Tag: Sixth Congressional District

Odds and ends number 42

As you likely know, this is the post where I pick out a few items worth a paragraph or three but not a full post. So here goes.

Polling is in the news these days – sometimes as a real reflection of the political scene, and sometimes just to make news and push a particular agenda. There are two recent polls which I believe reflect the latter.

I’m usually not too trusting of polls in which I can’t find a political or geographical breakdown, and a recent Washington Post poll fits this bill. Taken simply as a sample of 1,064 adults in Maryland, the Post poll gives Martin O’Malley a 55% approval vs. 36% disapproval – compare that to the 53-40 split in the recent Gonzales Poll, which I can easily ascertain subgroups and methodology in. Other disagreements: a 50-44 split in favor of gay marriage on the Post poll vs. a 49-47 split in favor on Gonzales and the “key issue” question: the economy was the top choice of 49% in Gonzales but only 32% on the Post poll.

Without seeing the methodology besides the sample size, my guess is that the local Washington D.C. area was oversampled by the Post. Obviously the economy is better there than in some other portions of the state, and since the area is more liberal than the rest of the state (hard to believe, but true) the other numbers seem to point in that direction as well.

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The Sixth District donnybrook

Since I live on the opposite end of the state, I really don’t have a dog in the Sixth District slugfest that now involves an incumbent Congressman in a revamped district taking on three members of the General Assembly and a cast seemingly of thousands. Most of my readers recall the battle royal which took place in the First District four years ago when two sitting members of the Maryland Senate fought each other and the incumbent in a nasty primary skirmish eventually won by Andy Harris. It took him two years, but Harris finally put the seat back into the hands of the conservative electorate of the First District – a base made even stronger with redistricting.

History will eventually reveal what occurs in the Sixth District as the years pass, but there’s one piece of the puzzle I find quite interesting when it comes to two of the contestants. Despite two of the Republicans having ties to the Maryland Senate – Alex Mooney was a Senator from 1998-2010 while David Brinkley has served since 2002 – nearly every Republican member of the Maryland General Assembly hailing from that part of the state supports Brinkley. This despite the fact Mooney is the (outgoing) Chair of the Maryland Republican Party.

Certainly Mooney seems to be the more conservative of the two (a lifetime monoblogue Accountability Project rating of 88 vs. Brinkley’s lifetime 75 rating) but in either case – or if incumbent Roscoe Bartlett wins the primary – most of the “traditional” Sixth would certainly be more in line with their prospective Congressional voting record than the miserable mAP lifetime rating of 10 compiled by Senator Rob “Gas Tax” Garagiola or the probability that any of the other Democrats would be similarly terrible for the district. My question is how Mooney could have burnt so many bridges, and is this a reason why he’s not been the successful fundraiser for the Maryland Republican Party he intended to be?

The chances are pretty good that the Sixth District race will be the most interesting one to follow in Maryland since we won’t have Kratovil vs. Harris round three here in the First. April 4th will be a crazy morning after.