The Christmas gifts have all been distributed, the tree now sits slumped and desiccated, and our attention now turns to seasonal matters such as postseason football, tax preparations and hearty Sunday stews.

For the political and cultural commentariat, this is the time when we can veer into one of two directions. Either we can look back at the year that was, or offer a glimpse, with speculation and predictions, at the one in the on-deck circle.

This writer cannot think of anything less appealing than revisiting a year that, from beginning to finish, has been shrouded in darkness. Rather than wasting time enumerating the American values that have been assaulted, the constitutional passages that have been shredded, the societal institutions that have lost legitimacy and the beloved souls who have been taken from us, let us just agree—if only within the confines of this space—never to speak of 2025 ever again.

Which leaves us looking ahead with trepidation to 2026. Which, potentially, will be one of the more fascinating years in the recent history of Maryland politics and government, with no end of issues, personalities and developments to watch in the coming year.

Gov. Wes Moore

As our ebullient governor heads into his re-election year, he is faced with both good and bad news. The most obvious good news is that he appears primed to win re-election by a decisive margin. The governor has sufficiently traveled throughout the state to deepen relationships with an electorate that is still getting to know him.

He has also earned intra-party plaudits for speaking out, with customary eloquence, against the poisonous policies of Donald Trump and their consequences. The only plausible GOP contender, former Gov. Larry Hogan, has done nothing to reassemble his political machine aside from occasional Facebook posts teasing a comeback.

While Republican hopeful Ed Hale’s messaging has been highly effective at tapping into the frustrations of Maryland’s minority party, he simply doesn’t possess the political experience or persona needed to upend a Democratic governor in a state where Democrats still outnumber the GOP by more than 2-1.

On the other hand, a poll conducted by UMBC’s Institute of Politics and its estimable pollster-in-residence, Mileah Kromer, indicate that while his approval ratings remained steady in 2025, his disapproval ratings have experienced a substantial uptick. The Governor’s relationship with the Democratic-dominated legislature has steadily devolved over time – over everything from reparations and redistricting to the sale of beer and wine in grocery stores – and can fairly be described as icy.

To add to this drama, a multibillion-dollar state budget deficit that had been slain in 2025 with a painful blend of service cuts and tax increases has now re-emerged, like Glenn Close from the bathtub in Fatal Attraction, to the tune of more than $1.4 billion. This, with a hefty balloon payment from the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future education plan looming a year from now.

And Marylanders were startled last month by the new cost estimates for the new Francis Scott Key Bridge, which have jumped from less than $2 billion to as much as $5 billion. This has cast a fresh round of doubts upon the commitment of the federal government to wholly finance its construction, and to do so in a timeframe under which the new bridge would be open for service within the next five years.

How will the governor manage these and other landmines?

Can he harness his once-in-a-generation political talent to unify his restive party? Will he and legislative leaders find solutions to Maryland’s resurgent fiscal challenges that jeopardizes neither his anticipated margin of victory in 2026, nor his rising star on the national political stage?

Or will this session simply be the start of a desultory campaign toward a Pyrrhic victory that inflicts lasting political wounds? As was William Donald Schaefer’s in 1990?

For that matter, will he be the latest in a long, distinguished history of Democratic incumbents and frontrunners to deal with an annoying primary challenger? One who has no chance of winning but exists merely to dredge the latent disquiet within the party’s rank and file?

Many Annapolis insiders still recall the lonely campaign waged by grocery store clerk Bob Fustero against Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in 2002 – one which raised less than $2,000 but carried 20 percent of the statewide primary vote.

The Next Madam Speaker

Joseline Peña-Melnyk, a cerebral and highly respected lawmaker from Prince George’s County, brings more than her share of “firsts” to a new position.

The Dominican-born Peña-Melnyk, 59, is the first Afro-Latina and the first immigrant to be elected speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates. She is also the first speaker to hail from the Washington suburbs since the abbreviated reign of Hyattsville’s Perry O. Wilkinson from 1959–63.

Perhaps more importantly, the new speaker offers a portent of philosophical, administrative and generational change within the “People’s Chamber.” In less than three weeks, she has already overhauled the House’s leadership ranks and rearranged its organizational chart by subdividing one committee into two.

Peña-Melnyk has also demonstrated a willingness to fly outside the Democratic Party’s prescribed V-formation. In 2016, she mounted a surprisingly energetic and appealing challenge to longtime party stalwarts Anthony Brown and Glenn Ivey for the 4th District seat in Congress. Six years later, she bucked Prince George’s County’s vaunted Democratic establishment—one of the few remaining bastions of vertical machine-politics in Maryland —to support U.S. Rep. David Trone over her County Executive, Angela Alsobrooks, in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Ben Cardin.

What does all of this mean for the composition and flow of Democratic House priorities in 2026? It remains to be seen. What we do know is that Peña-Melnyk takes the gavel riding a wave of genuine enthusiasm, affection and goodwill from her colleagues, one that is truly uncommon in this grim political age. We know from her personal story that she is undaunted by challenges of the moment, and we have seen from her political life that she does not feel beholden to her party bosses.

Energy Crisis

Maryland’s energy policies are a mess, an exploding meth lab of illogic and wish-fulfillment fantasy.

In the laudable pursuit of clean energy, our state leaders have depressed electricity support by closing three coal-powered electricity plants in the past five years. This, even as local growth and economic development policies, coupled with the inevitable ravages of climate change, have caused demand to spike.

As a result of a ruptured balance between supply and demand, we are now forced to import 40 percent of our state’s electricity from out-of-state. Which is literally bought at an auction and is, therefore, prohibitively expensive. In a holiday spirit, this writer was almost tempted to omit the fact that this gold-plated electricity is generated at the same type of coal-fired plants that we have shut down. Note that I said almost.

Now, BGE—financially fortified by state laws that allow it to reward its investors with record profits, pass its mandatory costs down to the ratepayers, and operate in a literal market monopoly—is under the microscope. As are the governor and General Assembly, who must now brace for angry ratepayers brandishing unprecedented monthly bills, and who don’t want to hear hollow excuses, incremental policy reforms or yet another spate of “studies” that simply confirm the obvious.

Donald Trump’s War on Maryland

Of all the uninformed, asinine political rhetoric that has infected our civic discourse over the past year, perhaps the dumbest are the utterances of those who—motivated either by legitimate fears or bad-faith partisanship—have begged Gov. Moore to please stop poking the bear, because he might just retaliate against US.

Respectfully, those who would actually say something like this in a public forum have no business managing their own finances. Indeed, one can imagine this graceless vulgarian rising out of bed and wondering how his national policies can work specifically to the disadvantage of the State of Maryland.

His DOGE-fueled crusade to dismantle the U.S. government has already cost Maryland about 15,000 federal jobs. According to one George Mason University study, as many as 50,000 public and private sector jobs have already been lost.

Trump’s war on scholarship resulted in an $800 million loss of funds at Johns Hopkins University, which in turn has led to more than 2,000 layoffs while placing lifesaving or life-changing research at risk. More than $2.3 billion was slashed at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, threatening jobs, careers and the fundamental mission of the agency.

His administration has reneged on a deal to build the new FBI headquarters in Greenbelt, has paused offshore wind projects in places such as Ocean City, and inexplicably refused to authorize federal disaster aid to communities in Western Maryland that were destroyed by floods last spring.

To top it off, the three most visible, highest profile victims of this administration’s ethnic cleansing, perpetrated under the rubric of immigration reform, happened to be Maryland residents – Miguel Abrego Garcia, Pastor Daniel Fuentes Espinal and Melissa Tran.

How will our state’s leaders respond in 2026?

Will there be new laws proposed to, if not curb, at least expose the barbaric behavior of sworn ICE agents on Maryland streets and in school drop-off lanes? Will they impose deep financial sanctions upon those counties that have established agreements to cooperate with ICE?

How, and to what extent, will our state, federal and local leaders challenge these and other ruinous policies in the courts?

We, The People

Amid all of this dystopia, Marylanders can be excused for their mood as we head into 2026. According to a UMBC-Kromer poll, we believe the following conditions will be even worse in the coming year than in the hellish one we are about to mercifully discard:

• Social divisiveness

• American democracy

• Our quality of life

• Our daily sense of stability

That doesn’t leave much room for optimism. And it begs a question of existential importance: Given the pervasive gloom that Marylanders feel about the current state of our politics, and the sense that things are not going to get better in the near future, how will that affect the civic engagement that is the lifeblood of any healthy system of government?

Bereft of the opportunity to vote against Donald Trump in this gubernatorial election year, will people be motivated to volunteer and vote for the local candidates? Burdened by a sense of fatalism about daily existence, will they still summon the will to advocate for legislation that will make their communities better, and challenge those bills that would have the opposite effect? Will our political leaders, many of whom have been appointed to their elected offices and are insulated by the comfort of districts that were drawn for maximum partisan advantage, do whatever they wish in 2026 simply because they can?

Or will they have the humility to have an honest conversation with constituents who simply believe the system no longer works for them – and actually listen to what they have to say?

The answers to these questions will begin to take shape in a mere matter of days, as the Maryland General Assembly will convene once again on January 14. Ready or not, business is about to pick up.

Len Foxwell is the principal of Tred Avon Strategies, a communications and political consulting firm in Annapolis.  A Johns Hopkins lecturer and HopStart director, Len previously served as Chief of Staff to Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from Salisbury University, where he also served as Special Assistant to the President.