The Washington Ratings Game, Part 1: National Journal Has Some Local Surprises

Many of the think tanks and research outfits have weighed in, or are on the verge of doing so, with their evaluations of the 2006 voting performance of House and Senate members. This is the first in a series of posts that will look at them.

On Friday the National Journal published theirs. Their methodology was to look at 95 key roll call votes in the House and 82 in the Senate (after some filtering, which they explain), and to classify them as relating to either economic policy, social policy, or foreign policy. They gave each vote a “weight” of 3, 2, or 1, to indicate its relative importance in the policy area it was part of. Then, to finish it off:

Members were then ranked from the most liberal to the most conservative in each issue area. These rankings were used to assign liberal and conservative percentile ratings to all members of Congress.

The liberal percentile score means that the member voted more liberal than that percentage of his or her colleagues in that issue area in 2006. The conservative figure means that the member voted more conservative than that percentage of his or her colleagues.

The Journal’s results will upset some apple carts around here.

The way to read this ratings is to say “this person voted more conservatively than X% of his or her colleagues in the areas noted.”

In the Senate, here are the OH-KY-IN members rated on the conservative scale (Econ, Social, Foreign, Conservative Composite):

DeWine (R-OH) — 47, 47, 50, 49
Voinovich (R-OH) — 51, 54, 67, 59
Bunning (R-KY) — 88, 82, 92, 91.8
McConnell (R-KY) — 93, 69, 85, 84.3
Bayh (D-IN) — 13, 28, 35, 26.7
Lugar (R-IN) — 55, 51, 54, 54.3

Here are some other Senate “notables” (Conservative Composite only):

DeMint (R-SC) — 92.5
Dole (R-NC) — 80.7
Coburn (R-OK) — 78.8
Santorum (R-PA) — 70.3
McCain (R-AZ) — 56.7
Clinton (D-NY) — 29.8
Biden (D-DE) — 22.5
Kerry (D-MA) — 14
Obama (D-IL) — 14

Over in the House, here are the local area Members (Econ, Social, Foreign, Conservative Composite):

Boehner (R, OH08) — 98, 63, 73, 80
Chabot (R, OH01) — 65, 65, 67, 66.5
Schmidt (R, OH02) — 81, 79, 94, 86.8
Turner (R, OH03) — 71, 66, 73, 72
Davis (R, KY04) — 68, 70, 86, 76.7
Pence (R, IN06) — 77, 70, 94, 81.7
Sodrel (R, IN09) — 94, 85, 86, 90.7

Here are some other House “notables” (Conservative Composite only):

Hunter (R, CA52) — 84
Oxley (R, OH04) — 81
Tancredo (R, CO06) — 73.3
Shadegg (R, AZ03) — 70.2
Flake (R, AZ06) — 51.2
Murtha (D, PA12) — 40
Mollohan (D, WV01) — 39.8
Strickland (D, OH06) — 30.2
Brown (D, OH13) — 28.5
Hoyer (D, MD05) — 21.5
Kucinich (D, OH10) — 13
Pelosi (D, CA08) — 7.7

There are a few more surprises in the rankings than I want to (or have time to) specifically address, but I did want to get the info out for Tri-State area folks. I’ll also leave it to someone else to second-guess at a detail the National Journal’s vote selections and weightings, which on the surface look pretty reasonable to me.

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UPDATE: Cleveland Openers covered the National Journal’s rankings (HT Project Logic). Based on other info coming out later this week, I’m not ready to hang the label “most conservative member of the Ohio delegation” on Jean Schmidt just yet, as Project Logic has. But it should be noted that her foreign-policy conservative cred, which is not measured in many of the other ratings, is basically untouchable.

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Part 2: National Taxpayers Union Notes Little National Improvement
Part 3: Americans for Tax Reform — Local Congressional Delegation Gets Straight A’s
Part 4: Club for Growth
Part 5: American Conservative Union
- Consolidated Rankings for All Five Sources