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The partisan split in Republican gubernatorial primaries this year has not followed a clean pattern. In states such as Georgia, Idaho, and Nebraska, for example, GOP primary voters ignored Donald Trump and rejected far-right election deniers seeking statewide office. In states like Pennsylvania, however, the Republican base followed the former president’s instructions.
Maryland seemed like a state where GOP voters would recognize the need for more moderate nominees. After all, outgoing Gov. Larry Hogan won two statewide campaigns in a “blue” state — the second time, by double digits — by steering clear of his party’s more radical wing.
With this in mind, the Republican governor urged his party’s electorate to think strategically and nominate former state Commerce Secretary Kelly Schulz, a relative GOP moderate. Trump, meanwhile, backed a far-right state lawmaker named Dan Cox. As NBC News reported, in this proxy fight, Maryland Republicans decided to ignore Hogan’s advice.
Another Republican who has sowed false doubt about the 2020 election is a step closer to a governor’s mansion and the power to certify results of the 2024 presidential race. Dan Cox, a state delegate in Maryland, won his state’s GOP primary Tuesday, NBC News projects, beating Kelly Schulz, a former state secretary of commerce backed by the state party’s establishment.
Much of the coverage this week has focused on the fact that Democrats played a role in the primary, giving Cox a boost over Schulz because they saw him as far too extreme to win in the general election. It’s a fair point: The Democratic Governors Association spent more than $1 million on Cox-centric messaging.
But as the votes are tallied, it looks like Cox won by roughly 16 points over the incumbent Republican governor’s hand-picked preference — suggesting the outcome likely would’ve been the same whether there was Democratic mischief or not.
What matters even more is why Democrats saw Cox as the unelectable candidate.
The newly crowned GOP nominee, after all, attended Trump’s pre-riot rally on Jan. 6; he labeled former Vice President Mike Pence as a “traitor“; and he tried to impeach Hogan over Covid restrictions. Hogan went so far as to label Cox “a QAnon whack job.”
In one of the nation’s more reliably “blue” states, Republican primary voters nevertheless nominated Cox for this year’s gubernatorial race — though Hogan made clear yesterday that he has no intention of voting for him.
Making matters slightly worse, those same GOP primary voters nominated Michael Peroutka in Maryland’s race for state attorney general, despite an astonishing record. HuffPost described him as “a neo-Confederate activist.”
In a 2014 blog post, Peroutka described the separation of church and state as the “great lie.” That same year he argued for dismantling public education, which he denounced as “the 10th plank in the Communist Manifesto.” And in 2002, according to Vice, Peroutka gave a speech to a racist organization called the League of the South, in which he said he was “still angry” that Maryland did not secede from the Union during the Civil War.
A Right Wing Watch report added, “Peroutka founded the Institute on the Constitution, a Christian Reconstructionist organization that favors religious tests for public office and teaches that the government’s role is to enforce God’s law, and that the government has no legitimate authority to ‘house, feed, clothe, educate, or give health care to ... ANYBODY!’”
Vice News concluded, “His views are extreme even for the modern Republican Party, and once would be considered disqualifying for any major party nominee for statewide office. But his emergence as a serious candidate shows just how far the door has been thrown open to extremism in the Republican Party.”