Big money dominates our politics in the United States. The capital of corporations and millionaires, derived from the surplus value of our labor, flows like a sludgy river to the campaign committees of Democrats and Republicans alike. This river of money in politics runs wide as it winds through Maryland.
The donations are anything but gifts — the wealthy expect, and receive, a return on these investments. Those returns are policies and budgets that harm working-class Marylanders, our treasured natural environment and our state’s democracy.
Could a more robust democracy formed by healthier electoral parties address the harm done by this deluge of dollars? Since Maryland governors wield nearly unrivaled structural power relative to other states, it is instructive to focus our attention there.
The current and most recent governors make for a convenient, time-based case study. Governors Wes Moore and Larry Hogan are both men — all 63 Maryland governors have been. They are of different parties, races and generations. However, in each of their most recent runs for governor, they rejected the incentive from Maryland’s public campaign finance system to focus on smaller dollar in-state contributions. Instead, they accepted corporate, political action committee (PAC) and millionaires’ contributions, despite each eventually cruising to wide margins of victory in 2022 and 2018, respectively.
Their decisions to accept these checks — candidates take up to $6,000 per person per two-year cycle, though the governor-lieutenant governor slate can take $18,000 total — harm us in direct and material ways. Through their checkbooks, the wealthy have bent state government to their will. Our air is less clean, our future less livable, our budgets less funded for it. The concessions Governors Moore and Hogan have made have undermined our government, economy, environment and democracy.
It does not have to be this way! If we can envision alternatives, we can embody them. If we can imagine a multiparty, participatory, grassroots democracy, we can build it. When we understand the power of peoples’ coalitions, we can move away from the big money arms race to the bottom. We can then move toward elections in which the mass of voters, not just a wealthy few, truly determine the outcomes of our elections.
Arriving at a more just Maryland politics will require more than strategic idealism and hard work. It will require that we Marylanders withhold our consent to be misgoverned. In addition to community organizing, civil disobedience and direct action, it will require that we demand a new social contract with our governors, legislators and judges. It will require that we convene the first state constitutional convention in Maryland in 57 years to write a new state constitution together. After all, the people of Maryland have changed since 1968 — the last time elected delegates attempted to rewrite the state constitution — and our constitution should reflect that change.
In our 21st-century state constitution, we can restrain the power of concentrated capital to define Maryland’s politics. We can reposition justice, ecology, peace and democracy at the center of our governing system. We can begin to repair our state’s relationship with the land, Indigenous peoples and descendants of enslaved workers.
We can. Will we?
Multiparty democracies are more collaborative. A multiparty system in Maryland cannot solve all that ails our state’s democracy. It cannot abolish big money’s influence single-handedly. But through a multiparty democracy that more fully includes parties such as the Maryland Green Party — which rejects corporate and PAC money — the incentives increase for expanding the use of public campaign financing, ranked choice voting and proportional representation to put people power at the center of our politics.
Building a new Maryland politics and writing a new Maryland constitution are enormous undertakings. They will require concerted, collective action over the next decade to leave a better Maryland for future generations.
In the 2026 election, Marylanders will be able to choose between more of the same, a return to the past or a new direction. By realizing our power to build alternatives, we begin to build a Maryland where elected officials serve the working class, not the donor class.
Will we?
Owen Silverman Andrews is a teacher living in Baltimore. He served two terms (2018-2021) as co-chair of the Baltimore City Green Party.
