Wes Moore / Aruna Miller

Democratic

Committee Name: Wes Moore For Maryland

Address: P.O. Box 50123

Baltimore, MD 21211-

Phone: (410) 366-3940

Website: www.wesmoore.com

Social: facebook.com/iamwesmoore

@iamwesmoore: instagram:@iamwesmoore

Wes Moore and Aruna Miller: They Inherited a Surplus. They Dug a Hole. They Will Not Stop Digging.

Maryland’s governor’s race is a rematch. Wes Moore and Aruna Miller want four more years. They should not get them.

Larry Hogan left the State House at the end of 2022 with a surplus measured in billions — about $5.5 billion on the books, the strongest fiscal position in state history by Hogan’s own accounting, and cash in the bank even after you discount the federal COVID dollars Moore later tried to wave away. Moore put his hand on the Bible on January 18, 2023, and called the position fortunate. Then he spent. Then he taxed. Then he spent again. Then he stood on national television and talked about fiscal responsibility as if the hole had been dug by someone else.

It was not.

Who Wes Moore is

Westley Watende Omari Moore was born in 1978, raised in Maryland after his family moved from New York, sent to Valley Forge Military Academy, then Johns Hopkins, then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He served as a captain in the 82nd Airborne. He wrote books. He ran a foundation. He hosted a television show. He has never been a county executive, a mayor, a comptroller, or a legislator. The first executive job he asked Maryland for was the top one.

In 2022 he beat Dan Cox. The biography sold. The résumé was a keynote. The state was still sitting on the cushion Hogan left. Moore did not have to prove he could run a government. He only had to promise he would.

He has now had a term. The promise is the record.

The surplus that vanished

Moore’s first defense is that the surplus was fake — one-time federal money, not a real balance. Republicans who were in the building when the cash arrived call that manure. The dollars were in the account. The Rainy Day Fund was stocked. The state was not insolvent. What Moore inherited was a position most governors would have protected. What he produced was a structural deficit large enough that the 2025 session opened with a $3.3 billion hole.

The legislature and the governor closed that hole the expensive way. Cuts, yes. Transfers, yes. And a tax-and-fee package of roughly $1.6 to $1.68 billion. Two new individual income-tax brackets. The state rate now climbs to 6.25 percent above $500,000 and 6.5 percent above $1 million. Fees stacked onto businesses and consumers. A coin dealer in Laurel said the new bullion tax was sending customers across the line. That is what “modernizing the tax code” looks like when the people writing the bill do not have to live on the receipt.

Moore then declared victory. He said they had turned a deficit into a surplus. He said it in ads. He said it at bill signings. He said it as if the $1.6 billion taken out of the private economy were a rounding error and not the point.

The surplus did not last. By last fall the forecast surplus had become another projected deficit — approaching $1.6 billion, including more than a billion in cash. His fiscal 2027 plan, about $70.8 billion, closed a $1.5 billion gap with cuts and nearly $1.1 billion in cash transfers, including $150 million lifted from the local income-tax reserve on the theory that it was an overpayment that would not have to be paid back. No new taxes in that cycle. He made a point of saying so. In September 2026 he would not promise the same for the next one.

The out years are worse. Analysts told the General Assembly the plan does little for fiscal 2028 and beyond. Shortfalls in the next term start around $2.3 billion, climb toward $3 billion, and approach $4 billion by the early 2030s. Blueprint education costs that were deferred come due. Teacher retirement. Human services. Salaries. The Spending Affordability Committee has already put structural deficits in the $2.7 to $3.7 billion range on paper. Agencies have been asked to model 10 percent cuts against a $3.1 billion shortfall. Moody’s has looked at the books. CNBC ranked Maryland’s economy near the bottom of the country. That is not a talking point from a primary opponent. That is the scoreboard after four years of a man who inherited a surplus.

Moore’s answer on CNBC was to lecture Washington about spending and to claim four straight years of shrinking the general fund. State Republicans called it a lie with a camera on it. He raised taxes and fees by the billions and still has another multibillion-dollar hole in front of him. Balancing a budget on paper after you emptied the cupboard and refilled it from the taxpayer is not the same as running a solvent state.

He has not stopped digging. He will not say he will stop.

What the term actually bought

The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future is a spending machine with a moral vocabulary. It was already law when Moore arrived. He treated it as destiny instead of a bill that needed a governor willing to tell Annapolis the state could not write checks the counties could not cash. Harford already lives with the local end of that math — school crowding, APF games, development envelopes, and a state capital that talks about “investment” while the seats fill faster than the classrooms.

Energy policy under this administration has been ideology first and generation second. Maryland buys power from neighbors and then wonders why the household meter is a political document. Solar mandates and compliance payments have been cheaper than doing the hard work of keeping plants online. Data-center load is treated as growth until the substation and the water table show up in a county hearing. Harford does not need another four years of Annapolis discovering infrastructure after the ribbon cutting.

The Key Bridge is still the exhibit. A state that cannot put a span back on a timeline that matches the speech is a state that should not be trusted with a second term on competence alone.

Crime rhetoric improved in Baltimore on some counts. Statewide cost of living did not. Families leaving for Pennsylvania and West Virginia do not file a press release. They just leave. Moore talks about 100,000 jobs and new corporate plaques. He does not talk about the people who decided Maryland was no longer worth the carrying cost.

Who Aruna Miller is

Aruna K. Miller was born in Andhra Pradesh, immigrated at seven, earned a civil-engineering degree, spent a quarter-century in transportation work, and represented Montgomery County’s District 15 in the House of Delegates from 2010 to 2018. She sat on Ways and Means and Appropriations. She lost a 2018 congressional primary to David Trone. Moore put her on the ticket. She became the first immigrant elected to statewide office in Maryland and the first Indian-American woman elected lieutenant governor in the country.

That is the brochure. The term is the job.

Miller’s portfolio is transportation, mental health, STEM talking points, and work-zone safety. The lieutenant governor in Maryland is not a co-governor. She is the spare and the surrogate. When the administration needed someone to shrug at half a million wrong-party mail ballots before the 2026 primary, she was the one who told a national interviewer that ballots get mailed the wrong way and that it happens in almost every election. It does not. A vendor coding error that size is not weather. Treating it as weather is how a government tells you it does not fear the canvass.

Before she was lieutenant governor she collected, over years of campaigns, six figures from donors critics tied to Hindu-nationalist networks. The Moore-Miller campaign posted a denial page. The donations were still on the reports. Progressive activists who said so described retaliation inside party structures. Miller called the attacks gossip and discrimination. Voters can read the clips and decide whether a statewide officer’s first reflex should be a press page or an explanation.

She lives in Montgomery County. She governs as if the rest of Maryland is a service area for the Washington suburbs. Harford is not a suburb of Bethesda. A ticket that talks about representation and then shrugs at election administration is asking the counties that actually run precincts to pretend the shrug was wisdom.

Why this ticket should lose in Harford

Harford does not vote for a keynote. It votes for the power bill, the assessment notice, the school seat, the farm next door, and whether Annapolis will spend the next four years treating the upper Bay as a map color and a revenue source.

Moore took a surplus and turned it into a structural deficit. He taxed his way to a temporary “surplus,” watched the hole reopen, transferred cash to paper over the next year, and refused to rule out doing it again. Miller is the understudy who treats a ballot fiasco as routine and a donor controversy as someone else’s smear. Neither of them has produced a reason to extend the lease.

Dan Cox and Rob Krop are on the other line. Cox has already been the nominee and a delegate. Krop has already met a payroll and beaten a federal case in open court. That ticket is an argument about cost, generation, land, and whether Maryland still belongs to the people who live in it.

This ticket is an argument about four more years of the same shovel.

Do not vote for Wes Moore. Do not vote for Aruna Miller. They inherited a surplus. They dug a hole. They have not stopped digging.