By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Dan Cox is the Republican nominee for governor of Maryland. Again.
With 1,963 of 1,979 election day precincts reporting, Cox took 78,290 votes — 45.24 percent of the total 172,602 Republican primary ballots cast. Ed Hale finished second with 61,849 votes, 35.74 percent. The gap between them was roughly 16,400 votes, a margin that held consistently through the evening once early returns made clear Cox’s geographic dominance of the state.
The county map tells the story cleanly. Cox won virtually everywhere Hale didn’t. Hale’s strength was almost entirely concentrated in the Baltimore metropolitan corridor — Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Carroll County, Harford County, Howard County — plus a handful of upper Chesapeake Bay counties where his business profile and name recognition had traction. He won Kent and Talbot on the Eastern Shore, and Queen Anne’s County, likely drawing from his Baltimore-area base.
Cox, meanwhile, swept the rest of the state. He won Frederick County, his home base, with 8,663 votes to Hale’s 2,568 — a margin that was never in question. He dominated Western Maryland: Allegany gave him 3,589 to Hale’s 579, Garrett 2,098 to 323, Washington County 5,621 to 1,279. He ran up the score on the lower Eastern Shore — Wicomico, Worcester, Dorchester, Somerset — and won the Southern Maryland counties of Calvert, Charles, and Saint Mary’s handily. Even in Montgomery County, where neither candidate had obvious appeal, Cox took 4,383 to Hale’s 2,148.
The one county worth examining closely is Carroll — Hale won it 6,353 to Cox’s 5,064, despite Carroll being firmly in Cox’s geographic comfort zone as an adjacent county to Frederick. Carroll was Hale’s strongest performance outside the immediate Baltimore metro and hints at what his coalition might have looked like with more resources and time to build statewide.
The Baltimore County result was Hale’s signature number: 14,357 to Cox’s 6,153. That’s a 2.3-to-1 margin in the state’s most populous county and the foundation of Hale’s entire candidacy. Without Baltimore County, Hale’s path to the nomination disappears entirely. With it, he made a race of it — but not enough of one.
The Myrick Question
John Myrick finished third with 10,701 votes and 6.18 percent statewide — a result that, by any conventional metric, represents a significant underperformance relative to his campaign effort. By most accounts, Myrick outworked every other candidate in the field, attending forums across the state, building personal voter contacts in county after county, and running the kind of retail campaign the other candidates largely skipped. The numbers didn’t follow.
His best counties were Harford (1,347), Washington (1,124), and Anne Arundel (1,184) — each places where his ground presence was visible. But he never broke out of single digits in any jurisdiction. In Frederick County, Cox’s home turf, Myrick managed only 796 votes. In Baltimore County, where Hale dominated, Myrick took 1,136.
The honest explanation is structural. In a nine-candidate field where the two funded, named candidates consumed over 80 percent of the vote between them, the remaining 20 percent was divided among seven others. Myrick won that tier — he finished well ahead of Brunner (5.57%), Shannon Wright (2.03%), Burkindine (1.67%), Taylor (1.51%), Oakes (1.16%), and Larcomb (0.90%) — but winning the consolation bracket in a primary isn’t what campaigns are built for.
Ground games matter in low-information, low-turnout races where name recognition hasn’t already sorted the electorate. The Maryland Republican gubernatorial primary is neither. Cox was a known quantity to every Republican who voted in 2022. Hale spent money to become one. Myrick, with limited resources and no prior statewide profile, was asking primary voters to make a discovery in the voting booth — and most of them didn’t.
It’s worth noting that Myrick’s 10,701 votes represent real people who found him and chose him without the benefit of television advertising, significant mail, or the kind of organizational infrastructure Cox and Hale deployed. In a different field configuration — or a different kind of race — that foundation is something to build on.
What the Numbers Mean
Cox’s win was not a squeaker. He cleared 45 percent in a nine-candidate field, which is a decisive plurality. His geographic breadth — winning 16 of 24 jurisdictions — reflects a coalition that is genuinely statewide rather than metro-dependent. He won rural Maryland, small-city Maryland, suburban Western Maryland, and Southern Maryland. The map looks like a candidate who has been on the ballot in Maryland before and whose voters know where to find him.
Hale’s 35.74 percent is a creditable second-place finish for a candidate who entered the race relatively late, switched parties to do so, and had to introduce himself to a Republican primary electorate with no prior relationship with him. The Baltimore County performance in particular — 14,357 votes — suggests there was a real constituency for the business-oriented, less ideologically rigid Republican he was trying to be. That constituency just wasn’t large enough, and it wasn’t spread broadly enough across the state.
The combined Cox-Hale vote was 81 percent of the total. The remaining seven candidates, including Myrick, split the rest. In that environment, hard work is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a primary breakthrough. Myrick demonstrated the former. The latter required resources and name recognition that weren’t available to him.
Source: Maryland State Board of Elections unofficial results, 1,963 of 1,979 election day precincts reported as of 1:37 AM June 24, 2026.
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