If Maryland redesigned its state flag today, a new survey suggests it might look less like 17th-century heraldry and more like a highway commute — complete with brake lights, a crab cake sandwich and a tin of Old Bay.
The survey, conducted by the online gambling review site Custom Made Casino, asked 3,014 respondents nationwide to imagine what their home state’s flag should look like if redesigned for the modern era. Maryland’s top three picks, according to the results, were a Beltway brake light, a crab cake sandwich and an Old Bay tin — a lineup organizers say captures commuting frustration, local food pride and the state’s signature seasoning obsession more directly than any official symbol currently does.
“A Beltway brake light may not be glamorous, but it is extremely Maryland,” the survey’s write-up said of the top pick, describing it as representing “commuting, congestion, D.C.-area stress and the shared regional experience of moving six feet, stopping, and wondering whether everyone else also made a terrible route choice.” The crab cake sandwich came in second, described as “local food pride between bread,” while the Old Bay tin rounded out the top three as what organizers called Maryland’s “seasoning jar of state pride.”
Adam Marks, founder of Custom Made Casino, said the results reflect how differently people think about state identity compared with the symbols governments officially adopt. “State flags are one of the oldest forms of place branding,” Marks said. “They are meant to tell people what a state stands for, what it values, and how it wants to be recognized. What this survey shows is that people think about state identity in a much more modern, everyday way. They did not necessarily reach for grand historic symbols. They picked the foods, frustrations, habits, stereotypes, and local details that feel instantly recognizable now.”
Maryland’s actual flag has nothing to do with crabs, traffic or seasoning. Adopted by the General Assembly in 1904, it’s a heraldic banner combining the arms of the Calvert family — the yellow-and-black quadrants associated with George Calvert, the first Baron Baltimore — with the red-and-white Crossland arms inherited through his grandmother. Though its heraldic roots reach back to the colonial era, the flag itself wasn’t formally adopted by the state until the early 20th century. Historians note the red-and-white Crossland portion carries a more complicated legacy: those colors were adopted informally by Maryland secessionists during the Civil War, even though the state itself remained in the Union, a history the Maryland State Archives has acknowledged amid periodic public debate over the flag’s imagery.
Maryland is far from the only state whose residents, in Custom Made Casino’s survey series, chose modern lifestyle symbols over historic emblems. In neighboring New Jersey, respondents said they’d replace their flag’s horse and allegorical female figures with a bagel, a Garden State Parkway toll transponder and a full-service gas pump — a nod to the state’s unusual ban on self-service fueling. Alabama respondents, meanwhile, picked a college football helmet as the symbol that best captures the state’s identity, reflecting the outsized role of college football culture there.
Unlike some states that have pursued formal flag redesigns in recent years — including Minnesota, which adopted a new state flag and seal in 2024 through a dedicated redesign commission — Maryland has no active push to change its flag, which remains one of the most visually distinctive and widely recognized state flags in the country. Its bold, checkered pattern has become a popular design element on merchandise, sports apparel and local branding well beyond official government use, suggesting that even without brake lights or crab cakes on it, Marylanders already feel a strong connection to their existing flag.
The full results of Custom Made Casino’s 50-state survey are available on the company’s website. Custom Made Casino, which reviews online gambling sites, has run similar informal surveys on other lighthearted topics tied to state and regional culture as part of its content marketing, and its state-by-state flag results have circulated widely on local news sites across the country in recent days as each state’s results were released.
