A Republican Delegate Says His Party Is Useless. We Checked.

In March 2026, Maryland State Delegate Christopher Eric Bouchat (R-Carroll/Frederick) was quoted in Maryland Matters saying:

Since my term started, you can remove every Republican vote taken on every bill both in committee and on the floor and nothing would change. Which means we are useless.

Was he correct? Can that possibly be true?

We checked every vote.

We collected data on every vote taken in the Maryland General Assembly — House and Senate — from 2018 through 2026. Then we ran an experiment.

In that timeframe, we found 20,606 "Third Reading" votes — the votes that decide whether a bill passes in a chamber, the necessary step before becoming law. We pulled the historical vote tally for each one and recorded the result: pass or fail.

Then we ran two simulations.

For each of the 20,606 votes, we asked: what if every Republican had voted together as a bloc — all "yea" or all "nay"? In either case, would the outcome have changed?

The answer.

Out of 20,606 votes across ten sessions (including one special session), Republicans voting as a unified bloc could have changed the outcome on 30 votes.

That is 0.15% of votes.

To Delegate Bouchat we say: Fact check — TRUE.

What this means for District 35A.

Republican delegates can't pass bills. Republican delegates can't block bills. And even when Maryland elects a Republican governor, vetoes are overridden by the Democratic supermajority.

There is no lever of state legislative power that Republican delegates currently hold — and the math isn't going to change in 2026.

District 35A deserves a delegate who can actually deliver. A delegate whose vote counts, whose amendments get adopted, whose bills become law.

That's why I'm running.

Sources & methodology

Voting data: All Maryland General Assembly roll-call votes, 2018–2026, pulled from LegiScan on April 26, 2026. We restricted the analysis to Third Reading votes — the floor votes that determine whether a bill passes a chamber.

Simulation: For each of the 20,606 votes, we replaced every Republican vote with either a unified "yea" or unified "nay," recomputed the chamber tally, and compared the result to the actual recorded outcome. A vote was counted as "could have made a difference" if either simulation flipped the result.

Bouchat quote: Bryan P. Sears, "Bouchat, in bout of frustration, skipping floor votes and committee sessions as term ends," Maryland Matters, March 20, 2026.