Did Amie Hoeber donate to Owe’Malley? Numbers Edition

By Eric Beasley

So I have this thing. I really like numbers and facts. I still remember the statistics of every Starcraft unit. I remember every move for the wrestler that I created on Nintendo 64 for Wrestlemania 2000 and WWF No Mercy. During Basic Training, I had memorized not just the entire Smart Book and could recite it verbatim upon request, but I memorized the page numbers and location of every sentence. My Drill Sergeant had to open his mouth to brag about it and I spent the next hour demonstrating this strange ability, surrounded by large angry people with angry hats. There’s a certificate somewhere that calls me the “Soldier of the Cycle” as a reward.

So I would like to take this opportunity to bring some facts and numbers into this deceitful, contrived, mud-slinging, click-baiting, 6th Congressional race.

So here’s some facts that I was asked to report on. Did Amie Hoeber contribute to Martin Owe’Malley?

Yes. Yes she did. And if you stop reading right here, then you are falling into the click-bait headline trap and refusing to look at the actual facts. You are being intellectually dishonest and perpetuating the “Low Information Voter” stereotype. I’m going to make this very easy for you, I already did all the hard work. All you have to do is actually read the entire article before forming an opinion or commenting on the article.

I compiled a list of all federal and state campaign contributions made by Amie Hoeber and Mark Epstein, her husband. Why am I including both? Because no married couple spends large sums of money without talking to each other. You can review that list here. You’re welcome, by the way.

Contributions to Republicans: $328,495
Contributions to Democrats: $5,100

Methodology note: Some of these contributions were to PACs. I labeled these donations according to where the majority of money went, according to Open Secrets.

Now, let’s be fair. $300,000 of that was Mr. Epstein donating to MarylandUSA PAC in support of Ms. Hoeber. Mr. Epstein also donated $2,700 to the campaign, so let’s take both of those contributions off our totals.

Contributions to Republicans: $25,795
Contributions to Democrats: $5,100

Seriously? This is an issue? Did you miss the $4,500 in donations to George W. Bush? Did you miss the $3,000 to John McCain? How about the $500 to Roscoe Bartlett? Of course you missed it, because those facts do not align with the false narrative being created and has not been reported.

Let’s compare Ms. Hoeber’s household to the Republican Presidential front-runner’s contributions:

Contributions to Republicans: $961,140
Contributions to Democrats: $584,850

So let me get this straight, Trump can have less than a 2:1 donation ratio, but it’s an issue when Ms. Hoeber’s household has a 5:1 donation ratio? Is that the position that you want to take?

So given all this contrived controversy over a donation, like a responsible fact-based adult I reached out to Ms. Hoeber concerning the Owe’Malley donation:

The simple answer on that one is that a neighbor was having an event and invited us and we went —I was just curious to meet him.  That’s all.  That particular neighbor, by the way, has donated to both me and Delaney this election season. That’s not all that uncommon.

So there you have it. It was a party as a neighbors house. For anyone that has worked or attended a fundraiser in Potomac, you know that this is exactly how such events go. Someone invites their neighbors with deep pockets to a party. They listen to the candidate speak for 10 minutes. Then they party like its 1989.

Now, since you have made it this far, we are going to have a logical thought exercise. Did that $1,000 donation swing the election in favor of Owe’Malley? Did it give us the Rain Tax and unconstitutional gun laws? Would $1,000 to Mr. Ehrlich have given us a Republican Governor in 2010 and stopped that dreadful 4 years of bad legislation?

Let’s dig a little deeper, shall we? According to Ballotpedia, Owe’Malley spent $3,697,653.53 on the race and Mr. Ehrlich spent $1,424,097.49. Given their vote totals, the cost of each vote was:

Owe’Malley – $0.28
Mr. Ehrlich – $0.55

Therefore, given the cost of a vote and postulating that $1,000 been spent on Mr. Ehrlich and not on Owe’Malley, the total vote swing would have been:

Owe’Malley: -3,571
Mr. Ehrlich: 1,818

So in this world where this extremely important $1,000 had been spent elsewhere, Ehrlich would have lost by 263,253 votes instead of 268,642 votes.

Now that we have settled what the donation was for, the fact that the contribution had absolutely no sway on the election, and that the entire controversy is fake, can we go back to talking about the issues?