Congressman Steve Daines: Montana's Most Conservative House Member--Ever?

 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 80^th Congress through the first year of the 113^th). 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.

Steve Daines, the Shutdown, and What it Means for The Montana Senate Race—if Anything….

I recently wrote in a magazine piece that the Democrats should, just by looking at historical trends, have a bad year in the midterm elections (see the piece here). One take away message from the two week plus government shut down is that the Republican Party was hurt tremendously in the eyes of the public. According to a recent WSJ-NBC News poll, only 24 percent of respondents have a favorable view of the Republican Party and by a 22 point margin put more of the blame for the shutdown on the Republican Party as opposed to President Obama.

Democrats might gloat over all of this, but I agree with other assessments that the voting public is not only notoriously fickle, they are quite forgetful. Republicans can certainly hope with some degree of confidence that by the midterms come along in November, the debt crisis will be a distant memory in the minds of voters.

But the Democrats won something else when they reopened government and lifted the debt ceiling: They planted the seeds for more histrionics when voters will be paying closer attention. As the result of the agreement made in the Senate, the federal government is reopened for about 90 days—and the new debt ceiling will be breached in February 2014. Again, House Republicans will be placed between a rock and a hard place this winter: Should they again attempt to use the debt ceiling to again demand more cuts in spending and changes in the Affordable Care Act? If they don’t make good on their promises to their base—who want these cuts and want to rollback ACA—they risk demoralizing that base going into a crucial midterm election where they stand to make serious gains in the Senate. 

If Republicans do not use this opportunity to pursue these goals, establishment Republicans risk more primary challenges that could, in low turnout elections, produce Republican nominees so far to the right of center that they cannot hope to win a general election campaign against a centrist Democrat. Republicans probably lost five solid pick up opportunities in the Senate over the past two cycles because their nominees were too extreme relative to general electorate (Delaware, Colorado, Nevada, Indiana, and Missouri). Senators Cochran, Alexander, Graham, and McConnell all voted for the debt limit and shutdown deal and all have drawn Tea Party challengers who could exploit their votes.  Conversely, if the House Republicans do shut down government again, they also risk the party’s standing among the electorate and boost the election prospects of Democrats during an election cycle where they should—given the fundamentals—perform poorly.

Democrats should privately be gleeful that the temporary solution will shine the uncomfortable gridlock glare once again on the GOP, making them have to make some very difficult choices in the months ahead that—either way—will have electoral consequences.

Finally, relating this to Montana directly, the whole situation puts Republican Congressman Steve Daines in quite a sticky wicket. Daines voted with his Republican House colleagues to defund ACA and to repeal the medical device tax—both positions that were unpalatable to President Obama and Senate Democrats and which precipitated the government shutdown. Montana Democrats have gleefully exploited this situation, calling Daines “Shutdown Steve” and pointing to the deleterious effects of the shutdown on Montana’s economy—in particular the closure of our two national parks.

On the other hand, Daines—like other House members eyeing Senate campaigns—joined 86 other House Republicans for the compromise plan developed in the Senate that reopened government. Daines has also attempted on other occasions to strike a more moderate pose, such as supporting the Violence against Women Act. Daines is carefully trying to keep the Tea Party support with him while also appearing to more centrist elements within the party. It was likely these more centrist or moderate elements that abandoned Rehberg for Tester in 2012—likely costing him the election.

I suspect that the last thing Daines wants is to have continual shutdown and debt ceiling crises erupting during a general election campaign—whether he chooses to remain in the House or run for the Senate (and, to be clear, I believe he is running for the Senate). It forces him to make tough, thankless decisions, keeps him in Washington and off the campaign trail, and finally, it raises the ugly specter of running as a Republican in an environment where the Republican Party would likely to continue receiving the bulk of the blame for any impasse in Washington.

In 1995 and 1996, congressional Republicans were overwhelmingly blamed for the government shutdown. History repeated itself again during the 2013 shutdown. The simple fact of the matter is it is far easier for voters to blame Congress for all the ills they don’t like about Washington. Congress has always been the least popular branch, and in head to head showdowns with a President, it is hard for them to win given the president’s inherent advantage in his use of the bully pulpit and the fact this president himself remains personally popular even if voters disapprove of his policies.