By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
With the general election field now set, Green Party gubernatorial nominee Andy Ellis is pushing to make sure Maryland voters see more than a two-candidate race on stage this fall.
In a July 27 press release sent to newsrooms across the state, Ellis called for a series of at least four regional gubernatorial debates — one each in Western Maryland, the Baltimore region, the Washington suburbs, and the Eastern Shore — featuring all four tickets certified for the November 3 ballot: Gov. Wes Moore and Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller (Democratic), Dan Cox and Rob Krop (Republican), Ellis and running mate Owen Silverman Andrews (Green), and Cathy White and Cathy Permut (Working Class Party).
“If it hosts a debate this fall, it should invite all four candidates for governor.”
— Andy Ellis
Ellis wants at least one of those debates hosted by Maryland Public Television, and he’s leaning on the station’s own legal mandate to make the case. Section 24-206 of the state’s Education Article, enacted in 1966, bars MPT from “presenting biased or one-sided aspects of partisan politics.” Ellis argues that a debate stage limited to the two major parties runs against that standard, particularly with roughly a quarter of Maryland’s registered voters affiliated with neither party.
“MPT is a state agency with an educational, nonpartisan mission,” Ellis said in the release. “If it hosts a debate this fall, it should invite all four candidates for governor.”
The push isn’t new for Ellis. His campaign backed House Bill 101, pre-filed by Del. Gary Simmons (D-Anne Arundel) on Oct. 31, 2025, and formally introduced Jan. 14, 2026. The bill would have barred a public broadcaster from using or receiving state funds if it held a statewide-office debate without inviting every ballot-certified candidate. It was an emergency bill, jointly referred to the House Government, Labor, and Elections and Appropriations committees, and got a hearing Feb. 4 — but the General Assembly’s own tracker shows no further recorded action after that hearing. It never came up for a vote and died in committee when the session ended.
HB101 would have required any publicly funded broadcaster to invite every ballot-certified candidate to statewide debates.
Under MPT’s current practice, candidates must clear a 10% polling threshold to qualify for its debate stage — a bar no third-party gubernatorial candidate has cleared in Maryland since the end of the Civil War, according to the release.
The stakes are more concrete than in past cycles. Ellis and Andrews were formally nominated through the Green Party’s online primary, held July 8–22, after Ellis ran unopposed. Maryland reserves state-funded primaries for the Democratic and Republican parties, so Green-affiliated voters cast ballots separately.
Roughly one-quarter of Maryland’s registered voters are affiliated with neither major party.
This isn’t the first time debate access has been a flashpoint in a Moore-Cox matchup. In their 2022 race, Moore agreed to only one televised debate with Cox — an MPT-hosted forum in October — after declining multiple other invitations, including from Morgan State University, the Maryland Federation of NARFE, and a candidate forum at the Maryland Association of Counties conference.
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