This content was republished with permission from WTOP’s news partners at Maryland Matters. Sign up for Maryland Matters’ free email subscription today.
This article was republished with permission from WTOP’s news partners at Maryland Matters. Sign up for Maryland Matters’ free email subscription today.
Michael S. Steele, the former Maryland lieutenant governor and one-time chairman of the Republican National Committee, has created an exploratory committee ahead of a possible run for governor in 2022.
Jim Dornan, a veteran national Republican strategist who was campaign manager for Ellen R. Sauerbrey during her 1998 run for governor in Maryland, is leading Steele’s exploratory effort. He said Steele expects to decide whether to run sometime between Labor Day and Thanksgiving.
Steele’s entry into the gubernatorial race would shake up the GOP field, with Gov. Larry Hogan (R) term-limited in 2022. Kelly M. Schulz, a former state lawmaker who is Hogan’s commerce secretary, is the establishment favorite so far, and Del. Daniel L. Cox (R-Frederick) recently entered the race as an avatar of the Trump wing of the party. Anti-tax gadfly and frequent candidate Robin Ficker is also running.
Steele may have an uneasy relationship with certain Republicans, due to his longstanding and vocal criticism of former President Trump and his regular presence as a commentator on MSNBC, but he is also a charismatic, well-known figure in GOP circles, with a long record as a Republican activist in Maryland, dating back to his time in the 1980s as the leader of the Young Republicans at Johns Hopkins University. He was also chairman of the Maryland Republican Party and the Prince George’s County GOP.
Dornan said Steele plans to travel the state in the weeks ahead, “doing a lot of listening, a lot of talking.” He’ll be hitting high-profile events, meeting with voters and party stalwarts, and also plans to begin raising money “very quickly,” he said.
Dornan said Steele has been hearing from both big-time Republican donors and grassroots activists who are urging him to get in the race.
“Michael has been getting a ton of phone calls from people encouraging him to run, and he’s taking it very seriously,” he said. “He has a vision for the future of Maryland. And he’d be carrying the Hogan vision into the next generation.”
Dornan asserted that even with Steele’s endorsement of President Biden in the 2020 presidential election, the former lieutenant governor will have broad appeal in a Republican primary.
“Michael still has a lot of goodwill in the state,” he said. “Just because he’s not a fan of President Trump doesn’t mean that he’s not a conservative. He’s the same small government conservative he was as Gov. [Robert] Ehrlich’s lieutenant.”
Dornan said Steele did not expect to get much support from Trump supporters, but posited that they aren’t “the majority of Maryland Republican voters.” As for Schulz’s status as the favored candidate of many current party leaders, Dornan said, “We have nothing against Kelly. She’s obviously done an admirable job serving the governor. But we think Michael has a stronger case to make for voters.”
Steele, 62, first ran statewide in 1998, when he unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for state comptroller. He took over as state GOP chairman following the 2000 election and was Ehrlich’s running mate in 2002, becoming the first African American to win statewide office in Maryland that year (while the two subsequent lieutenant governors have been Black, a Black candidate has never been independently elected to statewide office in the state).
In 2006, Steele was the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate. While he ran a high-profile and well-funded race, 2006 was a big Democratic year nationally, and Steele lost handily to now-Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (D).
Because Maryland has no mechanism for potential candidates to set up an exploratory committee, Steele has created a so-called 527 committee — a reference to an IRS designation that allows candidates to set up an entity for political activity without formally entering a race — called the Michael Steele for Governor Exploratory Committee. That was how Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Perez seeded his political activities before formally becoming a candidate last month.
