How to Create Your Own Political Scorecard
How conservative are your state’s legislators? Here in Idaho for many years, it was hard to say, because voters and activists were often given only rhetoric. Many candidates campaigned as “conservatives” while activists and opponents would slam them as “liberals” and “RINOs.” Neither side provided a basis for its claim. Even voter guides were of little help. A growing number of political leaders in Idaho refuse to fill out voter guides, citing the deluge of questionnaires that come at them. Others who do fill them out may take popular positions on the form that don’t match how they’ve voted.
In his keynote address to the Republican National Convention, Senator Zell Miller (R-Ga.) presented a solution. “Campaign talk tells people who you want them to think you are,” he said. “How you vote tells people who you really are deep inside.” Voters needed to know where politicians really stood. While they could dodge a voter guide, eventually they would have to cast a vote that would declare their stand on the issues.
Of course, national interest groups like the American Conservative Union create ratings for members of Congress based on their stance on key votes. At the state level, however, these resources are often lacking.
So in 2007, I began to score members of the legislature according to their votes on key issues. The Idaho Conservative Scorecard was born.
For that first year, I scored nine issues in the state House and seven in the state Senate. As I’ve refined my methods of finding data on the bills put to a vote, and as our state has addressed some more serious issues, the number of votes scored has climbed to sixteen issues for both houses in the 2011 session. The issues that have ended up on the scorecard over the last five years include abortion, education reform, illegal immigration, anti-smoking legislation, and — welcome to Idaho — our state’s wolf management issues.
For many conservatives in my state, the Idaho Conservative Scorecard has provided a basis for challenging incumbent legislators. Party higher-ups often advise conservatives that someone who agrees with us 80% of the time is our friend. That saying, though true, no longer applies in the face of evidence that a particular Republican we are being urged to support only agrees with us 30% of the time.
In 2010, the Idaho Conservative Scorecard revealed four Republican Idaho state senators had liberal and moderate voting records. One, Twin Falls Senator Chuck Coiner, had a 31% Idaho Conservative voting record, a fact cited by activists calling for his ouster.
These have to be done year after year. McCain has an 80 rating from the ACU during non-election years, and a 90 rating during election years.
If they do not have a 90+ rating all the time, I am not interested. Reagan was wrong. A guy who agrees with you 80% of the time is not your friend. He is an enemy agent. Such a person gives the opposition fig leaves of “bi-partisan” votes, like the Maine twins.
This is why Castle had to go. O’Donnell lost the main election, but she did great service in getting rid of the Democratic mole. He was no Republican. He sold us out all the time. Like McCain. At key moments, on bills of great consequence, we just cannot count on them. Sometimes they are with us, and other times not. They make us vulnerable.
You have some excellent points,unfortunately you can add a lot more Republican US Senators to that list; Orin Hatch, Dick Lugar, Scott Brown and Linsey Graham come to mind.
Well said, Mr. Mallone.
Brilliant insight Marc! couldn’t agree more. I am adopting the same take no prisoners attitude. Making nice with dependo-CRATS is why we are waaaaaaaaaaay over drawn on our national credit card.
Avoiding what statisticians call “the fallacy of false precision” –coding list-items (in this case, politicians) per essentially arbitrary, minuscule performance differences– requires not quantitative ratings but qualitative ranking, not scoring but a “beauty contest” approach.
Given Legislators A, B, C, one will consistently rank First, one Indeterminate, one Last. That’s not Data, but Information that anyone can use.
Great article really. In CA we now have prop 14 which allows all the union backed candidates to run as conservatives in “non partisan primaries”. take a wild guess which top two vote getters will always land on the final ballot? Yep the ones that bluster about spending cuts while granting all the gold the public employee unions demand out of our pockets.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but in the limited amount of time I have right now, I did not find an actual listing of the bills, amendments, or other items upon which the Idaho legislators are rated.
I’ve had a fair amount of experience with these kinds of rating systems, at both ends of the political spectrum. Scorecards are useful only to the extent that the proponents want to prove ideological points; they usually don’t really assess how effective a legislator actually is.
#1 Marc Malone: “Reagan was wrong. A guy who agrees with you 80% of the time is not your friend. He is an enemy agent.” Gee, I thought we were all Americans in this room.
Proves my point that many of the PJM posters would consider Reagan as a “RINO” if he came back to life. Same for other great, true, conservatives like Goldwater and William F. Buckley. Reagan was smart enough to understand that a “scorched earth” policy isn’t good for governance. You have to reach out across the aisle.
SteveB, It is disingenuous to use the “Gee I thought we were all Americans” argument, which is an ad hominim attack. Stick to facts.
Your approach may well have worked in previous generations, and it will certainly work again when Left and right share a common perception of what it means to be an American as well as what the role of the Federal government is. That agreement is long gone, and we are enroute the abyss if we cannot stop the slide. The time for reaching out across the aisle is gone on many of these issues. We can not afford to compromise anymore.
Our problem as Conservative voters is that an 80 percent agreement still allows the D’s to win votes that are inimical to Conservatives and the country at large.
It’s like a pawl working on a gear – once the pawl slips into place, the gear is only going to go one way – not the other. An 80 percent Conservative voting record allows the gear to move only to the left. At worst we want the gear not to move. At best, we want it moving to the right.