By Michael Phillips, MDBayNews
Sen. Chris Van Hollen sat across from Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” this past Sunday and told her flatly that he has been to New Hampshire. He said he was invited to Iowa last summer, too, and that he is “kicking the tires, testing the waters” on a run for president in 2028.
It was not an off-the-cuff remark. Van Hollen has said some version of the same thing for months, first to the On NOTUS podcast in June, then at the Hill Nation Summit in July, and now on national television in August. Maryland’s senior senator is, by his own account, actively exploring a national campaign three years out. He is not alone. Maryland’s Democratic bench, from the governor’s mansion to the House delegation, has spent much of 2025 and 2026 on the road, and increasingly that road runs through the same early presidential states that mattered in past nominating contests.
“Maryland’s senior senator is, by his own account, actively exploring a national campaign three years out.”
The Maryland Republican Party flagged the pattern this week in a social media post, asking a fair question: is a single Maryland Democrat actually focused on Maryland right now? A review of public reporting, campaign disclosures and the politicians’ own statements suggests the travel is real, well documented, and not confined to Van Hollen.
Moore’s mileage
The most detailed accounting comes from Gov. Wes Moore himself, or rather from his own state police travel logs. The Baltimore Banner analyzed calendars obtained through public records requests and found that Moore has spent at least a portion of one in every five days out of state since taking office in January 2023. Since the start of 2025, that rate has climbed to roughly one in four days, about 25 percent of his time in office. The total comes to at least 270 full or partial days spent outside Maryland, and it does not even count his regular trips to Washington or the roughly four weeks he has spent overseas on trade missions and personal travel.
Moore’s office disputes the framing. Spokesman Ammar Moussa told the Banner the analysis was “sloppy and inaccurate” because it counts more than 110 partial travel days, days when Moore also worked in Maryland, the same as full days away. That is a fair point of contention, and MDBayNews notes it here in the interest of giving Moore’s team its say. But even by a generous reading, the governor has visited at least 27 states since taking office, several of them for reasons that have nothing to do with running Maryland.
“The governor has visited at least 27 states since taking office, several of them for reasons that have nothing to do with running Maryland.”
Consider where he has gone:
- South Carolina, repeatedly, including a keynote address at the state Democratic Party’s Blue Palmetto Dinner and an appearance at U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn’s fish fry. South Carolina has opened the Democratic presidential calendar in recent cycles.
- Nevada, Georgia and Michigan, states with early or influential primary contests, where Moore has campaigned for other Democrats this summer.
- New Jersey and Virginia, where Moore campaigned last year for now-Gov. Mikie Sherrill and now-Gov. Abigail Spanberger, and where he attended Spanberger’s January inauguration.
- Idaho, for the Sun Valley conference sometimes nicknamed “billionaire summer camp” by the press that covers it.
- Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, for fundraising among wealthy Massachusetts donors.
- New York, a frequent stop that Moore’s team has paired with national media hits on outlets including CNN and Fox News.
Some of that travel is tied to an official, nonpartisan role rather than campaign politics. Moore became chair of the National Governors Association on August 1, 2026, after a stint as its vice chair, a position that carries its own travel obligations regardless of any national ambitions.
Moore insists none of this distracts from the job. “I’m the governor of Maryland no matter where I am,” he told the Banner, adding that he stays on the phone with his cabinet secretaries regardless of location. He has also said repeatedly, including on ABC’s “The View,” that he is not running for president in 2028.
“Since the start of 2025, Moore has spent at least part of roughly one in four days outside Maryland.”
Not everyone close to Annapolis is convinced the travel is cost-free. Patrick Moran, president of AFSCME Maryland, told reporters in early August that he hopes the administration will focus on “the here and now” in Maryland rather than the national stage. Both AFSCME and the Maryland State and D.C. AFL-CIO declined to endorse Moore in this year’s Democratic primary, a break from 2022, when the state’s largest labor umbrella backed him. Unite Here Local 7, which represents concession workers at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, has launched what it calls a “Poor Because of Moore” campaign, arguing the administration has not pushed hard enough to force higher wages from airport concessionaires. Local 7 president Tracy Lingo, who also serves as a vice president of the state AFL-CIO, put it bluntly: “In the absence of them telling me which of those two things it is, I think assuming he’s too busy running for president is the nicer of the two.”
Senate President Bill Ferguson, a fellow Democrat, put it more diplomatically but did not dodge the question when Fox45 asked him about it in June. The governor’s attention, he said, has been focused on things outside Maryland at times, and that is something Annapolis will have to navigate going forward.
The security bill for all this travel is not small, either. Records from the Maryland State Police show the cost of sending troopers with Moore on out-of-state and international trips topped $1.1 million over his first three years in office. For comparison, security for former Gov. Larry Hogan’s travel during the first nine months of 2022, when he was weighing his own presidential run, ran about $266,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars.
Van Hollen’s road trip
“I am kicking the tires, testing the waters.”
Van Hollen’s travel is smaller in scale but larger in symbolism, since it points directly at the traditional first-in-the-nation primary states rather than general campaign stops. He traveled to Keene, New Hampshire in June to serve as keynote speaker at the Cheshire County Democrats’ annual spaghetti dinner fundraiser, sharing the bill with New Hampshire’s own U.S. Senate candidates. Around the same trip, he told the On NOTUS podcast he was “kicking the tires” on 2028. He has also referenced a trip related to Iowa, though his own account of it has shifted slightly depending on the interview. At the Hill Nation Summit in July, he told The Hill he had recently visited Iowa and was asked to go to New Hampshire. On “Meet the Press” in August, he described it the other way, saying he had been to New Hampshire and was invited to Iowa last summer. Either way, Iowa has since been pushed out of the Democratic Party’s early nominating window for 2028, while New Hampshire has kept its traditional first-in-the-nation spot.
On the “Meet the Press” appearance that prompted the Maryland GOP’s post, Van Hollen was blunt about why he was there. He said Democrats have not offered a clear alternative to the Trump administration and that he wants to be part of shaping what comes next.
“I am kicking the tires, testing the waters,” he said.
Van Hollen has paired the early-state travel with a broader national campaign push. In June, he endorsed Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s competitive Democratic Senate primary, and in late July he appeared in person at a campaign event for El-Sayed in Ferndale, Michigan, alongside Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal. El-Sayed went on to introduce Van Hollen to the crowd as a future Senate majority leader. He has also weighed in on the Maine Senate primary and spoken at the Hill Nation Summit about the need for “dramatic change” in Washington. Van Hollen has a Senate seat of his own to defend in 2028, the same year he is eyeing for a possible presidential run, a timing conflict he has acknowledged but not resolved.
The rest of the delegation
Rep. Jamie Raskin has one of the most extensive out-of-state campaign travel records in the Maryland delegation, and it is not limited to past cycles. In April, Raskin traveled to Chatham, New Jersey, to campaign alongside former Rep. Tom Malinowski for Analilia Mejia, the Democrat who had just beaten Malinowski in that state’s CD-11 primary, drawing a standing ovation from a packed crowd of more than 200 people, according to InsiderNJ. That trip echoes a pattern set during the 2024 cycle, when Axios reported Raskin had campaigned for Democrats in 17 states and planned visits to at least nine more, making him one of the party’s most in-demand national surrogates. His fundraising follows the same pattern. Maryland Matters reported that Raskin had already given away more than $900,000 to other Democrats’ campaigns partway through this cycle, on pace to top the nearly $2 million he distributed nationally last cycle, with donations pouring in from 43 states and the District of Columbia.
Sen. Angela Alsobrooks has also stepped onto the national campaign trail. In late July, she traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to campaign for Democratic Senate nominee Scott Colom, joining him for a maternal health panel and a voting rights town hall alongside Rep. Bennie Thompson. She was the first Democrat from outside Mississippi to campaign for Colom in his own state.
Rep. Sarah Elfreth’s own record complicates a clean split between homebodies and road warriors. Her official press releases from her freshman term read almost entirely local, covering Chesapeake Bay legislation, oversight visits to an ICE facility in Baltimore, veterans’ health bills and joint statements with the rest of the Maryland delegation. But according to a post on her own campaign X account, her out-of-state political activity has included canvassing trips to Pennsylvania. Elfreth wrote that she went to Harrisburg in November 2024 to canvass for Democratic congressional candidate Janelle Stelson, who lost that race to Rep. Scott Perry by 5,133 votes out of 406,938 cast, and said she planned to return to Fairview Township, Pennsylvania on August 29, 2026, to canvass again for Stelson’s rematch against Perry this fall. MDBayNews could not independently confirm the details of either trip through outside reporting, so they are presented here as Elfreth’s own account rather than independently verified fact. Even so, it is a modest example next to Moore’s 27 states or Raskin’s national fundraising network, a volunteer day trip across a nearby state line rather than a multistate campaign circuit, but it suggests the instinct to work other states’ races is not confined to Maryland’s most nationally ambitious Democrats.
“The instinct to work other states’ races is not confined to Maryland’s most nationally ambitious Democrats.”
Attorney General Anthony Brown, unopposed in his own reelection bid this year, shows no significant record of out-of-state political travel in available coverage. That is worth noting in fairness. Not every statewide Democrat is chasing a national audience.
The counterargument
Democrats close to Moore and Van Hollen make a real case for the travel, and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than waved away. State Sen. Antonio Hayes, a Baltimore Democrat, told the Banner that Republican control of Congress and the Trump administration’s policies have hurt Maryland’s economy, and that helping elect Democrats elsewhere is itself a way of protecting the state. David Lublin, who chairs American University’s government department, made a similar point: a talented, charismatic governor is naturally going to be in demand as a speaker and surrogate, and that demand is not proof of hidden ambition.
There is also a data point that cuts against the idea that Moore is unusually absent. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, frequently mentioned in the same 2028 conversations, has spent about 20 percent of his second term out of state, according to a Bay Area News Group analysis, which is comparable to Moore’s post-2025 pace. Both governors are logging serious road miles. Neither is unique in that respect.
“Whether voters see that travel as building coalitions for Maryland or keeping one eye on the next job is ultimately a judgment call.”
Still, the underlying fact pattern is not in dispute. Maryland’s most prominent Democrats have visited South Carolina, New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan and Mississippi over the past year and a half, largely for events tied to national Democratic politics rather than state business. Whether voters view that as a governor and a senator building coalitions to help Maryland, or as officials with one eye on their next job, is a judgment call the Maryland GOP has now put squarely in front of voters heading into the fall.
Moore faces Republican Dan Cox again in November, the same opponent he beat by a wide margin in 2022. Polling cited by the Banner put his in-state approval rating at 56 percent last month, up from a year earlier, suggesting his travel has not dented his standing at home, at least not yet. Van Hollen is not on the ballot this cycle. Whether either man’s national ambitions become a bigger issue in Maryland politics will likely depend on what, if anything, comes of the “kicking the tires” phase over the next two years.
Sources: This article draws on Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s August 23, 2026 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” verified against the full NBC News transcript, along with reporting from the Washington Times, the Keene Sentinel and NH Journal on his June 14, 2026 appearance at the Cheshire County Democrats’ fundraiser in Keene, New Hampshire, and his comments to the On NOTUS podcast around that same trip. His Michigan campaign travel is documented through his own June 2026 endorsement statement for Abdul El-Sayed and C-SPAN’s coverage of the July 2026 Ferndale, Michigan campaign event with Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Pramila Jayapal. Gov. Wes Moore’s travel record is drawn from the full text of the August 20, 2026 Baltimore Banner analysis by Lee O. Sanderlin and Pamela Wood, based on calendars obtained through Maryland Public Information Act requests, including named quotes from Moore spokesman Ammar Moussa, AFSCME Maryland president Patrick Moran, Unite Here Local 7 president Tracy Lingo, Senate President Bill Ferguson, state Sen. Antonio Hayes and American University’s David Lublin. Rep. Jamie Raskin’s April 2026 New Jersey campaign trip is drawn from InsiderNJ’s reporting on the Chatham event with Analilia Mejia and Tom Malinowski. His 2024 campaign travel figures come from Axios reporting, and his fundraising and donation totals come from Maryland Matters and a related Yahoo News republication of that reporting. Rep. Sarah Elfreth’s Pennsylvania canvassing trips for Janelle Stelson, including the claimed 2024 vote margin and the stated plan to return August 29, 2026, are drawn from a post on Elfreth’s own campaign X account and are presented as her account of her own activity rather than independently confirmed reporting. The Stelson-Perry race itself is confirmed through Ballotpedia and campaign coverage of Pennsylvania’s 10th Congressional District. Sen. Angela Alsobrooks’ Mississippi campaign trip is drawn from reporting by Mississippi Today and the Magnolia Tribune. Additional biographical and office information was confirmed through Ballotpedia, Congress.gov and official Senate and House websites for Elfreth, Brown, Alsobrooks and Raskin. California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s travel comparison and former Gov. Chris Christie’s 2015 travel figures are drawn from the Baltimore Banner’s reporting, which cited a Bay Area News Group analysis and a Wall Street Journal report, respectively.
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