democrats,” Eberly said. “That would normally be the recipe for the potential for a Republican to be competitive, and yet they are not competitive at all.”
