Dan Cox
Daniel Lewis Cox is an American politician and lawyer. He was a Republican member of the Maryland House of Delegates, representing the fourth district from 2019 to 2023.
Cox was the unsuccessful Republican nominee in the 2022 Maryland gubernatorial election. In 2024, Cox unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in Maryland's 6th congressional district, losing to former state delegate Neil Parrott in the Republican primary election. Cox is a candidate for governor in the 2026 Maryland gubernatorial election.
Cox is characterized as a far-right politician. An election denier, he has continuously espoused the disproven theory that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was fraudulent.
Early life and education
Cox was born in Washington, D.C., on August 9, 1974, as one of ten children. His father named him after the biblical prophet, Daniel. Cox initially lived in Takoma Park, Maryland, but his family moved north to Frederick County after his father took a job there as a minister. Cox grew up on a farm near Taneytown, Maryland.Cox attended the Wellspring Christian Family Schools, a faith-based home-school organization founded by his father, as a child. He attended Mount St. Mary's University from 1992 to 1995 and later attended the University of Maryland Global Campus, where in 2002 he earned a bachelor's degree in government and politics. He attended Regent University School of Law, earning a J.D. degree with distinction in 2006.
Career
In 2006, he became a member of the Maryland State Bar Association and was a sole practitioner outside of Emmitsburg, Maryland. Cox was also a member of the Alliance Defending Freedom.Before getting involved with Maryland politics, Cox taught as a high school teacher from 1995 to 2005 at Walkersville Christian Family Schools. He also served as a Captain in the Civil Air Patrol.
Political involvement
Cox says he has been active in politics since 1980, when he campaigned with his parents for Ronald Reagan. He also worked on the 1996 presidential campaign of Alan Keyes and as an aide to former U.S. Representative Roscoe Bartlett. He was the Republican nominee for Dorchester County Circuit Court Clerk in 2006, losing the race to Democratic nominee Michael L. Baker. Cox ran on a platform that included establishing a division to help fathers gain visitation, ensuring mothers received child support, and refusing to issue licenses for same-sex marriages, which were not legal in Maryland at the time. From 2007 to 2009, he was the President of the Town Commission of Secretary, Maryland.2016 congressional campaign
On February 1, 2016, Cox filed to run in 2016 in Maryland's 8th congressional district.During the Republican primary, Cox was described as being the most conservative candidate in the Republican primary race. He campaigned on imposing a 10 percent flat tax for incomes over $36,000 and eliminating payroll taxes, strengthening gun ownership rights, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, and reducing funding and programs for the departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development. He supported Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries. Cox pledged to join the Freedom Caucus, a group of tea party supporters, if elected.
In September 2016, Cox claimed that "far-left sign Nazis" were stealing campaign signs he posted alongside state highways, and posted on Twitter that he had urinated on the signs as a deterrent to prevent theft.
Cox won the Republican primary with 44.4 percent of the vote. In the general election, he was defeated by Democratic nominee and state senator Jamie Raskin with 34.2 percent of the vote.
Maryland House of Delegates
In February 2018, Cox announced that he would run for the Maryland House of Delegates in District 4. He ran on a platform that included cutting regulations, increasing immigration enforcement, and supporting gun rights. He campaigned on a platform that included lowering taxes, expanding Interstate 270, and supporting charter schools. In November 2018, electioneering complaints were filed against Cox after he recorded a video of himself within 100 feet of an early voting center in Thurmont, which is prohibited by Maryland election law.Cox was sworn into the Maryland House of Delegates on January 9, 2019. He was a member of the Judiciary Committee, serving on its family law and public safety subcommittees from 2019 to 2020 and its family and juvenile law and civil law and procedure subcommittees from 2021 to 2023. In his first term, Cox filed 84 bills, only two of which passed, and attached amendments to others.
From 2018 to 2021, Cox served as the secretary of the Frederick County Republican Central Committee. During the 2020 United States presidential election, he served as a Frederick County co-chair for the state's Trump Victory Leadership County team.
Involvement in the January 6 United States Capitol attack
In November 2020, Cox said that he was part of a Republican legal team observing the count of mail-in ballots in Philadelphia during the 2020 United States presidential election. After Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Cox has repeatedly endorsed Trump's false claims of a stolen election and called for a "forensic audit" of the 2020 election results, later calling for an audit of the 2020 elections in Maryland.Cox helped arrange for buses to take constituents to the "Save America March" in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021; the rally preceded the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol. During the rally, Cox sent a tweet attacking Vice President Mike Pence, writing "Pence is a traitor." After receiving backlash, Cox tweeted and retweeted false claims blaming antifa for the attack on the Capitol, and expressed his support for Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, an extremist group with nationalist, neofascist and self-proclaimed Western-chauvinist views. Cox later said in June 2022 that his Twitter post was "his way of expressing his disappointment and not a personal attack on the vice president." After his win in the Republican gubernatorial primary, Cox denied organizing buses for the rally.
The Frederick County Democratic Central Committee began a letter-writing campaign calling for Cox to be expelled from the House of Delegates for his false claims. Two days later Cox issued a statement denouncing "all mob violence including those who broke into the U.S. Capitol." In the statement Cox said he had attended the rally, but was not involved in the storming of the Capitol. Governor Larry Hogan and Steven Clark, the chairman of the Frederick County Republican Central Committee, denounced Cox's comments, and delegate Kathleen Dumais, the co-chair of the House Joint Committee on Legislative Ethics, said that the committee received some inquiries about Cox's tweets.
In February 2022, representatives from Our Revolution and other progressive groups urged the Maryland State Board of Elections to consider blocking Cox from the ballot for his participation in the Capitol attack, citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. In May 2022, a lawsuit was filed against Maryland Elections Administrator Linda Lamone, seeking to remove Cox from the 2022 Republican primary ballot for his presence during the Capitol attack. Anne Arundel County circuit court judge Mark W. Crooks dismissed the case on May 20, 2022.
2022 Maryland gubernatorial campaign
In late June 2021, Cox filed paperwork to run for governor in 2022, and formally announced his candidacy on July 4, 2021. He launched his campaign with a campaign rally in Cambridge on August 6, 2021. He picked Gordana Schifanelli, an Eastern Shore lawyer, as his running mate. On November 22, 2021, Cox received the endorsement of former president Donald Trump.Ahead of the primary election, Cox threatened lawsuits seeking to invalidate mail-in ballots. Some political observers said before the primary that Cox would have publicly doubted the results if he had lost to Kelly Schulz.
As polls showed Cox and Schulz running neck-and-neck in polls, the Democratic Governors Association spent $1 million for a television advertisement promoting Cox, hoping he would win the nomination and be easier for Democrats to defeat in November. Cox denied receiving any support from the DGA, saying that he had "nothing to do with the ad purchase". Some observers, including strategist Jim Dornan, say that two factors—Trump's endorsement and the DGA ad blitz—allowed Cox to advance to the general election. Other observers, including former Maryland lieutenant governor and Republican National Committee chair Michael Steele, say the ads had little impact on voters, highlighting that far-right politician and neo-Confederate activist Michael Peroutka had won the Attorney General primary on the same ballot by an almost identical margin to Cox, even though the DGA did not run any ads on his behalf.
Cox won the Republican primary on July 19, 2022, defeating Schulz with 52.0 percent of the vote. If elected, he would have been the first governor from Frederick County since Enoch Louis Lowe. At his victory party, Cox took photos with and accepted a gift from a young man who introduced himself as a member of the Maryland Proud Boys. The footage of this encounter, which was uploaded to Cox's Vimeo account, was deleted after The Washington Post contacted the Cox campaign, which responded with a statement denying an association with the young man.
Following his primary win, Cox sought to distance himself from the January 6 insurrection and former president Donald Trump, removing references to his endorsement from his website and making adjustments to his biography and issues pages. He also deactivated his account on Gab, a website that has been described as a social media haven for white supremacists and neo-Nazis and was used by the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, on which he had more than 1,000 posts. Republican leaders expressed concern that Cox's primary victory would hurt their candidates downballot, with Senate minority leader Bryan Simonaire refusing to endorse or campaign with Cox and House minority leader Jason C. Buckel saying that Cox would need to moderate his views for the party to make gains. The Maryland Republican Party would end up losing two seats in the state Senate and three seats in the House of Delegates in the 2022 elections.
Cox was defeated by Democratic nominee Wes Moore in the general election on November 8, 2022. He initially declined to concede after the election was called for Moore by various national news outlets, believing that there was still a path to victory, but called Moore the next day to concede the election.
Following Cox's defeat, his running mate Gordana Schifanelli filed to run for Chair of the Maryland Republican Party, seeking to succeed retiring chairman Dirk Haire, but was blocked from running because she filed an hour after the candidacy deadline. Schifanelli later said that Cox blamed her for their loss and that the running mates rarely spoke to each other during the campaign, with their relationship souring well before the general election. Cox disputed this claim, telling The Washington Post, "I never blamed Ms. Schifanelli for our election loss. Her comments are false and sadly self-serving." Cox later endorsed Nicole Beus Harris, a political consultant and the wife of U.S. Representative Andy Harris, as the next chair of the Maryland Republican Party.