Ben Jealous

Jealous ran for Governor of Maryland in the 2018 election. He ran as a Democrat, and won the party's nomination in the June 2018 primary, defeating Prince George's County Executive Rushern Baker and seven other candidates. However, he lost in the general election to the incumbent governor, Republican Larry Hogan.

The Democratic primary was held on June 26, 2018. Despite trailing in polling in the months prior to the primary, Jealous and Turnbull won the primary with 40% of the vote in a nine-candidate field, 10% ahead of the second place duo.

Jealous ran on a platform that included free college tuition, legalized marijuana, universal healthcare, and a $15 minimum wage for Marylanders. His views were described an analyst for Circa News as democratic socialist. However, Jealous disputed this characterization. On August 8, 2018, when questioned by a reporter about whether he considered himself a socialist, Jealous referred to himself as a "venture capitalist." When the reporter asked a second time whether he was a socialist, he responded, "Are you fucking kidding me?"

In October 2018, Jealous confirmed to Washington Jewish Week that he would "vow to defend" the Executive Order by Hogan related to banning companies from working with the state who boycott the Israeli Occupation and/or settlements. This order is very similar to one the ACLU successfully challenged into suspension in Arizona as unconstitutional. Jealous's campaign added that if the ACLU was successful in suspending the Maryland order, he would "bring leaders in the Jewish community and the Maryland-Israel Development Center together ...to figure out if there's a constitutional way to discourage the BDS movement in Maryland."

The general election was held on November 6, 2018, and Jealous lost the election to the incumbent governor, Hogan by a wide margin of 11.9%.

On May 31, 2017, Jealous announced his candidacy for Governor of Maryland in the 2018 election, then held by Larry Hogan (R). His Lt. Gubernatorial running mate was Susan Turnbull.

Jealous is a progressive Democrat. He endorsed Bernie Sanders in his 2016 campaign for U.S. president, then supported Hillary Clinton after she was nominated as candidate by the Democratic Party.

In 2014 Jealous became a senior partner at Kapor Capital, a firm that leverages the tech sector to create progressive social change. He also joined the Center for American Progress as a senior fellow.

Jealous is a partner at Kapor Capital, Board Chairman of the Southern Elections Fund and one of the John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs Visiting Professors at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. In 2013, Jealous was named a Young Global Leader by the Davos World Economic Forum.

Upon announcing his resignation in 2013, Jealous was praised by activists for his coalition-building efforts.

After the NNPA, he served as director of the US Human Rights Program at Amnesty International. He focused on issues such as promoting federal legislation against prison rape, racial profiling, and the sentencing of persons to life without the possibility of parole (LWOP) who are convicted for acts committed as children. (In 2012, the US Supreme Court ruled that such sentencing was unconstitutional, and ordered its ruling to be applied to people already in prison.) Jealous is the lead author of the 2004 report "Threat and Humiliation: Racial Profiling, Domestic Security, and Human Rights in the United States."

During his tenure, the NAACP helped register 374,553 voters and mobilize 1.2 million new voters to turn out at the polls for the 2012 presidential election. It supported abolition of the death penalty in Connecticut and Maryland, endorsed same-sex marriage, and fought laws it believed were intended for voter suppression in states across the country.

Jealous broadened the NAACP's alliances in 2011 at the National Press Club when a conservative coalition of criminal justice reform advocates endorsed an NAACP report authored by Jealous. In the report, Jealous highlights the adverse effects of over-incarceration of youth on society and the case for increasing public funding for education. In Texas later that year, the NAACP worked with leaders of the Tea Party to pass a dozen criminal justice reform measures, leading to the first scheduled prison closure in state history. Similarly, in 2013, the NAACP worked closely with Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell to pass bipartisan voting rights reform that gave former offenders the chance to vote after they served the terms of their sentence.

Jealous led the NAACP to work closely with other civil rights, labor and environmental groups. In 2010 the NAACP was one of the conveners of the One Nation Working Together Rally, which Jealous referred to as "an antidote" to the Tea Party. In June 2012, the NAACP led several thousand protesters from different groups to march down New York City's Fifth Avenue in protest of the NYPD's policy of stop-and-frisk policing. In 2012 Jealous formed the Democracy Initiative along with other progressive leaders, to build a national campaign around three goals: getting big money out of politics, supporting voting rights, and reforming broken Senate rules. Finally, in 2013 Jealous gave the keynote address at the A10 Rally for Citizenship, a major rally for immigration reform at the US Capitol.

Jealous was elected in 2008 as president and CEO of the NAACP; at age 35, he was the youngest person to serve in that position. He served through 2012. During his term, Jealous initiated national programs on criminal justice, health, environmental justice and voting rights, expanded existing programs and opened the NAACP Financial Freedom Center to provide financial education and banking resources.

Jealous was married to Lia Epperson, an NAACP lawyer and law professor at American University Washington College of Law in July 2002. Epperson is the sister of CNBC correspondent Sharon Epperson. Jealous and Epperson have two children. The couple divorced in 2015.

While in Mississippi, Jealous began working as a reporter for Jackson Advocate, Mississippi's oldest historically black newspaper, under the tutelage of publisher Charles Tisdale. He eventually became its managing editor. His reporting was credited with exposing corruption among high-ranking officials at the state prison in Parchman. In addition, he helped acquit a small farmer who had been wrongfully accused of arson. Jealous returned to Columbia in 1997, where he applied for and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship.

Benjamin Todd Jealous (born January 18, 1973) is an American civic leader and politician. He served as the president and chief executive officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 2008 to 2013. When he was selected to head the NAACP at age 35, he became the organization's youngest-ever national leader. The Washington Post in 2013 described him as "one of the nation's most prominent civil rights leaders."

Jealous was born in 1973 in Pacific Grove, California and grew up on the Monterey Peninsula. His mother, Ann (Todd) Jealous, is black. She worked as a psychotherapist and had grown up in Baltimore, Maryland. She had participated there in the desegregation of Western High School. She is the author, with Caroline Haskell, of Combined Destinies: Whites Sharing Grief about Racism (2013). His father, Fred Jealous, who is white, is descended from settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, related to businessman Joseph B. Sargent, and directly in line to inherit the fortune from the Sargent and Co business. He founded the Breakthrough Men's Community and participated in Baltimore sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters. Jealous's parents met in Baltimore in 1966. At the time, they did not openly date each other in public; when they went to the movies, they took separate paths to adjacent seats to hide their relationship. As an interracial couple, they were prohibited by state law from marrying in Maryland before 1967. They married in Washington, D.C. and returned to live in Baltimore for a time before moving to California in the early 1970s. As a child, Jealous was sent to Baltimore to spend his summers with his maternal grandparents, who lived in the Ashburton neighborhood.