So what is the advantage of incumbency? In Wayne Gilchrest’s case, it’s pretty good. I decided to do a little bit of digging into election results because I was curious about something.
What I looked up was the performance of Wayne Gilchrest vs. both of his challengers who have made previous runs for office, Andy Harris and E.J. Pipkin. It’s somewhat of a more valid comparison with Pipkin since his district is enveloped by the First District while Andy Harris’s district runs into a little more Democrat-friendly territory in Baltimore County.
The methodology is relatively simple; county-by-county results for the contenders in the last three elections. Pipkin ran on the same ballot as Gilchrest in all three (2002, 2004, 2006) while Harris and Gilchrest shared the election in 2002 and 2006. One can argue that Pipkin came in as a new face in 2002, but subsequent elections should have eliminated that factor.
I’ll start with Gilchrest vs. Pipkin. There are four counties in Pipkin’s District 36; Caroline, Cecil (both of which are shared with other districts but still solidly GOP country), Kent, and Queen Anne’s. Here’s their shares in each county, by election:
Caroline County:
- 2002: Gilchrest 80.9%, Pipkin 62.8%
- 2004: Gilchrest 79.7%, Pipkin 48.9%
- 2006: Gilchrest 70.4%, Pipkin 65.0%
Cecil County:
- 2002: Gilchrest 72.1%, Pipkin 58.9%
- 2004: Gilchrest 72.9%, Pipkin 51.3%
- 2006: Gilchrest 65.1%, Pipkin 57.1%
Kent County:
- 2002: Gilchrest 80.8%, Pipkin 58.7%
- 2004: Gilchrest 79.5%, Pipkin 42.5%
- 2006: Gilchrest 72.1%, Pipkin 60.9%
Queen Anne’s County:
- 2002: Gilchrest 80.6%, Pipkin 66.8%
- 2004: Gilchrest 80.1%, Pipkin 55.5%
- 2006: Gilchrest 73.0%, Pipkin 69.7%
It’s obvious that Pipkin has cut what was once a 13 to 22 point deficit down to between 3 and 11 points in each county, which bodes well for his challenge in his home area. However, that increase is tempered by the fact that it’s mostly in voter share lost by Gilchrest rather than a large Pipkin gain.
Now let’s look at Gilchrest vs. Harris. Again, this is a bit more skewed since Andy’s area overlaps into other Congressional districts.
Baltimore County:
- 2002: Gilchrest 76.7%, Harris 56.2%
- 2006: Gilchrest 69.9%, Harris 55.8%
Harford County:
- 2002: Gilchrest 75.8%, Harris 62.3%
- 2006: Gilchrest 70.6%, Harris 58.6%
This trend is a bit more troublesome for Harris as he continued to trail Gilchrest by 12-14 points in his home area. However, the district overlap may play into the deficit so this guide’s not as useful for Harris as it is for Pipkin.
I did get wind of a poll that had Harris down a few points to Gilchrest before E.J. Pipkin jumped in, with both candidates’ numbers in the 40’s. (The spread was right around the margin of error.) The scuttlebutt that was going around at the convention was that Pipkin was getting into this race to secure the GOP nomination for Gilchrest, who would then announce that this would be his final term and endorse Pipkin as his successor in 2010. Planted rumor or not, it has some plausibility considering the timing of Pipkin’s entry.
And then we come to the next subject: Courtesy of Politicker MD, their “Quote of The Day”:
“I only accept contributions from people who can vote for me, and I wish every member of Congress subscribed to that.”
– Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, 08/25/02
“After the last finance report, when we realized the Club for Growth was going to dump hundreds of thousands of dollars into this race, it wouldn’t be a fair fight. He’s taking PAC money, money from all over the country. We have to fundraise as aggressively as Andy Harris.”
– Gilchrest campaign manager Tony Caligiuri 12/03/07
That was 7-8 points ago for Wayne. If you’d like to see a copy of the new Wayne Gilchrest “I now take PAC money” invitation, click here.
The Daily Times also weighed in today (besides the Politicker MD quote) with a story by Joe Gidjunis that seemed to give the “everyone else is doing it” excuse on Wayne’s behalf. It seems to me that the Club For Growth was involved in the ’02 GOP primary election here as well but obviously the poll numbers weren’t as tight for Wayne that time.
With the deep pockets of E.J. Pipkin now involved, this race might be the first local race to spend millions for the Congressional seat – certainly it will set a record by primary day.
Crossposted on Red Maryland.
Before someone asks, yes, I could have went all though the First District in 2004 for Gilchrest vs. Pipkin but that wouldn’t have been a good sampling since it was only one race and my other tests are for two or more races.
Actually Michael, you are misinformed. In 2002, bundling was not permitted in 2002 which meant that the direct contributions for Club for Growth did not pour into the challenger campaign. This is the first time a candidate running against Gilchrest who has raised over 90% of their total contributions from individual donors who live outside the state of Maryland.
Michael, your numbers are not wholly conclusive. I assume the numbers you used were from General Elections over those years. First of all, Gilchrest has only run against lackluster Democrats at best…so, to justify his numbers would take some doing. Also, Harris is in a district which is significantly more Democratic than Republican, so for him to put up nearly 60% is fairly impressive. Furthermore, to compare the numbers from each race is somewhat disingenous, as they are completely different races, and consequently significantly different dynamics. Also, if you want interesting numbers, look at Pipkin’s from his Senatorial race in 2004.
Lloyd: I stand corrected, at least for the 2002 election. Gilchrest’s main primary challenger (David Fischer) only received $24,314 in PAC money according to the Center for Responsive Politics but spent over $550,000 – about half loaned to himself. So if the Club for Growth indeed endorsed him as I recall hearing (not living here at the time), they didn’t do much for him financially.
Shoreman: What got me interested was wondering who did better at election time as far as drawing votes, and Gilchrest was the winner as far as general elections go. But in the 2006 GOP primary both were unopposed and that’s more apples-to-apples. There’s two counties I could use as a comparison, Kent and Queen Anne’s. In Kent County Gilchrest had 1,513 primary votes and Pipkin 1,439. In Queen Anne’s County, Pipkin had 3,902 primary votes and Gilchrest 3,783. If one were to assume this was a popularity contest among GOP voters, bear in mind that Governor Ehrlich outpolled both in each county (1,629 in Kent and 4,321 in Queen Anne’s.)
Honestly, I’m not sure my theory holds water as I originally thought but I put it out there nonetheless.
Michael, i respectfully disagree with your data analysis. You are using general election numbers from completely different races, and not all are district wide races either. If you were going to use the data, maybe you should get into specifics for each race & why the candidates received the numbers they got. Some practically ran unopposed several times.
That’s what I tried to do with comment #4 above. Admittedly my analysis is weaker with Harris than Pipkin. And sometimes my theories just don’t work out, as it appears in this case. (But my earlier hunch on how the races was shaping up was borne out on the poll results I’d heard in talking to a couple people over the weekend…I was 2 points off on Gilchrest and right on the number for Harris.)
All I know is that Pipkin’s spending a bunch on postage since I got my second full-color four page brochure this week. That and Andy is now making the effort through his advertising to lump him in with Wayne Gilchrest. It’s going to be intriguing to see how Wayne plays it in his advertising – something tells me he doesn’t lay a glove on Pipkin and then it may be more apparent that the fix is in.
Wayne’s desperation and intellectual dishonesty was obvious from his hit piece on Harris re drivers licenses for illegal aliens. This was pure chuztpah.
From his voting record, wayne takes his directions more from Nancy Pelosi than from his own party leadership.
Given the political demographics of the district, Gilchrest should vote like an Eastern Shore Republican than one from Montgomery County.
The Pipkin ploy may drain votes from Harris but could Pipkin trust Wayne to keep his word in 2010?
Playing the role of spoiler may not be the ticket to future political success.