I’m always skeptical when I get the e-mails and press
releases from candidates attacking the records of their opponents. They are
often prone to hyperbole and histrionics. In 2012, Jon Tester was called
“liberal” and advertisements suggested he was an Obama clone for voting with
the president “95 percent of the time”.
I recently received an e-mail from the Montana Democratic Party that
says the following about “Shut Down Steve”: “Congressman Daines’ Tea
Party agenda isn’t just hurting Montana families, it’s hurting Montana’s great
outdoors for future generations”. An earlier e-mail claims that “Congressman Daines’ decision to side with
extremists” hurts Montana.
Steve Daines’ own campaign has intimated that Walsh is in
the pocket of out-state liberal interest who will “spend millions promoting Walsh.” The email continues: “But the fact
remains that we're going to have to compete with millions of dollars from the
Democrat elite, special interests, Hollywood, and New York liberals, like Chuck
Schumer.”
How does one make sense of
all of these allegations? Is Representative Steve Daines “too extreme” or “too
conservative” for Montana? How can we objectively assess the voting records of
members of Congress especially when the campaigns have little interest in an objective
portrayal?
One way to evaluate the
voting records of members of Congress is to examine their NOMINATE scores.
NOMINATE is a measure of ideology developed by political scientists Keith Poole
and Howard Rosenthal. This measure uses the roll call votes of members and
plots every member along a left-right dimension ranging roughly between -1 and
1—with -1 the extreme liberal end of the scale, and 1 the extreme conservative
end. This measure allows us to not only evaluate how liberal or conservative a
member is relative to other members, it also allows us to measure how the
ideologies of members of Congress has changed over time.
Recently, Poole and
Rosenthal released their NOMINATE estimates for the first year of the 113thCongress. We can finally, with these scores, put Daines’ voting record into
comparative perspective. In the first figure below, I plot Daines’ NOMINATE
scores relative to every other member elected to serve in the House of
Representatives for Montana in the post-war era (from the 80th
Congress through the first year of the 113th). Democrats serving in
the House are below the X-Axis, and Republicans are above the X-Axis.
Figure 1: NOMINATE SCORES for Montana's House Delegation, 80-113th Congresses
The first thing that leaps
out from these data is that, unequivocally, Daines has compiled the most
conservative voting record of any Montanan elected to the House of
Representatives. Of that there is little doubt—his NOMINATE score is far more
conservative than Rehberg’s (who, by the way, was not particularly extreme
ideologically) and further to the right of Congressman Rick Hill.
The second figure aims to
put each House member’s ideological into additional comparative perspective.
This time, I plotted the mean NOMINATE values for the Democratic and Republican
Parties in each Congress. Then, I subtracted the NOMINATE value for each member
of Montana’s delegation from that mean. The resulting value represents how far
the member is their party’s NOMINATE average relative to the ideological center
(which is zero on this scale). A positive value means the member is to the left
of the party mean and a negative value to the right of the party mean.
Figure 2: Montana's House Members Ideology Relative to Party Mean, 80th-113 Congresses
Note how much further the
Republican Party has moved to the right compared to the Democratic Party’s move
to the left. Second, note that Congressman Daines is pretty close to the
Republican mean in the current Congress but—because the Republican mean has
moved so far to the right—he is the most conservative individual Montana has
ever elected to the House of Representatives even if he represents the center
of his party. By comparison, note how centrist Congressman Rehberg appears
relative to the rightward shift of the Republican Party during his time in
Congress. Perhaps this ideological disparity explains why Rehberg's campaign was so concerned with nailing down his ideological right flank during
the 2012 Senate race.
It is also interesting to
note that the Democratic Party nationally has not moved as far leftward as the Republican
Party has moved rightward—and furthermore, Democrats representing Montana in
the House generally speaking have moved to the right of their party
ideologically and closer to the ideological center over time (note how much
more liberal the Democratic House delegation was in the 1950s and 1960s than
the Democratic Party nationally has denoted by the positive purple bars on the
left side of the graph). Montana Republicans, generally speaking, have been much
further from that center and the distance has only increased over time.
Now, Daines’ record is
certainly the most conservative of any House member to serve the state. Is that
too extreme? He is not as extreme or conservative as other members of the
House. Congressman Daine’s NOMINATE score is to the left of the average member
of the House Tea Party Caucus (whose average score is .794). The most right
member of the Republican Party is Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner from Wisconsin
who has a NOMINATE score of 1.257. The most liberal Republican is Congressman
Walter Jones of North Carolina who has a NOMINATE score of .054. To the
immediate left of Congressman Daines is Congressmen Barton and Hall of Texas
and Congressman Lankford of Oklahoma. To his immediate right are Congressmen
Hunter (CA), Hartzler (MO), and Renacci (OH).
Although Congressman Daines
has made some votes to establish moderate credentials, most notably his
vote for the Violence Against Women Act, his global voting record as calculated using
the NOMINATE algorithm clearly shows he is quite conservative and without a
doubt the most conservative Montana has elected to the House of Representatives.
A big part of Daines’ conservative record simply reflects how far to the right
the Republican Party has moved in the past twenty years.
Is Congressman Steve Daines "too extreme" for Montana? That will be for the voters to decide.
