By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Governor Wes Moore spent his Sunday morning on “Surrounded,” a debate program from the online media company Jubilee, in an episode where he takes questions from 20 self-described non-voters. The episode — taped in a California warehouse and running over an hour — dropped on Jubilee’s YouTube channel Sunday morning, July 5.
Back in Maryland, the candidates who will actually appear on the November ballot have no guarantee of a debate stage at all.
Andy Ellis, who is seeking the Green Party nomination for governor, responded to the appearance Sunday morning with a statement welcoming the governor’s willingness to debate — and a pointed suggestion about venue. “I am pleased to see the governor answering questions from non-voters,” Ellis said. “Hopefully, he will do this in Maryland when the cameras are not rolling.“
Ellis renewed his campaign’s call for Maryland Public Television, the state-funded broadcaster that hosts gubernatorial debates, to invite every candidate certified to the general election ballot. “In addition to talking to non-voters on a podcast, we hope the governor will push Maryland Public Television to invite all candidates on this year’s general election ballot for governor to a televised debate,” he said.
The governor’s appetite for debating people outside the process: strong enough to fly to a California studio and take questions from 20 people who don’t vote at all.
The Ten Percent Wall
MPT has historically limited general election debate participation to candidates polling at 10 percent or higher. The threshold was in effect for the October 2022 Moore–Cox debate, where both major-party nominees met the qualifying criteria. No third-party or independent gubernatorial candidate has cleared that bar in modern Maryland history — which means the threshold functions, in practice, as a two-party filter on a taxpayer-funded stage.
The exclusion is not hypothetical. In 2022, Democratic primary candidate Jerome Segal was left out of an MPT gubernatorial debate and publicly called his exclusion “a major blow to my campaign” that he believed was illegal. MPT’s communications director said the network used its best judgment in determining Segal did not meet participation criteria, and offered him a separate appearance on an MPT program instead.
Notably, MPT applies no such filter in primaries. For its May 2026 Republican gubernatorial primary debate, the network invited all nine candidates who appeared on the primary ballot. The narrowing happens precisely at the stage where the most Maryland voters are watching: the general election.
The Bill That Died Without a Vote
The General Assembly had the fix in front of it this year. House Bill 101, sponsored by Delegate Gary Simmons, a Democrat representing District 12B in Anne Arundel County, would have required any public broadcaster hosting a statewide candidate debate to invite all candidates certified to the general election ballot — and would have barred a noncompliant broadcaster from using or receiving state funds for the remainder of the fiscal year.
A bill to guarantee every ballot-qualified Maryland candidate a place on the state broadcaster’s debate stage: died without a vote.
The bill was pre-filed in October 2025, received its first reading in the Government, Labor, and Elections Committee on January 14, 2026, and got a hearing on February 4. Then nothing. The committee never voted it out. Advocacy organizations, including Baltimore-based Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, spent March publicly urging legislators to demand the bill receive a vote in the Election Law Subcommittee. It never got one. The session adjourned with HB101 dead in a committee controlled by the governor’s own party — heard, noted, and left on the table without a single recorded vote from any member.
So the record for 2026 reads as follows. A bill to guarantee every ballot-qualified Maryland candidate a place on the state broadcaster’s debate stage: died without a vote. The governor’s appetite for debating people outside the process: strong enough to fly to a California studio and take questions from 20 people who don’t vote at all. Among the three statements Moore put up for debate on the show, per the Baltimore Banner’s recap: “Bad politics thrive when you don’t participate.” Delegate Simmons’s bill made the same point. It’s still on the table in Annapolis.
What Ellis Is Asking For
The Ellis campaign’s democracy platform calls for including all ballot-qualified candidates in MPT’s televised debates, alongside ranked choice voting and public campaign financing. The campaign is circulating a petition to MPT asking that every candidate on this year’s general election gubernatorial ballot be invited to a televised debate.
Ellis’s framing borrows the premise of the governor’s own Sunday appearance: people engage when they see their views represented in the conversation. Jubilee’s format is built on that idea. So, in theory, is public television.
Moore won the June Democratic primary and is seeking a second term in November. Dan Cox, the 2022 Republican nominee, won the Republican primary, setting up a rematch of the 2022 race between the two major parties. Whether Maryland voters see anyone else on a debate stage this fall is, for now, a decision that rests with MPT’s editorial criteria — the same criteria that have never once admitted a third voice.
Sourcing: Ellis campaign press release, July 5, 2026 (provided to MDBayNews); Jubilee Media’s “Governor Wes Moore vs. 20 Non-Voters | Surrounded” episode, published to YouTube July 5, 2026, and associated promotional posts; Baltimore Banner recap of the episode, July 5, 2026; Washington Informer coverage of the October 12, 2022 MPT gubernatorial debate and qualifying criteria; Associated Press/CBS Baltimore coverage of Jerome Segal’s exclusion from the 2022 MPT debate; Maryland General Assembly records for HB101 (2026 Regular Session), including bill text, the February 4, 2026 hearing record in the Government, Labor, and Elections Committee, and the sponsor page for Delegate Gary Simmons (D-12B, Anne Arundel); Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle advocacy materials on HB101, March 2026; Maryland Public Television Vote 2026 programming page regarding the May 19, 2026 Republican primary debate; Ellis campaign democracy platform at gogreen2026.com/democracy.
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