The District 38 battle is joined

It took a few weeks, but the Maryland GOP has finally begun countering the barrage of full-color mailers that the Democratic Senate Caucus Committee has sent to my house (and presumably those of other 4x Republican voters) trying to portray Jim Mathias as the willing follower of Larry Hogan and Mary Beth Carozza as the pawn of special interests – basically accusing the enemy of what they themselves were doing.

Yet on the Republican response there are a whole slew of votes cited. Finally, perhaps, someone has picked up on the reason I have done the monoblogue Accountability Project for all these years. In this case, the race is a direct compare and contrast since both have voted in the Maryland General Assembly since 2015 – however, the mAP spans the entirety of Mathias’s legislative career, which began in 2006 when he was appointed to finish the brief unexpired term of the late Delegate Bennett Bozman and won the office outright in the election that November as the top vote-getter. Four years later Mathias ran to succeed the retiring Senator Lowell Stoltzfus and won his current post.

So I can tell you that, looking at the record from my conservative, limited government perspective, over his legislative career Mathias has made 71 “correct” votes out of 336 cast. If it were a batting average .211 might keep you around if you were a defensive superstar and would be really good for a pitcher who has to hit in the National League, but getting 21.1% of the votes right for the interests of the district isn’t so good.

On the other hand, out of 100 votes cast by Mary Beth Carozza she has been correct on 62 – not the greatest of records, but a vast step in the right direction. The difference is even more apparent when you compare her total to 18 Mathias got right in that same span (and only 8 in the last three years, when he was supposedly helping out Larry Hogan.) Those 44 votes cast differently are going to be the focus of a series of posts I’ll do leading up to the beginning of early voting October 25.

I’ve already noted Jim’s subservience to special interest PACs across the state, so it will become more clear when you see what he votes for compared to Mary Beth.