The Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries provide harvests of crabs, oysters and many fish species to both commercial and recreational fishermen.

Dorchester County was the birthplace of Harriet Tubman, who escaped from slavery and afterward worked to guide other refugee slaves to freedom in the North.

[9] In earlier times, unlike highly secessionist Wicomico, Worcester, Queen Anne's and Cecil counties,[10] Dorchester was a swing county in the late 19th century due to the voting power of its freedman population, who strongly supported the Republican Party.

The conservative whites voted Democratic for William Jennings Bryan in 1908, after Maryland had passed laws raising barriers to voter registration among blacks, resulting in a dramatic drop in their voting until after passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

During the following election, Dorchester was the only county in the state where the segregationist George Wallace outpolled either Nixon or Humphrey.

In the late 20th century, white conservatives in the South shifted from the Democratic to the Republican Party.

Since then the only Democratic presidential nominee to carry Dorchester County was southern native son Bill Clinton in 1996.

The county has trended less conservative in recent years, with Democrat Barack Obama coming within five percentage points of beating Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election; Obama won nationally.

The DSO is a full service agency, headed by Sheriff James W. Phillips Jr. since December 2002.

The Trewartha climate classification has only the area near the bay as Cf and the remainder of the county as oceanic (Do.)

Average monthly temperatures in Cambridge range from 36.1 °F in January to 78.4 °F in July.

[25] At the 2010 United States census, there were 32,618 people, 13,522 households and 8,894 families residing in the county.

A regional newspaper, The Star Democrat, serves several counties on the Mid-Shore, including Dorchester.

Dorchester County is included in the coverage area of local television stations WBOC, WMDT and WRDE-LD.

It also receives coverage from television stations based in Baltimore and Washington, D.C.