With polls showing he's a shoo-in to win his reelection campaign in November, Democratic Maryland governor Wes Moore during a Wednesday podcast interview gave a not-so-subtle indication that he is preparing a run for president in 2028.
"I am going to be part of a bigger conversation going forward," Moore, who turns 48 next month, said on a podcast hosted by CNN analyst and Democratic political consultant Bakari Sellers when asked about his plans for 2028.
"I think the state of Maryland and what we've done has justified that," Moore went on, before adding that he is "focused on November and what we're going to get done."
"I just think it's important for all of us to be involved," Moore, Maryland’s first black governor, said. "What does the future actually look like? And that's not necessarily saying you're going to run for this or run for that. But it is saying that we are going to be a part of how do we repair."
To some political commentators, Moore's comments were confirmation he is planning a presidential run in 2028. "It's sure sounding like the Democrat is preparing to hop into the 2028 pool," said Puck News reporter Leigh Ann Caldwell. "If Moore doesn't run after making a comment like that, well, I'd be shocked."
Moore's comments come after years of self-promotion via two memoirs published by the time he was 36 and a long-running media campaign to sell himself as a can-do Democrat with a gold-plated résumé. Moore has also been battling credible allegations that he fabricated or embellished key portions of his résumé and inspiring life story.
His remarks to Sellers, that he intends to be "part of a bigger conversation" in 2028, also mark reversal from his previous talking points on his presidential aspirations. Moore said in no uncertain terms during his September 2025 appearance on Meet the Press that he will not run for president in 2028 and that he intends to serve out a second full term as governor of Maryland. When asked about his 2028 plans during a CBS town hall in February, Moore said, "I'm not running for president."
Polls show Moore is the overwhelming favorite to win his reelection bid for governor in November. He opened the general election season in August with a 27-point polling lead over Dan Cox, his Republican challenger. Moore bested Cox in a 32-point blowout to win his first term in office in 2022, after eking out a shocking victory in a crowded three-way Democratic primary in July that year.
Moore's remarkable life story, which includes incredible claims about his athletic, academic, and military achievements, many of which have crumbled under scrutiny, could hamstring his future political campaigns. He falsely claimed for nearly two decades that he received a Bronze Star for service in a combat zone, an award he only received—under unusual circumstances—in the final weeks of the Biden administration, 18 years after his tour in Afghanistan, which lasted just under seven months.
Moore also falsely claimed he was born and grew up in Baltimore, that he was inducted into the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame (an organization that does not exist), and that he was once considered a foremost expert on radical Islam based on his Oxford graduate thesis, a document that he never submitted to the university's esteemed library and which he can no longer locate.
Charleston-based Democratic strategist Kevin Walling said Wednesday on Mark Halperin's Morning Meeting podcast that Moore's "fibs about his family's history in South Carolina" could play a factor in the early 2028 primary state, where black voters hold great sway. Moore often tells the story that his grandfather as a young child was forced to flee South Carolina in the 1920s in the dead of night because the Ku Klux Klan took issue with his great-grandfather's sermons condemning racism.
But a Washington Free Beacon investigation in February found Moore's story was flatly contradicted by historical records and is almost certainly false. Church records show Moore's great-grandfather made an orderly and public transfer from South Carolina to Jamaica, the island of his birth, in December 1924 to succeed a prominent Jamaican pastor who had unexpectedly died. Amid the copious documentation of the life and career of Moore's great-grandfather, there is neither any mention of any trouble with the Klan, which never had a chapter operating out of the town at which he preached, nor mention of any sort of dramatic escape from America to Jamaica. The church at which he preached was held in high regard for the work it commissioned for the black community, according to contemporaneous reports from then-South Carolina bishop William Guerry, who was best known for his work to advance racial equality in the state.
Moore has also been feuding with the Smith family, the Baltimore-area media barons whose Sinclair company owns the Baltimore Sun and the local Fox TV station, over a series of detailed reports the Sun has published undermining his claims about his military service. Moore told former Biden aide Jen Psaki on her MS NOW show that Sinclair's executive chairman, David Smith, is a "MAGA billionaire" publishing "right-wing drivel."
