Instead of using the National Journal or whatever's ranking that always waits until a Presidential candidate is determined and then ranks them as "most liberal", here's a bit more objective and developed analysis. http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/06/liberal-conservative-rankings-done.html Liberal-Conservative Rankings Done Right I think I'm a pretty smart guy, but every now and then I come across something and say to myself "man, that **** is deep". This morning, in doing a little bit of remote-term planning for features that we might add to the site in the distant future, I was doing some background research on liberal-conservative scores and other methods of vote classification and stumbled across a website called voteview.com, created by a University of California at San Diego professor named Keith Poole. Voteview uses an extremely rigorous methodology for ordering Senators from most liberal to most conservative which to my mind produces some fairly intuitive results. (Five most liberal senators thus far this year? Russ Feingold, Chris Dodd, Bernie Sanders, Sheldon Whitehose, and Ted Kennedy). This is how Voteview classifies Senators McCain and Obama over the last four Congresses; for good measure we'll also throw in Senator Clinton: <pre> Congress Obama McCain Clinton 107th -- 57/102 22/102 108th -- 96.5/100 21.5/100 109th 21/101 100/101 25/101 110th 10.5/101 94/101 20/101 </pre> By this method, Obama is liberal, but not that liberal. He was the 21st most liberal senator in the 109th Congress and has been the 10th or 11th most liberal thus far in the 110th. The surprising result is John McCain, who rates as the 8th most conservative senator in the 110th Congress, the 2nd most conservative in the 109th, and the 5th or 6th most conservative in the 108th. In the 107th Congress, however, McCain was quite moderate. Voteview doesn't have rankings before the 107th, so I'm not sure whether there was some permanent change in McCain's political philosophy on or around 2003 (perhaps coinciding with the start of the Iraq War) or whether it was his behavior in the 107th that was unusual (perhaps he took some pleasure in being a thorn in President Bush's side after having lost the primary to him). But this is more evidence for the notion that the 2008 version of John McCain is a very different politician than the 2000-2002 version of John McCain. Posted by Nate at 7:16 AM
I like the idea but that's so hard to do. I mean McCain has several issues like stem cells that would keep him far away from 5th or 6th most conservative. These rankings look like they are heavily weighted for foreign policy. Interesting that as of last Congress we are looking at two of the far extremes in the Senate...7th most conservative and 10th most liberal...
I know it uses votes, but it doesn't pass the sniff test. Examples: Harry Reid is a social conservative who rejects much of the mainstream Democratic populims, and whose views are far to the right of the DNC. He's ranked more liberal than Schumer and Clinton, and far more liberal than Feinstein. Using Reagan/Goldwater Conservatism as the standard, Senators Sununu and Happy Feet Craig have consistently been the most conservative, and they aren't close in the rankings. Specter and Snowe are certainly more liberal than than the Baucuses and Testers of the Senate, but the ranking puts a clean break between the conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans that doesn't exist. I suspect that the rankings heavily weight support for the war and Patriot Act as conservative tendencies, when they are not. On a traditionally accepted scale, while no standard bearer for conservatism, Chuck Hagel is far more conservative than John McCain, and the fact that he's ranked far more liberal is a key that it fails.
weslinder: I wonder if a better descriptor here than liberal/conservative would be Republican/Democrat - ie, who voted more with party? I can't find the exact methodology, so I'm not sure how they did it - but that would explain why there is a clear break between D and R. While Snowe might be more liberal, she probably still voted with the Republicans more often than Tester, for example. Also, Hagel seems to have the 2nd highest "classification error", so that may be why he stands out. While most people are around 30 or so, he's up at 80.
Probably so, but what's Republican and what's Democrat changes every Congress, so it gives the rankings less meaning. Maybe one day, I'll rank votes as pro-government and anti-government and come up with my own ranking. (Right now that's way down the list of my priorities.)
Voting for an expansion or against a reduction of the size and/or scope of government increases pro-government rating. Voting against an expansion or for a reduction of government reduces that rating. Votes that neither increase nor decrease government power don't count. Actually, until 2 years ago, RLC did just that with their Liberty Index. Maybe it's time to revive that.
If you need one of the two words to feel comfortable picking a candidate then you need to read more. If you have read a lot of books and still feel comfortable with the two simple labels then the stuff you read is out of date and you still need to read more. Why resort to simple labels unless you confess to being simple? When given a choice between chocolate and vanilla, most people would pick rocky road or mint chocolate chip. WTF?
http://www.moomilk.com/archive/feature-10.htm When faced with dozens of kinds of ice cream in a supermarket freezer, 45% of ice cream buyers buy chocolate or vanilla.
So you would see a vote against strengthening FEMA's ability to respond to a major incident as a positive while voting for regulation of child p*rn would be a negative?
Then your ranking would be meaningless because every individual vote would have to be considered based on the merits.
this debate illustrates why the "most liberal" arguments are ultimately a futile exercise and the charge is a disingenuous one.
Even if it were true (you're busting out ice cream stats in response to my metaphor?), more than half of the voters make me feel a little better about the 45% who might just be buying ice cream bc they were pandered to.
Ranking that I think is best. It uses co-sponsorship instead of just votes: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/spectrum.xpd
