Around the country this primary season, Democratic candidates backed by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders generally haven’t fared well. That changed Tuesday in Maryland.
First-time candidate Ben Jealous, an outspoken Sanders supporter, easily beat Prince George’s County Executive Rushern Baker III to garner the Democratic nomination for governor.
As of midnight, Jealous had 219,430 votes to Baker’s 161,656, with 98 percent of the votes counted.
Krish O'Mara Vignarajah of Gaithersburg finished fourth in the nine-candidate field with 45,154 votes and state Sen. Richard Madaleno of Kensington was fifth with 31,541 votes.
Jealous, the former president of the NAACP, will face popular Republican Gov. Larry Hogan in the November election.
In Montgomery County, Jealous beat Baker by a margin of 41,559 votes to 37,467. The 16,516 votes that Madaleno received in the county represented more than half of all the votes he got statewide. Vignarajah garnered 8,306 votes in the county.
After declaring victory, Jealous told supporters gathered in Baltimore on Tuesday night that he can defeat Hogan. “I know there is skepticism that Larry Hogan can be beaten,” he said. “Well, we’ve got a message for those who think this race is already over. Larry Hogan will lose in November because he is not ready to run against someone who knows how to build a true people-powered grassroots campaign.”
