By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
The Maryland primary is over. The choices are set. And by nearly every measure, Marylanders aren’t happy about it.
Three informal polls conducted by MDBayNews in the days following the June 23 primary painted a remarkably consistent picture: voters are dissatisfied with their parties, skeptical of their candidates, and increasingly convinced that the system producing those candidates may be the deeper problem.
The numbers aren’t scientific. They’re Twitter polls — self-selected, unweighted, and limited to whoever follows MDBayNews or encountered the posts in their feed. But directional signals have value, and these three point in the same direction with enough consistency to be worth examining.
What the Polls Said
One of the most-engaged polls asked a straightforward question: with the primary over, are you happy with your party’s direction and its chances in November?
Eighty-one percent said no. Seven percent said yes. Twelve percent weren’t sure.
That poll drew 74 votes and 473 impressions — a modest sample, but the margin is too wide to dismiss as noise. Across whatever ideological mix follows MDBayNews, near-unanimous dissatisfaction was the response.
The second poll focused on the Republican side of the general election matchup. Dan Cox, the presumptive GOP nominee, is heading into a November rematch against incumbent Gov. Wes Moore — the same race Cox lost by nearly 32 points in 2022. Will MDBayNews readers support him?
Sixty-eight percent said yes. Twenty-four percent said no. Eight percent were undecided.
That poll was the most-engaged of the three — 194 votes, 1,000 impressions, 11 comments, six reposts. It touched something. But the 24% who said no deserve attention. In a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two to one, those aren’t potential Moore voters. They’re Republicans and right-leaning independents who looked at their own party’s nominee and declined. Where they go in November is an open question.
The third poll asked whether Maryland should adopt an open primary system like California’s, where the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, advance to the general election. Forty-three percent said yes. Fifty-seven percent said no.
That result is more complicated than it looks. Opposition to open primaries from a right-leaning audience is predictable — the California model is often associated with diluting conservative candidates in heavily Democratic states. But 43% support, from that same audience, signals something. Nearly half of the respondents were willing to blow up the current system, even knowing what the alternatives look like.
The System Is Working as Designed
None of this happened by accident. Maryland’s electoral architecture is not broken. It is functioning exactly as it was built to function — and it was built to produce two choices. Oftentimes, only one.
Closed primaries are the foundation. Maryland does not allow unaffiliated or third-party voters to participate in Democratic or Republican primaries. Those voters — the fastest-growing registration category in the state — watch from the sidelines while the two parties select the only candidates most Marylanders will ever have a meaningful opportunity to choose between. By the time November arrives, the decision has already been made by a subset of the electorate that skews older, more ideologically committed, and less representative of where the broader electorate actually is.
Ballot access compounds the problem. Third parties in Maryland face petition thresholds that require collecting tens of thousands of signatures just to get a candidate’s name on the general election ballot. That process consumes resources, volunteer hours, and organizational capacity that could otherwise go toward actual campaigning. It is, by design, a barrier — not a feature.
Maryland’s electoral architecture is not broken. It is functioning exactly as it was built to function — and it was built to produce two choices.
Media coverage and debate access do the rest. Without major-party status, third-party candidates are routinely excluded from televised debates, receive minimal coverage from outlets that treat viability as a prerequisite for coverage, and face an audience that has been conditioned to treat a vote outside the two parties as a wasted one.
Green Party candidate Andy Ellis will appear on the November ballot. He earned that access. But the infrastructure around him — the financial support, the media oxygen, the institutional legitimacy — has been systematically minimized by a system that treats his candidacy as a curiosity rather than a legitimate alternative.
Ellis has been direct about his positioning. While Moore campaigns against Trump and national Republicans, and Cox campaigns against Moore and Annapolis Democrats, Ellis has staked out a different lane entirely — running, as he put it, against both parties and for what he calls “the Maryland we deserve.” His platform calls for ending what he describes as two-party corruption, building an economy based on solidarity, putting people over profits, declaring an environmental state of emergency, and divesting from what his campaign characterizes as war and genocide.
Whether that agenda appeals to the disaffected right-leaning voter who won’t support Cox is an open question — probably not on most of those planks. But Ellis’s structural argument — that both parties have failed Maryland — maps directly onto what the poll numbers reflect, regardless of ideological fit. There is an audience that is done choosing between two parties it doesn’t trust, and at least one candidate on the November ballot is speaking directly to that audience.
Where Do the Disaffected Go?
The 24% of Cox’s own audience that won’t support him. The 81% who are unhappy with their party’s direction. Five months remain before Election Day. Their options are limited, and none of them are clean.
They can vote the party line anyway — hold their nose, pick the lesser of two disappointing options, and hope the party learns something from whatever happens in November. Most voters, historically, do exactly this.
They can vote third party. Ellis is on the ballot. A protest vote in a race Moore is expected to win decisively doesn’t change the outcome, but it does register on the margin — and margins, over time, send signals that competent political operatives notice.
They can stay home. MDBayNews documented Democratic turnout collapse in the primary — a pattern that doesn’t emerge from nowhere and doesn’t disappear on its own. Disengagement is a choice too, and it’s one an increasing number of Marylanders appear to be making.
They can write someone in. It’s legal. It accomplishes nothing electorally. But it is an expression of something real.
Each of these choices carries consequences — not just for this race, but for what the parties learn, or refuse to learn, from November’s results. A Moore blowout tells Democrats nothing useful if the right-leaning disaffected simply stayed home rather than crossing over. A closer-than-expected race tells Republicans something, but not necessarily the right thing if Cox treats it as personal vindication rather than a reflection of structural fatigue.
A Signal, Not Apathy
The impulse is to read voter dissatisfaction as apathy — a shrug, a tuned-out electorate, people who don’t care enough to engage. That reading is wrong, and the polls above are evidence against it.
People who don’t care don’t answer polls. They don’t repost them, comment on them, or engage with the question at a rate of 1,000 impressions. The MDBayNews audience that responded to these questions is paying attention. They have opinions. They are frustrated.
That frustration is not directionless. It has a specific target: a system that presents two options, tells voters to be grateful, and then expresses bewilderment when the electorate grows increasingly alienated from both.
Maryland is a state with a supermajority Democratic legislature, an incumbent Democratic governor facing credibility questions on multiple fronts — those questions are not abstract: Moore’s own former supervisor has gone on record disputing the governor’s account of his military service, a story MDBayNews documented Sunday — and a Republican opposition that has twice nominated a candidate who lost by double digits statewide in 2022. The conditions for a genuine third-force moment exist — not necessarily this November, but eventually.
The question is not whether Marylanders are tired of the two-party system. The polls already answered that. The question is whether the people running that system are paying attention — and whether they have any interest in changing it.
So far, the evidence suggests they do not.
Sources
MDBayNews (@MDBayNews), X polls conducted June 2026: party satisfaction poll (74 votes, 473 impressions); Dan Cox support poll (194 votes, 1,000 impressions); open primary poll (49 votes, 296 impressions). Andy Ellis for Governor (@gogre…), X post, June 2026.
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