Minnesota, land o' liberals ... and moderates and conservatives
One of the semi-official annual analysis/rankings of the voting records of members of Congress came out Monday. It's done every March by National Journal and gives each member an overall score on the liberal/conservative spectrum. It also breaks each member's voting down across economic, social and foreign-policy issues. For those who want to do their own study and analysis, the methodology of the rankings is explained here. The entire ranking of the House is here and the Senate here.
The summaries of the Minnesota members is below. A few quick impressions:
The Repubs
Not too surprisingly, Rep. Michele Bachmann is the most conservative member of the delegation. Her overall conservatism percentage is 89.8, and she is ranked the 28th most conservative member of the House overall. Perhaps slightly more surprising, she barely edges out John Kline for the Minnesota conservatism award. He came in 32nd among conservatives, with an overall 89.0. Close watchers know that Kline is very solidly conservative, just not in as flamboyant or media-centric a way as Bachmann. Bachmann and Kline both scored a perfect zero for liberalism on foreign-policy issues. It would be fun to know what issues caused Bachmann to be rated 10 percent liberal on social issues.
Minnesota's most junior Republican, freshman Rep. Erik Paulsen, looks substantially more moderate. His 2009 voting record is rated 69.2 percent conservative, making him the 144th most conservative member of the House. This is a tad more conservative than his predecessor, the famously (or notoriously) moderate Repub Jim Ramstad, but considering there were 178 Republicans in the House, it puts Paulsen left of center among House Republicans.
Most liberal Dems
Betty McCollum was ranked Minnesota's most liberal member of Congress. With an overall "liberalism" score of 90.5 percent, McCollum was rated the 18th most liberal member of the House. If you expected to see Keith Ellison in that spot, he scored 86.3 and came in 44th. McCollum was rated more liberal than Ellison last year as well (and she came in 12th most liberal in the entire House last year). It wouldn't be wise to attach much meaning to small year-to-year swings like that, since the ratings are certainly affected by which issues happened to come up for votes.
McCollum rated least liberal (only 81 percent) on economic issues. Ellison rated least liberal on foreign-policy issues (69.) Be interesting to know what those votes were as well.
Jim Oberstar, the dean of the delegation, voted with the liberals on 73 percent of the roll-call votes scored by National Journal, which makes him the 130th most liberal member. Since there were 257 Democrats in the House, that puts him almost dead center among his caucus. Oberstar, who is pro-life, rated as slightly more conservative than liberal on social issues.
Two moderate Dems
Tim Walz, the sophomore Democrat from southern Minnesota's 1st District, received an overall score of 63.8 percent liberal/36.2 percent conservative. This made him the 166th most liberal member of the House in 2009, by National Journal's methodology. That means he is left of the center of the House, but well right of the center of the Democratic spectrum. Walz is most liberal on foreign-policy issues and least liberal on social issues.
(Walz's re-election campaign put out a press release based on the National Journal rankings, boasting that the ranking proves Walz is a "centrist." Unlike McCollum, Ellison and Oberstar, all of whom represent districts that have been sending Democrats to Congress for 50 years or more, Walz represents a swing district and has to worry about such things.)
Collin Peterson of Western Minnesota is a Democrat, but one of the bluest of Blue Dogs. He scores as the 243rd most liberal member and the 188th most liberal. So he is well to the right of the midpoint of the House and, by National Journal's methodology, he is the 10th most conservative Democrat in the House. But it's worth noting that even as the 10th most conservative Democrat, not a single Republican in the House scores to the left of Peterson. This is a reminder of one of the big developments of the past 30 years in Congress. There used to dozens of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress, but they are basically all gone. The parties are much more ideologically "pure" than has been the case historically, which has enormous consequences for the way business is done in Congress, and is one of the reasons that Democrats have been unable to create any serious bipartisan story around the health-care bill or many other matters.
The senators
The overall Senate rankings are here.
Al Franken did not get scored. I assume that's because he joined the Senate so late in 2009 that the National Journal didn't have enough votes to rank him.
Amy Klobuchar, believe it or not, came in in the dead-center of the Senate. She was the 50th most liberal and the 49th most conservative. She was rated 54.8 percent to the liberal side (and 45.2 to the conservative side). And Klobuchar's relatively middle-of-the-road scores held true across economic, social and foreign-policy issues.
One last note. Despite (or perhaps because of) having a delegation that includes liberals, conservatives and moderates, when you blend together the votes of all Minnesota's House members, the state gets an overall ranking of 51.4 percent liberal, which makes it (contrary, I suppose, to its stereotype in the national mind) the 21st most liberal state. The blended state rankings are here. There are several surprises on the map. For example, Mississippi and Arkansas are in the middle group with us, while New Mexico is in the liberal group.
For those who want to pore over the delegation's scores in more detail ...
Source: The National Journal
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Comments (14)
Eric, any ideas on why the bigger ideological divide than usual? I'd guess it has to do with more strictly gerrymandered districts, but that's only a shot in the dark.
Peder,
the conventional explanation, which I subscribe to, is that the parties have become more clearly ideological. In previous generation, lost of conservatives were Dems, but mostly from the South, for historical reasons. They're still conservatives, but now they're Repubs. And the Yankee Repub tradition could be quite liberal. Repub. Sen. Jacob Javitz of New York, for example, was a solid liberal on most topics. But in today's climate, someone like him virtually couldn't be nominated by the Repubs in any state. The left-wing of the Repubs is now defined roughly by the two Senators from Maine. The right-wing of the Dems is Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson and, while we're on the topic, Collin Peterson. The overall scores for party-line voting are much, much higher than they used to be.
But Scott Brown is an interesting outlier.
Sounds like he's already thinking about reelection, and knows that to do that in Massachusetts he can't stay too far to the right.
And is this a Freudian slip?
"lost of conservatives were Dems"
Just finished reading Mark Stein's "How the States Got Their Shapes," and today's piece reinforces what for me was a revelation from that book: Congress had a plan – loose, but a plan, nonetheless – in mind when the states were created. A big part of that plan was to create states that were roughly equal, and today's piece, coupled with the map from "National Journal," adds weight to a suspicion I've had since moving here last June.
That is, Colorado and Minnesota are not only similar in size (part of that Congressional plan), but they're similar in population, and, it turns out, similar in political outlook among their respective Congressional representatives. Alas, the similarities don't extend to climate or geography, and more's the pity.
The stereotype is that Colorado is a conservative state and Minnesota a liberal one, but the past 10 or 15 years of electoral turmoil have resulted in Colorado sending Diana DeGette to the House, while Minnesota sends Michele Bachmann, so the stereotypes obviously don't hold water very well.
The National Journal's annual rankings are essentially meaningless. In 2004, they announced that Kerry and Edwards were the two most liberal senators, according to their flawed methodology. In 2008, they announced that Obama was the most liberal senator. More liberal than Feingold. More liberal than Sanders--who actually IS a socialist.
Biden came in at number three, and ahead of Sanders also. Clinton was ranked at number 16, even though she and Obama voted differently only 10 times during the ranking period. John McCain was not ranked at all, because he missed too many of the "defining" votes, according to the NJ.
This sort of "ranking" is nothing but thinly veiled political hackery.
So, the rankings indicated that Obama is more liberal than a Socialist? After a year as President, I think that passes the sniff test. His drive for socialized medicine, the bailouts (government interference in business), massive stimulus package; it all supports Obama's ranking when he was a Senator.
Dear Steve: Please look up "socialist" in the dictionary.
The president hopes Congress will pass the bill developed by the Senate Finance Committee, and even wants some Republican ideas of doubtful benefit to patients to be added. This plan, while having some features that are designed to protect people from the insurance industry while protecting the industry's profits, is far, far from socialized medicine.
Bernice:
I have completed your assignment, I looked up "socialist" in the Webster's Dictionary, which led me to look up "socialism".
Socialist: An advocate or supporter of socialism.
Socialism: The stage of society, in Marxist doctrine, coming between the capitalist stage and the communist stage, in which private ownership of the means of production and distribution has been eliminated.
We are entering into that transitional stage, some of us more willing than others. Whatever term you choose to use for Obamacare, it is the first increment, a foundation on which to build.
Twenty years after we won the Cold War, we've decided to surrender.
This whole exercise illustrates to me the problem with the pundits and the press.
I believe they want everyone tied down in neat little boxes so they can tag them with a single word characterization when slanting stories of current events -- with perceived pejoratives reserved for those with whom they disagree.
In real life, only a very few of us can in actuality be so tagged (people are much too complex), but no matter: it's not reporting, it's spinning.
The solution: IGNORE THESE TAGS, no matter where you see or hear them. That's the way to have some hope of objectively evaluating the actions of any one human being on any given day.
Hey Steve - I enjoy hyperbole as much as anyone, and yours is pretty good.
But in the interest of getting back to reality:
No one has eliminated private ownership of anything. We've done a poor job of competing globally, allowing the "means of production" to go elsewhere, but that's a different issue.
The current health plan has no public option. Hardly socialist.
The stimulus plan and bailouts, distasteful as they are, prevented a total collapse of the global economy. If they hadn't happened (and that process all started under Bush, before Obama was even elected), we'd be in the midst of a depression far worse than any in history. So say the experts, and most especially those who were in the middle of it, and who thus had access to information you and I do not. Bernanke said we were 3 days from the abyss. Would you prefer we went over the cliff, just so you could say that "government didn't interfere in business"? Yeah, sounds great, "hey Sam, unemployment is 30% and we have bread lines, but at least government didn't interfere."
The state economist said the recent improvement in Minnesota's economy is largely due to the federal stimulus package. Should we just say no and accept a worsening economy, thankful that we didn't allow government to interfere?
As for the Cold War, it had nothing to do with socialism (or should we have gone after those "socialist" states of Norway and Sweden, too?). It was about the two biggest kids on the block, fighting for dominance. Our empire against theirs, the oldest story in history. The rest was just window dressing.
Lance, remember that my comments were concerning Obama, not the current health care trial balloon floating overhead. A public option was and is a goal of Obama. He said that he would sign either the House or Senate version of the health care bills that passed those chambers. Our own Senator Franken proposed getting something signed and fixing it later.
Minnesota has spent only 1/3 of it's federal stimulus money; that is some powerful stuff.
Obama's stimulus is larger than the two ineffective Bush stimulus packages combined. A stimulus simply takes money from one part of the economy and injects it into another part, an economic equivalent to daylight savings time. The problem is we don't have the money, so it is deficit and staggering debt. Did we avoid the economic collapse or did we super-size it and kick it down the road for our kids to hit?
Steve:
As a country, we have chosen to socialize (which means to pay for a common good as a body and therefore pay less per person) police and fire protection, national defense, public education, roads and streets and bridges, parks and playgrounds, public libraries, and health care for the poor and/or elderly. Our problem is that we mischaracterize health care as a free-market commodity managed for maximum profit instead of care.
Our current system not only fails to cover everyone but costs us money we can ill afford to pay insurers who abuse their customers with petty reasons for refusing to pay claims.
Single payer: 100% coverage, $400 billion/year saved. Single payer for Minnesota (the MN Health Plan): 100% coverage, estimated savings as a state of 9-20%.
Bernice:
You are going to need to source your numbers for me, so they can be verified.
An article from today's WSJ (linked below), states that the 10-year cost of the bill has a $460 billion deficit. The second 10-year cost of the bill has a $1.4 trillion deficit.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000142405274870380790457509739406862665...
Regarding my thoughts at the end of comment #11, I am willing to be talked in off the ledge; it is getting cold out here. Bernanke has offered no assurances that I have seen regarding the future. It is not hyperbole; I have a genuine concern for the table we are setting for our children. You supporters of bail-out/stimulus/deficit spending/multi-trillion dollar debt/public option health care will owe your children and my children an apology. I am hoping to be proved wrong regarding this point.
"As a country, we have chosen to socialize (which means to pay for a common good as a body and therefore pay less per person)"
>not what "Socialism" is about. It is about government taking control of the means of production of either goods or services or both.
"police and fire protection"
>since colonial times. Works pretty well, which is why pols always threaten it when wanting new taxes.
"national defense"
>the reason the Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation. The only part of the economy "made" for government: waste and corruption don't matter when national security is at stake.
"public education"
>and SEE how that has turned out. Any bets on when it will be "fixed?" And see how private schools do a consistently better job with half the cost, as they have done since before "public education" existed.
"roads and streets and bridges"
>again, since colonial times. How do you like the potholes? Toll roads are still no answer, though.
"parks and playgrounds"
>we are well on our way to England's "king's woods" already, and usurping private enterprise willy-nilly in the process. Ask the folks up north.
"public libraries"
Government was a "Johhny Come Lately" here, but has done a moderately successful job. Seeing the budgets, however, I'm not sure it saves us any money, if that was the goal.
"health care for the poor and/or elderly"
>Don't get me started, here: without the private insurance industry's supplemental plans most seniors would be "up a creek" if they got sick. And as for the poor, what good does it do you to have Medicaid if you can't find a doctor who can afford to treat MA patients?
"Our problem is that we mischaracterize health care as a free-market commodity managed for maximum profit instead of care"
>"Profit" is what's left over after you cover all your expenses. It is the difference between continuing to provide a good or service and going bankrupt.
>It's NOT a bad thing, except in the minds of those in favor of government control, where to have no profit only provides another opportunity to saddle the community with more and more taxes, until the whole thing collapses from its own weight. Ask the British. Ask the Chinese. Ask the Russians. Ask the Poles. Ask ANYONE who has lived under the kind of economic society socialists espouse.
Of course, reigning in ABUSES in the Free Market is needed, and government has a role there. But to my knowledge government has never TAKEN OVER a segment of that free market without bringing it to failure and ruin. See Medicare. See home mortgages - Freddy- and Fanny-Mae. See poverty programs. See light rail. See manufacturing (in socialist countries). See abuses of eminent domain in real estate. And the list goes on.
There are just too many grasshoppers and too few little red hens for socialist principles to work.