The Poll Saying Moore Is Up 27 Points Was Built by His Own Party's Pollster and Sold by a Podcast His Party's Media Sponsors

By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews

ANNAPOLIS — A poll released this week says Gov. Wes Moore leads Republican challenger Dan Cox by 27 points and that his approval rating has climbed to 56%. Multiple outlets ran with the topline numbers. Almost none of them told readers who actually built the poll, who’s paying for it, or why that matters.

Here is what MDBayNews found after pulling the thread.

The survey, branded “Maryland Now,” was commissioned jointly by Blended Public Affairs and the Annapolis lobbying firm Perry, White, Ross & Jacobson, known around the State House simply as Perry Jacobson. It was conducted by Zenith Research, a polling firm founded and run by Adam Carlson.

Carlson is not a neutral figure. Zenith Research’s own website describes its client list as Democratic gubernatorial, U.S. Senate, U.S. House, state legislative and mayoral candidates, national Democratic Party committees, unions and progressive advocacy groups. In the weeks around this Maryland survey, Carlson’s firm was in the field for Fighting for Michigan PAC on a Democratic Senate primary and for the pro-Abdul El-Sayed group Common Defense in the same race. Carlson has described his own approach as building something that “steers clear” of the traditional D.C. consulting shops, but his client roster runs almost entirely through one party.

Blended Public Affairs is run by Alexandra Hughes, a longtime Annapolis operative who previously served as chief of staff to two Maryland House speakers. Her firm’s polling partner on prior Maryland Now surveys has been described in Blended’s own materials as a “Democratic pollster.” Perry Jacobson’s leadership tells a similar story: founding partner Tim Perry was chief of staff to the late Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, the longest-serving state Senate president in U.S. history and a fixture of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. Partner Jonas Jacobson previously worked at the Maryland Department of the Environment and advised a former Baltimore County executive. Partner Justin Ross is a former Democratic delegate from Prince George’s County who served as chief deputy majority whip.

None of that makes the poll’s numbers fake. It does mean the operation behind “Maryland Now” was built, staffed, and run by people whose professional lives have run through the Maryland Democratic Party and its adjacent institutions.

None of that makes the poll’s numbers fake. It does mean the operation behind ‘Maryland Now’ was built, staffed and run by people whose professional lives have run through the Maryland Democratic Party and its adjacent institutions.

MDBayNews initially cited Maryland Matters as independent confirmation of the poll’s topline numbers. That needs a correction, and it points to a bigger problem with how this poll made its way into the news.

Maryland Matters founder Josh Kurtz co-hosts a podcast called Maryland Now, which is the same branded product as the poll. The podcast is sponsored by Blended Public Affairs and produced in partnership with Perry Jacobson. Kurtz sits alongside Blended senior vice president Dori Henry and Baltimore Fishbowl’s David Nitkin as a regular host, and past episodes have featured guests from both the lobbying and public affairs sides of the operation.

So when Maryland Matters ran the poll’s numbers as news this week, the story was written by a different reporter, Bryan P. Sears, not Kurtz personally, but it was published by an outlet whose own founder is a paid, recurring on-air partner of the firms that commissioned the poll. Baltimore Fishbowl has a similar wrinkle: its executive editor, David Nitkin, is also a regular Maryland Now co-host. That’s three of the outlets that repeated the poll’s topline numbers this week, Maryland Matters, Baltimore Fishbowl and, by extension, anyone who picked up their reporting, with a direct institutional tie back to the poll’s own sponsors.

None of this means the underlying numbers are wrong. It means “independently confirmed” was the wrong phrase, and readers deserved to know the confirmation was coming from inside the same media ecosystem the pollster built.

It means ‘independently confirmed’ was the wrong phrase, and readers deserved to know the confirmation was coming from inside the same media ecosystem the pollster built.

Cox’s campaign pushed back hard on the poll in a Wednesday release, calling it a “push-poll” and arguing the sponsors have a stake in Moore administration decisions. On that point, the campaign is on solid ground. Perry Jacobson lobbies for US Wind, the offshore wind developer seeking permits in Maryland waters, and TeraWulf, the data center company that bought the old Morgantown coal plant in Charles County after getting expedited permitting help from Moore’s environmental secretary, hired four Perry Jacobson lobbyists this year, according to reporting by The Baltimore Banner.

Cox also claimed Maryland has the second-worst economy in the nation, a line MDBayNews flagged as unverified in an earlier version of this story. That was a mistake. A CNBC ranking placed Maryland’s economy second-worst in the country, and the finding was reported by Fox45 Baltimore in mid-July, tied to the launch of a new group called the Maryland Affordability Project. That claim checks out.

Two of Cox’s other claims still don’t. His statement said only 26% of respondents “strongly” approve of Moore’s job performance, and that 67% of the sample identified as Democrats. Neither figure appears in Zenith Research’s public materials or in any of the news coverage MDBayNews reviewed. Given Zenith’s client base and the sponsors’ backgrounds, a Democrat-heavy sample wouldn’t be surprising, but “wouldn’t be surprising” isn’t the same as confirmed. Those two numbers remain unverified pending release of the full crosstabs.

Moore’s early polling advantage over Cox may well be real. He beat Cox by 32 points in 2022, Maryland Democrats outnumber Republicans roughly two to one, and no independent, non-Perry Jacobson poll has yet been released to check these numbers against. But “Maryland Now” isn’t an independent poll checking in on the state. It’s a product built and marketed by people with deep, documented ties to the party of the governor it just gave a 27-point lead, distributed in part through a podcast that pays one of the state’s most prominent political journalists to sit at the same table.

Readers can decide for themselves what the topline numbers are worth. They should at least get to make that call with the sponsorship page open.

Readers can decide for themselves what the topline numbers are worth. They should at least get to make that call with the sponsorship page open.

• Whether an independent pollster with no ties to Blended, Perry Jacobson or Zenith tests the same numbers.

• Whether Zenith Research releases full partisan crosstabs to confirm or rebut Cox’s 67% Democrat claim.

• Whether Maryland Matters or Baltimore Fishbowl disclose Kurtz’s and Nitkin’s Maryland Now roles in future coverage of Blended/Perry Jacobson polling.

Sources: Maryland Matters (Bryan P. Sears, Aug. 12, 2026); Baltimore Fishbowl; Fox45/WBFF (”New poll ranks Maryland economy second worst as residents launch affordability push,” Jeff Abell, July 15-16, 2026); The Baltimore Banner (”A data center developer wanted a power plant. He needed Moore’s help.,” June 20, 2026); The Daily Record’s 2026 Annapolis lobbyist compensation rankings; Zenith Research and Perry Jacobson firm websites; Blended Public Affairs website and Maryland Now podcast pages; Dan Cox campaign press release, Aug. 13, 2026, via X/Twitter (@dancox4maryland).