Tea at Trianon: Wes Moore Wants to Choose His Opponent

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, June 21, 2026

Wes Moore Wants to Choose His Opponent

I have already voted for Hale, during early voting. From Direct Line News:

In the closing days before Maryland’s June 23 Republican gubernatorial primary, something unusual is happening on television, on Facebook, and in mailboxes across the state. Governor Wes Moore’s reelection campaign and the Maryland Democratic Party are spending real money on advertising aimed squarely at Republican voters. The ads attack the two leading GOP candidates, Dan Cox and Ed Hale Sr. The stated rationale from Democrats is simple: they say they are informing the public. Republicans say the operation is designed to pick Moore’s preferred opponent in November.
[...]
Republican candidates have had enough of it. Cox and Hale both publicly condemned the effort as Democratic interference. Their frustration is understandable. The 2022 cycle demonstrated the danger of this strategy, not because Democrats openly backed Cox, but because the amplification of his conservative credentials helped him consolidate a primary coalition. Cox’s nomination handed Moore exactly the general election opponent Democratic strategists wanted. The strategy worked. Now Democrats are running it again.
The key question is whether it will work a second time. Sam Novey, chief strategist at the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland College Park, offered a candid assessment. The jury, he said, remains out on pied piper effectiveness. Is spending money to elevate a weaker candidate worth the risk that the ads fail to move primary voters, while the funds could have gone elsewhere? And then there is reputational backlash. Republican activists who feel their primary has been manipulated have a way of channeling that anger into November turnout.
Democrats ran this play in 2022 and it worked. Cox won the primary. Moore won the fall by 35 points. Maryland Republicans cannot afford to let history repeat itself.
What Republicans Must Understand
There is a lesson here that Maryland Republicans need to absorb, and absorb quickly. When an incumbent governor with the resources of a statewide campaign apparatus and the backing of his state party is spending money in your primary, it is not because he fears you. It is because he has done the math. Moore’s team has made a calculation about which Republican candidate poses the lesser challenge in November. The advertising campaign is the logical result of that calculation. (Read more.)