By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews — Maryland on the Map
Mail-in ballots are already in circulation. The Republican primary is weeks away. And Wes Moore’s administration has spent the last several months providing Maryland voters with one of the clearest governance records in recent state history — if by ‘clear’ you mean ‘clearly bad’.
The Maryland on the Map series has documented it in detail. The $400 million in public bonds for a Pimlico rebuild. The $48.5 million Laurel Park purchase that is now under a 45-day financial review the governor didn’t mention when he announced the deal as a win. The farmland purchased for $4.5 million, which would have cost $100 million to develop, resulted in the dissolution of the Maryland Thoroughbred Racetrack Operating Authority for mismanagement. The Churchill Downs Incorporated acquisition of the Preakness Stakes brand — for $85 million — that Moore’s office learned about when the public did. And now, Maryland quietly trying to spend another $85 million to buy back leverage it handed to a Kentucky corporation through inattention and haste.
Half a billion dollars. A pattern of announced wins that evaporate when they come into contact with the math. And a governor who governs by press release and hopes no one checks the receipts.
Someone should check the receipts. Several Republican candidates are asking voters for the chance to do exactly that.
What This Race Actually Required
The Preakness Stakes governance failure is not a niche issue. It is a case study of the specific skills Maryland’s executive branch requires and that Moore’s administration has repeatedly demonstrated it lacks.
Negotiating with a publicly traded corporation like Churchill Downs Incorporated requires legal sophistication — an understanding of intellectual property, contractual leverage, and what it means when a private entity acquires the brand rights to a public institution. It requires business acumen — the ability to read a deal structure and understand who holds leverage and who doesn’t before committing public dollars. And it requires procurement discipline — the ability to evaluate infrastructure investments against realistic cost projections before announcing them as victories.
Moore brought none of that to the table. The results are documented and expensive.
The three leading Republican primary candidates bring something different.
Dan Cox: The Legal Case
Dan Cox is an attorney. Whatever the political disagreements about his 2022 gubernatorial campaign, the professional background is directly relevant to what Maryland got wrong with Churchill Downs.
The Preakness IP acquisition was a legal and contractual event. Maryland’s failure to anticipate it, position itself against it, or negotiate protective terms before committing $400 million to Pimlico is exactly the kind of failure that legal training is designed to prevent. A governor with Cox’s background asks different questions before signing — what are we actually buying, who owns what we’re depending on, and what happens to our position if the other party makes a move we haven’t planned for.
Maryland didn’t ask those questions. It announced a vision, committed public money, and found out later that Churchill Downs had purchased the most valuable piece of the puzzle while Annapolis wasn’t watching.
Ed Hale: The Sports Business Case
Ed Hale has owned and operated sports enterprises — the Baltimore Blast indoor soccer team. That is not a credential Maryland’s current governor has, and it is precisely the credential the Preakness situation demands.
Sports venue economics are not general government finance. They involve private operators, media rights, brand valuations, and the kind of leverage negotiations that CDI conducts routinely, and Maryland has proven it cannot conduct at all. Hale understands from direct experience how private sports entities think, how they negotiate, and what they actually want from public partners.
A governor with that background does not get blindsided by a Churchill Downs IP acquisition. He sees it coming because he has been on the other side of those conversations. He understands that CDI’s ownership of Colonial Downs in Virginia and Ocean Downs in Maryland is not incidental — it is leverage, and leverage is only valuable when the other party recognizes it.
Moore did not recognize it. Maryland is now paying the price.
John Myrick: The Procurement Case
John Myrick’s contracting and procurement background speaks directly to the failure mode that has defined Maryland’s racing investment from the beginning.
The farmland purchase. The $100 million development cost nobody apparently projected. The MTROA shutdown. The Laurel delay. These are not strategic failures — they are procurement failures. They are what happens when an administration announces acquisitions without performing the basic due diligence that any competent contracting professional treats as mandatory before a dollar changes hands.
Myrick has spent a career in environments where you check the math before you announce the win. Where the cost of getting it wrong comes out of your bottom line, not a public bond account. Where a 45-day delay to review finances is something that happens before the announcement, not two weeks after it.
Maryland’s racing debacle is, at its core, a procurement story. And Maryland’s voters are choosing right now whether they want someone in the governor’s office who understands that procurement is not a press release.
The Stakes
Moore will likely survive the Democratic primary without meaningful opposition. His path to a second term runs through November, not June. But the Republican primary happening right now is choosing the candidate who will make the case to Maryland voters that the state deserves better than a governor who announces half-billion-dollar commitments before he knows what he’s buying.
The racing series has built that case on the public record. The farmland. The MTROA. The CDI acquisition Moore didn’t see coming. The Laurel delay. The quiet $85 million attempt to buy back what should never have been lost. Every one of those failures is documented, sourced, and expensive.
Maryland voters filling out their ballots right now are not just choosing a primary candidate. They are deciding whether the governance record of the last few years deserves a second term — and whether the candidate they send to face Moore in November is equipped to make that argument with the receipts in hand.
The receipts exist. They are substantial. And they add up to more than half a billion dollars in public money managed by an administration that governs by announcement and learns the details later.
Cox has the legal training to understand what Maryland signed away. Hale has the sports business experience to understand who they signed it away to. Myrick has the procurement discipline to understand how to stop it from happening again.
Maryland deserves at least one of those things in the governor’s office.
Maryland on the Map is an ongoing MDBayNews series on the state’s sporting economy and public investment in major events. This installment is also tagged under Maryland Elections 2026.
Sources: Fox Baltimore; Churchill Downs Incorporated; Maryland Stadium Authority; Maryland Thoroughbred Racetrack Operating Authority; prior MDBayNews Maryland on the Map series reporting.
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