Is Wayne Gilchrest a liberal?

Now I can delete the tease part, I'm actually writing this article up. As I stated last night, this website says Wayne Gilchrest is a liberal. While one would think it's a creation of the Andy Harris campaign, it's actually funded not by his campaign but by a known Harris supporter group, the Club for Growth PAC.

I looked through the site today and checked out the votes the group cites here and here. While the evidence is damning in a number of cases, I was sort of surprised and disappointed to find that there were many other GOP voters with Gilchrest on a number of issues, including all 46 earmarks noted in the "Porker" post. Those amendments tended to fail with just the true GOP fiscal conservatives in the House voting to kill the earmark. Meanwhile, the "sampling" post took into account a small number of votes over the last 7 years. Of those 12 votes, the GOP voted in the majority on 6 of them so the Club For Growth's complaint shouldn't just be with Gilchrest on a number of those.

While I did not verify yesterday's claim, that "Gilchrest votes more often with Democratic leadership than with GOP leadership. So far this year (as of Sunday), he has voted with Majority Leader Steny Hoyer 514 out of 866 times. Conversely, he’s voted with Boehner 470 times out of 866," it's very plausible given a CQ Politics survey I posted on in July (about halfway down) that showed Gilchrest voted with the Democrats 48% of the time on key issues.

However, I did decide to link to the site on my sidebar so you can check it out for yourself anytime.

In other First District race news...

Andy Harris's campaign did let me know about an article by Aaron Blake in The Hill Tuesday that talks about the First District battle for endorsements and fundraising.

Also, I found out today that another Gilchrest challenger has signed on to appear at the Wicomico County GOP Straw Poll Monday night, that challenger being John Leo Walter. He'll join Joe Arminio at the event. I'm still awaiting word on who will be representing both Harris and Gilchrest at the Straw Poll.

Finally, an interesting Arminio aside. On his website under "The Campaign in the News" he has two links - a link to a WJZ-TV article and a "local blog". It's my post I did on his entering the campaign back in July. Hey Joe, at least properly cite the source will you?