The National Journal has put up their ratingsfor 2006, and, once again, Charles Franklin over at Political Arithmetik has done some great stuff with them. these ratings are percentiles: A leibaralism rating of 97% of senate/house members were less liberal than you
Some of my own analysis, and some comments, below the fold
The first two charts on the PA site are dot plots. These are wonderful. They should be used more often.
What do they say? Well, look at what Franklin has written, but some things are obvious:
- Nelson (D-NE) is by FAR the most conservative Dem in the Senate.
- Lieberman (??-CT) is on the conservative side for a Dem, but not outrageiously so…..he is about as conservative as
- Clinton (D-NY) (and if you look at the National Journal site that Franklin links to, you can see Hillary moving rightward).
on the Repub. side
4 Of the Senators who lost or left (Frist, Allen, Burns, Santorum, Talent, DeWine and Chaffee), four were less conservative than at least half their Repub. colleagues – that’s not unusual. But, NONE of the 18 most conservative lost or left, and THREE of the 18 least conservative lost (Talent, DeWine and Chafee) (the 18 wasn’t a random choice….it divides the Republican Senators into 3 roughly equal sized groups).
Looking at the next set of numbers, Franklin astutely points out that Lieberman is unusual for a Dem only on Foreign Policy
Next, there’s a dot plot showing Senate overlap. Now that Chafee is out, there is almost no overlap – only Nelson (D-NE) belongs with the other party, in terms of conservatism score.
If you go over to the National Journal link, there’s more interesting stuff. The most liberal Senate delegations are from IL (Durbin and Obama, total liberalism 181.2), MA (Kennedy and Kerry – total liberalism 179.4); and MD (Sarbanes and Mikulski, total 178.5)
Of the defeated House members, only 3 had conservatism scores under 50; the mean was 66.7.
Of the Presidential wannabes in Congress….most liberal in 2006 is Kucinch (87 rating) followed by Obama (86) and Dodd (84), but lifetime, the most liberal is Obama (84.3), and no one else is close. Of course, given that these are percentiles, lifetime rating is somewhat unfair because it’s easier to be more liberal now than it was 15 years ago.
Lots of other good stuff at those two sites. Enjoy!
