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Maryland voters overwhelmingly chose Democrat Wes Moore to be their next governor. Here are fast facts about the first-time candidate who will become the state’s first Black governor when he’s inaugurated on Jan. 18, 2023.
He’s had a varied career
Moore, 44, has had several stops in his professional career before turning to politics.
Some of the items on his resume include: investment banker in London and New York; captain in the U.S. Army Reserves, with a deployment to Afghanistan; one year as a White House Fellow in the U.S. State Department; founder of the now-shuttered for-profit education company BridgeEdU; author of multiple books, including the bestseller “The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates”; and CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation in New York City.
Moore has never run for political office before. He has often said on the campaign trail that while he’s not a politician, he’s been a “public servant” his whole life. Moore says that working at BridgeEdU (which helped first-generation college students) and Robin Hood (which funded anti-poverty programs) has helped him understand where government falls short and can be improved.
He has a military background
Growing up in the Bronx, Moore says he struggled in school and got into youthful trouble. His mother, Joy Thomas Moore, shipped him off to military boarding school at the Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania.
Moore says he rebelled at first, but ultimately relented and dove into his military school education. He rose the ranks of the cadets to a top leadership position. After graduating from Valley Forge’s high school, he stayed on to earn an associate’s degree. Moore wears his Valley Forge class ring daily.
Moore was commissioned into the U.S. Army Reserves when he was still 17, and his mother had to sign off on the paperwork.
Moore was deployed to Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division from August 2005 through March 2006. He reached the rank of captain and was awarded the National Defense Service Medal, Afghanistan Campaign Medal, Armed Forces Reserve Medal with “M” Device, Army Service Ribbon and Parachutist Badge.
He retired from the Army in 2014.
He’s a Rhodes scholar
After graduating from Valley Forge’s associate’s degree program, Moore enrolled at Johns Hopkins University, graduating in 2001.
One of his mentors, then-Mayor Kurt Schmoke, urged Moore to apply for the Rhodes scholarship. Moore became the first Black graduate of Hopkins to become a Rhodes scholar.
Moore began his studies at Oxford shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. He studied international relations and submitted a thesis titled “Rise and Ramifications of Radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere.”
Baltimore is his adopted hometown
When Moore was born in 1978, his family lived in Takoma Park, a Washington, D.C., suburb. His father was a D.C. radio host and his mother also worked in broadcasting.
Moore’s father, Westley Moore, died when he was about 3 years old from an infection that was not properly diagnosed.
With three children to raise, Moore’s mother soon moved the family to the Bronx to live with her parents and Moore spent most of his childhood there.
When Moore was in high school at Valley Forge, his mother took a job with the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore and moved to Pasadena in Anne Arundel County. That’s when Moore began visiting Baltimore on breaks from Valley Forge.
Moore periodically returned to the city — for college at Hopkins and for the period in his 20s when he was a White House fellow — before settling in the city, more or less permanently, in 2012.
He lives with his wife, Dawn Flythe Moore, and school-age children, Mia and James, in Baltimore’s Guilford neighborhood.
Moore often says that while he is not a Baltimorean by birth, he is a Baltimorean by choice.
Some already have high hopes for Moore
Moore has barely been elected governor of Maryland, and won’t be sworn into office until Jan. 18, but there’s already chatter that he could be the next rising star of the Democratic Party.
Multiple national news stories have suggested Moore could be like another charismatic Black politician: Barack Obama.
Moore has brushed off such suggestions.
Asked recently by The Baltimore Banner about the talk of running for national office, Moore chuckled and said: “I’m very excited about about being Maryland’s next governor. I’m very excited about what I think this next decade is going to hold for the state of Maryland. I think the the whole country is going to watch Maryland move fast. And that’s very, very exciting to me.”
pamela.wood@thebaltimorebanner.com
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Pamela Wood covers Maryland politics and government. She previously reported for The Baltimore Sun, The Capital and other Maryland newspapers. A graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park, she lives in northern Anne Arundel County.
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