Wes Moore wins Democratic nomination for Maryland governor, setting up race against conservative Dan Cox in November

Wes Moore, a first-time candidate for elected office who built an energetic campaign against a crowded and robust field, has won the Democratic nomination for Maryland governor.

A bestselling author and former nonprofit leader, Moore defeated former U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez as mail-in ballots were being tallied Friday, according to The Associated Press, but after Moore won significantly more in-person votes earlier in the week.

Longtime state Comptroller Peter Franchot conceded the race earlier on Friday, leaving just Moore and Perez in what started as a 10-person field.

Moore will face Del. Dan Cox, who won his competitive primary earlier this week, in the general election. If he wins in November, Moore would become the first Black governor in Maryland’s history.

Political observers say Moore has a strong chance against Cox, a conservative Republican endorsed by former President Donald Trump. Moderate Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, who supported former state Commerce Secretary Kelly Schulz in their party’s primary, has called Cox a “conspiracy-theory-believing QAnon whack-job.”

“I think there’s no race at all. I think Wes Moore is going to be the new governor,” Hogan said Friday.

Moore’s team had projected confidence since the initial returns Tuesday showed he led the 10-person Democratic ballot with about 37% of the vote. Perez was next at 27% and Franchot followed at 20%.

Those margins narrowed Thursday after election officials began counting hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots. The latest figures show Moore with 168,230 votes, or 34% of the total counted.

Perez, at 28% was down by about 32,000 votes. Campaign manager Sean Downey said on Twitter earlier Friday that they were “incredibly encouraged” by the initial mail-in returns. Most of those ballots were from Montgomery County, Perez’s home base and the largest pool of votes in the state, and they had not yet all been counted.

Franchot, who held a slight lead over the rest of the field in polling throughout the primary campaign, had 22% of the vote, or about 106,000 total votes, as of the latest numbers.

Franchot, in his concession statement Friday, congratulated Moore and said he would support him in the general election campaign.

Moore, 43, of Baltimore, is a Johns Hopkins University graduate and Rhodes scholar who also served in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan and worked in investment banking at Citibank. He’s known for his book, “The Other Wes Moore,” which followed his life and that of a Baltimore man with the same name who ended up in prison.

He stepped down as CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, a large nonprofit that fights poverty, in 2021 before launching his campaign. It became a juggernaut for fundraising and endorsements in a race that featured several prominent state and national figures.

Nearly 638,000 Maryland voters cast ballots in person. Another 509,000 voters requested a mail-in ballot, which they had to turn in by 8 p.m. Tuesday. As of Friday night, the state elections board reported receiving about 268,000 of those, with more expected to arrive by mail in the next several days. They’ll be counted as long as they were postmarked by the deadline.

As of primary day, the Democratic field had nine candidates. All but Moore and Perez have conceded: Franchot; Jon Baron, a nonprofit executive; former Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler; Ashwani Jain, a former Obama White House official; John. B. King, who was education secretary in the Obama administration; Jerome M. Segal, an author and founder of the socialist Bread and Roses Party, and teacher Ralph Jaffe. Former Prince George’s County Executive Rushern Baker dropped out in June but remained on the ballot.

(Baltimore Sun reporter Darcy Costello contributed to this article.)