Expect election year crowds 7 months later?

Laura Vozella’s Friday column contains this paragraph about last week’s Red, White and Blue Dinner hosted by the MD GOP:

The state GOP’s big fund-raiser was a big reminder that things aren’t quite what they once were for Maryland Republicans. Last year, with Ehrlich and Lt. Gov. Michael Steele in big-time races, the party needed the entire Constellation Ballroom at the Hyatt in downtown Baltimore. This week, a partition cut the room in half, and there was still room to spare — about 300 people in attendance compared with 800 or more last year.

Vozzella and Gregory Kane are the two Sun columnists (aside from some of the sports ones) that I try to read as soon as a new one is online. However, I take issue with the above excerpt from Friday’s column. To compare the crowd of an event held the month prior to a statewide election to the crowd at an event 7 months after a statewide election (and almost a year and a half from the next election) is comparing apples and oranges. Throw in the fact that Maryland seems pretty irrelevant right now in the presidential primary process because of the front-loaded process and you have plenty of reasons why there’s a crowd that small compared to last fall before the election.

I’m not saying losing the elections in the fall had no impact on the crowd, but my experience shows (granted, most of it is not in Maryland) events in off-years like this one get the diehards from the base unless there’s a major draw and the crowds right before an election are more broad-based.

Vozella does acknowledge that it’s still a good crowd for the MD GOP considering how small they used to be. It would just be better if she had provided context for why a crowd really might be half as large this far away from an election compared to an event right before one.