Gov. Wes Moore wants Democrats to deliver results. If he pulls it off, he could change Maryland for decades.

• Maryland Gov. Wes Moore recently sat down with Insider to discuss his first few months in office.
• Moore spoke of his success in expanding critical tax credits and his work to aid military veterans.
• He stands firmly behind a new law aimed at curbing gun violence, which led to an NRA-backed lawsuit.

ANNAPOLIS, Maryland — In Gov. Wes Moore's office, a regal space where a chess set sits near his desk, a nearby message reads: "Things do not happen. Things are made to happen."

Moore — the first Black governor in state history and only the third elected Black governor in the nation's history — is poised to dramatically reshape the trajectory of the state for decades to come.

Such a mission drives him, especially since he had never held elected office before becoming governor. His path, should he succeed, is not an unfamiliar one: recent American political history is full of such figures who came to office as outsiders, adapted quickly to work with a legislature, and made things happen.

That brand — an outsider who gets things done — has long punched the tickets of presidential contenders, from Mitt Romney to Chris Christie. Should he succeed, Wes Moore could be next. 

During an interview in the governor's office in late June, Moore told me that he wanted Marylanders to see that his administration could be "bold" and "still be responsible."

"The fact that we were able to get all of our bills passed with Republicans, I think was shocking to people," the 44-year-old Democratic governor said of bipartisan cooperation in the decidedly blue state. "They saw that we meant it when we said that we're going to make our case in every corner of the state. I think people saw that was legitimate."

Along the way, Moore spoke about the transition from campaigning to governing, gun violence, book bans, and his thoughts on what actually defines the Democratic Party.

'We're not demanding that other people do things'

Moore has long been floated by many Democrats as a future Senate or presidential candidate, with many seeing the governor as part of a new generation of leaders in a party that has often been criticized for failing to transition political power to younger generations.

While national Republicans have largely been defined by their push for tax cuts and their opposition to abortion rights, national Democrats have sometimes been called out for not having a clear message for voters about their core values.

Moore, who was sworn into office in January, has his own answer for how the Democratic Party should pitch itself to voters.

"If I had to break it down in one word, it's results," he said. "On the national level, we have the biggest and most impactful bipartisan piece of infrastructure legislation that's ever passed. On the local side, I stood with President Biden during my first weeks of office and we announced that we were working together on the Frederick Douglass Tunnel, which is going to produce 30,000 good paying jobs in the state of Maryland."

When speaking about the Democratic Party in Maryland, Moore leaned into a similar message.

"If you look at the work that we're doing here in the state of Maryland, it's results," he said. "We're not talking about things and we're not demanding that other people do things. We're doing them ourselves."

'There's not a drop of entitlement in our team'

Moore, who was elected with nearly 65% of the vote last November against then-GOP state Del. Dan Cox, ran on a platform of strengthening public education, expanding the state's earned income tax credit, enacting a service-year program for high school graduates, bolstering access to health care, and aiding the state's military community.

This year, Moore saw the earned income tax credit created by the Maryland legislative in 2020 made permanent, while also signing into law an eligibility expansion of the state's child-tax credit — part of his longstanding desire to end child poverty in the state. The governor signed into law the service-year option that he had long championed. And he also approved a health-care reimbursement program for Maryland National Guard members, one that he hopes will be a first step to them having free health and dental benefits.

In what was an early setback, the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature pared down the National Guard health care program. But Moore — who served as a captain and paratrooper in the US Army's 82nd Airborne Division and was deployed to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2006 — was jubilant about the initial step, telling me that Maryland is "the first state in the country" to be on the path to offering full health benefits.

And he was emphatic in stating that the administration that he assembled alongside Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller — a former state lawmaker with deep transportation policy acumen who knows the ropes in Annapolis — allowed for many of their proposals to become law.

"There's not a drop of entitlement in our team," he told me. "I think we showed that you could both focus on representation and not compromise excellence. And I think that was an important component to what we've been able to get done."

On guns in public places: "You can't just say, 'Well, it's my right'"

When I brought up the issue of gun violence, Moore immediately pointed to a graphic that he saw in the Capital Gazette displaying the number of mass shootings that have occurred in the US since that Annapolis-based newspaper suffered its own tragedy five years ago.

On June 28, 2018, a gunman, Jarrod Ramos, stormed into the offices of the Gazette, killing five staff members, in what was one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in the country since 9/11. (He was found criminally responsible for the murders and in September 2021 was sentenced to five consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.)

The graphic was a visual reminder of the 274 people who had been killed in public mass shootings beginning with the attacks in the Gazette newsroom through June 26; it highlighted incidents including the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue mass shooting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and last year's mass shooting at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York.

Moore has long spoken out about the scourge of gun violence. Baltimore — the city where he attended college as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University and where he chose to raise his family before moving to Annapolis to assume the governorship — has long struggled with violent crime. (Just days after our interview, gunfire broke out at a July 2 block party in Baltimore's Brooklyn Homes community, killing two people and injuring 28 others.)

In May, Moore signed into law gun-control legislation that prevents individuals from carrying or transporting a gun in an "area for children or vulnerable individuals" or in a "special purpose area." And the law also bars individuals from bringing a firearm onto another individual's property, unless the owner has a visible sign permitting the individual to have said firearm.

He was promptly sued by the National Rifle Association. And he didn't hold back in his defense of the legislation.

"I refuse to be a governor who was going to watch these horrific things happen in our state and know that the only thing that I would've done during my term as governor is to attend funerals and memorials and give thoughts and prayers and not pass a single piece of legislation to be able to actually save lives," Moore told me.

"You shouldn't be able to bring that firearm to a nursery. You should not be able to bring that firearm into a government building. What's the reason? And you can't just say, 'Well, it's my right.' Well, what about the right of the individual who's inside that space?" he continued. "We can't continue to say that the answer is to do nothing, or simply that the answer is: 'Let's just give everyone guns and let them carry them everywhere.'"

Moore told me that he had full confidence in the legality of the legislation, calling it "the right thing to do." 

'We're ... driving this idea of making bigotry expensive'

In May, Moore stood before the graduates of Morehouse College — the historically Black men's college in Atlanta, Georgia — and forcefully pushed back against book bans and any attempts to "rewrite" history.

"When politicians ban books and muzzle educators, they say it's an effort to prevent discomfort and guilt, but we know that's not true," the governor said at the time. "This is not about fear of making people feel bad. This is about fear of people understanding their power."

Moore, who had generally stayed away from cultural issues in his first few months in office, had just waded into one of the nation's simmering debates — with Republicans leading the charge in limiting access to an array of books that largely delve into racial inequality or sexuality and Democrats frustrated by actions that they feel are detrimental to telling the full story of America.

Last month, Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois signed legislation essentially barring book bans in schools and public libraries.

When I asked Moore if he'd push for a similar law in Maryland, he said that the legislature could explore a number of options when it returns in January 2024 — but also added that action could come sooner.

"I know that there are some lawmakers who have been talking about some things that they're looking at at exploring and I look forward to working with them to figure out what that looks like," he told me. "I also know that there's a whole lot that we can and we should do that we don't have to wait until January to be able to address. And that's why I've been aggressively going to conferences, corporations, entrepreneurs, schoolteachers — everybody — in these states that have chief executives that find it politically advantageous to make claims as to why books like 'The Bluest Eye' or 'Between the World and Me' are somehow detrimental to their children."

Moore told me he's instructed his Department of Commerce to reach out to businesses in states where some owners may feel as though their values aren't being reflected in government, along with entities that may feel uncomfortable holding conferences in states where leaders are pursuing book bans.

"What we say is 'Come to Maryland,'" he said. "What we're doing is driving this idea of making bigotry expensive. When you have chief executives who are going to spend their time doing that, I want there to be a financial punishment to it. For those states that honor their history — the good and the bad, flaws and all — then let's make inclusiveness rewarding."