Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, who is pushing his state to pursue mid-decade redistricting, said Thursday that President Donald Trump should not get to unilaterally decide which states redraw their maps this cycle.
“Donald Trump decided to start picking and choosing which states should go through this process mid-decade,” Moore said during a Texas Tribune Festival panel. “He didn’t call all of us. He called some of us.”
Moore, a Democrat, created a redistricting advisory commission in the wake of a national redistricting arms race that Texas kicked off in August, when state legislators took the rare step of changing the map mid-decade to create more seats for Republicans.
What started in Austin, where Trump called Gov. Greg Abbott asking him to take up mid-decade redistricting, ended up reverberating around the country. Republicans in both Missouri and North Carolina have since changed their maps to redraw one Democratic-represented seat in each state to favor the GOP.
California Democrats, following Texas Republicans’ move, successfully passed a ballot referendum circumventing the state’s independent commission to redraw the map. In California, Democrats shored up vulnerable incumbents and changed the composition of five districts to advantage Democrats, potentially negating Texas Republicans’ effort.
Maryland is one of the few Democratic-led states where the party both has room to pick up an extra seat — the current map favors Democrats 8-1 — and does not have legal hurdles in its state constitution to do so. While Moore and other top Democrats in the state House and congressional delegation have called for a new map, their push has thus far been stymied by Maryland Senate Majority Leader Bill Ferguson, a Democrat, who opposes the effort.
In opposing the redistricting effort, Ferguson said he is concerned about the 9-0 map being challenged at the Maryland Supreme Court, where five of seven justices were appointed by former Republican Gov. Larry Hogan. Ferguson also said Maryland’s move could trigger another Republican state to take up redistricting as well.
Moore, a potential 2028 Democratic candidate for president, did not call out Ferguson or discuss how he would get legislative stakeholders on board. But he noted that he convened a commission to discuss the issue and said states should not “sit on their hands.”
“If parts of this country are going to go through a mid-decade process to decide whether or not they have fair maps, then so will the state of Maryland,” Moore said. “Donald Trump is not going to choose what our democracy looks like.”
Moore, who is running for re-election next year, flipped the governor’s mansion in 2022 in an open race, after Hogan had held the position for eight years. Moore has denied speculation about a presidential bid, even as he had traveled to key early states like South Carolina and Nevada this year.
His 2022 gubernatorial victory marked Moore’s first foray into electoral politics. An Army veteran, author and former nonprofit CEO, Moore is Maryland’s first Black governor and the third Black governor in U.S. history. He was thrust into the national spotlight in 2024 when a cargo ship rammed into Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, disrupting the city’s port.
On Thursday, Moore reiterated that he is not running for president, and that he takes asking Marylanders for another four-year term seriously.
“I realize how much I’m playing with house money right now,” said Moore, who noted that his father died when he was young and that he was handcuffed as a preteen. “I’m probably the most improbable governor in this country.”
The governor also addressed key issues facing the Democratic Party — including the strategy around ending the government shutdown — and areas of common concern between Maryland and Texas, including rising energy costs.
Moore, whose state has more federal workers than any other, did not directly criticize Democratic senators who caved Monday night and voted with Republicans to end the government shutdown for a promise of a vote on expiring Affordable Care Act tax credits. He said that he was glad to see the government reopen, and lamented the existence of government shutdowns in the first place, calling it “absurd on its face.”
But he said the compromise Congress reached — which did not guarantee that the ACA tax credits would be extended — did not pass muster with him.
“The federal government should never have been shut down in the first place,” Moore said. “However, I will say this — how deeply inhuman it is, and it was, to think that a good compromise is that a prerequisite for reopening the government is kicking people off of health care.”
Moore also addressed some of the soul-searching in the Democratic Party about what went wrong in 2024 and how to fix it. The Maryland governor said Democrats’ problem lies in their ability to deliver on the issues they talk about rather than their messaging. He cited expanding housing supply and investing in more energy sources — both associated with the “Abundance” wing of the party — as potential ideas.
“I think the Democratic Party has got to stop being the party of no and slow and start being the party of yes and best,” he said.
Moore also said states around the country have not moved quickly to address rising energy costs, including the enormous demand that data centers have placed on grids. Energy utility processes, which he called “opaque and convoluted” is one area ripe for reform. And Moore said that tech companies seeking to build data centers need to be more involved in community input processes.
But he acknowledged that the issue goes beyond state boundaries and its solutions likely do, too.
“This is one of the crucial issues that we’ve got to be able to sort [out], and frankly, no individual state alone is going to be able to figure out. It’s going to really take coordination between all of our individual states.”
