Tag: Albert Wynn

Rep.	District	PVI	PVI rank	PP	NJ	Liberal rank	Difference
A. Davis	AL-07	D+17	62	91.77	61.3	179	-117
Meek	FL-17	D+35	10	94.76	76.5	117	-107
Rangel	NY-15	D+43	2	94.85	80.3	105	-103
Jefferson	LA-02	D+28	26	95.14	73	121	-95
E.B. Johnson	TX-30	D+26	29	93.97	77.7	123	-94
Fattah	PA-02	D+39	4	94.95	82.2	96	-92
Lipinski	IL-03	D+10	102	90.93	54.7	191	-89
S.T. Jones	OH-11	D+33	16	95.28	79	104	-88
Doyle	PA-14	D+22	39	94.58	75.2	125	-86
C. Brown	FL-03	D+16	64	94.39	67.7	142	-78
R. Brady	PA-01	D+36	8	95.35	84	83.5	-75.5
Rush	IL-01	D+35	11	95.61	82.8	86.5	-75.5
Meeks	NY-06	D+38	6	96.24	83.3	76	-70
Engel	NY-17	D+21	44	93.12	83.3	111	-67
Lynch	MA-09	D+15	68	94.07	72.3	135	-67
G. Green	TX-29	D+8	124	91.21	56.5	189	-65
Towns	NY-10	D+41	3	96.37	84.2	67	-64
T. Ryan	OH-17	D+14	73	94.36	70.3	136	-63
M. Udall	CO-02	D+8	121	90.94	60.2	184	-63
Serrano	NY-16	D+43	1	97.54	78	63	-62
J. Cooper	TN-05	D+6	139	85.7	54.7	200	-61
Berkley	NV-01	D+9	115	92.01	61.8	173	-58
P. Stark	CA-13	D+22	40	96.24	75.2	98	-58
Reyes	TX-16	D+9	111	92.54	61.8	166.5	-55.5
Sires	NJ-13	D+23	37	95.67	80.3	92	-55
Cummings	MD-07	D+25	32	96.51	77.5	86.5	-54.5
Maloney	NY-14	D+26	31	96.06	80	85	-54
Capuano	MA-08	D+33	20	97.16	79.2	73.5	-53.5
Emanuel	IL-05	D+18	57	95.96	72.3	110	-53
Barrow	GA-12	D+2	178	68.22	45.8	228.5	-50.5

Frankly, I was surprised to see so many members of the Congressional Black Caucus on the list, especially since most of the ones on the list have pretty progressive records (although it certainly does shine the spotlight on the ones with more centrist records, like Artur Davis and Kendrick Meek… those two, plus Greg Meeks, are the only members of both the CBC and the New Democrat Caucus). The formula is pretty unforgiving, and it can be hard to live up to having one of the most Democratic leaning seats in the nation.

It may be more interesting to focus on people who have the less safe seats, but not so dangerous as to justify sketchier voting records. Mr. Lipinski you’re all familiar with, but this list also points, for instance, to Jim Cooper, a Blue Dog in a D+6 seat based in Nashville, or John Barrow, the second most conservative Democrat in the House, who sits in a D+2 seat.

Now, let’s turn to the good news: the Democrats who are vastly overperforming their districts. These are a mix of Blue Dogs holding down the fort in some of the nation’s most conservative districts, and flat-out progressives based in light-blue or swing districts.

Now, let’s look at the Republicans. A low OWI score shows which GOP representatives are, as it were, overperforming their lean of their districts, by being hardcore dead-enders in districts that should elect moderates, or better yet, Democrats.

It’s heartening to see that a lot of these guys are already being targeted by the DCCC this cycle (Feeney, Chabot, Bachmann, Walberg, Shadegg). Also, I see more names that are on the “Races to Watch” lists of a lot of people here (Kline, Garrett).

Finally, let’s look at the Republicans who are more moderate than their districts would predict. There isn’t that much we can do with this list, other than thank them (or sit back and watch as the Club for Growth primaries them, as we saw with Wayne Gilchrest this year), so I’m just holding it to 10 names. It’s an interesting mix of representatives from red districts who’ve turned against the war, and very conservative representatives from super-red districts who just aren’t as crazy as the voters in their districts.

Some of the more observant of you might be wondering about how there’s one name missing… the name that’s come to signify that Bad Dems can, in fact, be beaten? Some of the others of you might be wondering who are the representatives who exactly match their districts, with almost no difference between their record and the district’s lean? Well, the answer to both of those questions is: Al Wynn. Somewhat surprisingly, for his 2007 voting record, he was right on the mark. MD-04, at D+30, is the 23rd most Democratic district. He had a Progressive Punch score of 97.14 and a National Journal score of 95, making him the 22nd most liberal representative. That’s a differential of 1.

So what does that mean? Did we target the wrong man? Nope… turns out, savvy politician that he is, he veered sharply to the left in 2007, worried by his previous narrow primary victory and anticipating the rematch. Here’s a chart that illustrates the U-turn: Progressive Punch also puts together lifetime scores, so I compared those against district lean too. Observe how most of the Lifetime Bad Dems are the same as the 2007 Bad Dems, but check out who’s #2 on the list:

Now, Wynn’s turnaround of 10.91, from a lifetime score of 86.23 to a 2007 score of 97.14, wasn’t the biggest gain of any Democrat… not by a long shot. The biggest jumps, perhaps unsurprisingly, were among the Blue Dogs, who had lower scores to begin with, and an opportunity to make up more ground by voting with the new Democratic majority. The biggest jump belonged to Ike Skelton, who went from 63.46 to 89.5, and the 3rd biggest jump was John Murtha, shooting up from 70.85 to 94.67.

In fact bigger jumps were shown by many of the other Dems subject to internal challenges or the threat thereof, often at the behest of the netroots: Jane Harman (who’s #13 on the Lifetime Bad Dem list) went from 79.08 to 93.32, Ellen Tauscher went from 84.01 to 95.97, and even Henry Cuellar beat Wynn, going from 74.25 to 85.24. (In case you’re wondering, only one Dem went in reverse: Nick Lampson went from a lifetime score of 75.28 to a 2007 score of 71.24, perhaps to compensate for his new very red district.)

So, there’s something here for both people from the “more” Democrats school and the “better” Democrats school to chew on. Primary challenges can sometimes be effective, but they have to be chosen wisely, and the best targets may not always be the most conservative. Also, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in the form of unpleasant right-wingers in light-red and swing districts; let’s get picking!

Methodological notes: Districts are rated according to PVI. There would be a lot of ties if I just used the Cook PVI ratings, so I took the actual vote totals in each district and used the PVI formula to recalculate PVIs to enough significant digits where aren’t any ties.

Representatives are rated according to the 2007-08 Progressive Punch scores and their 2007 National Journal composite scores, to smooth out any hiccups caused by one or the other compilers’ methods. To further increase the sample size I would have liked to also include DW-Nominate scores (which don’t cherry-pick votes but include all votes and measure representatives’ deviations from each other), but those won’t be published for the 110th Congress until it’s over in 2009, and to include ADA scores, but there isn’t enough differentiation there (for instance, 78 different representatives got a score of 95). Rather than averaging their two scores (where you run into an apples & oranges problem) and ranking the averaged scores, I ranked each representative from 1 to 422 on each score, then averaged their two rankings, then ranked the averaged rankings.

Here’s an example: Mike McIntyre is the midpoint for the House, at the 211th most liberal (or conservative) representative. He has a Progressive Punch score of 84.31, which is 208th. He has a National Journal score of 49.5, for a rank of 217.5 (a tie at 217th). The average of those is 212.75. An averaged score of 212.75 makes him the 211th overall. His district, NC-07, has a PVI of R+3.5271, the 230th most Democratic district in the nation. Subtract 211 from 230 for an OWI score of +19. Not much difference; he’s very slightly overperforming his district.

Wait… why are there only 422? Well, there are four open seats (those formerly held by Lantos, Jindal, Baker, and Wicker). Also, there are nine representatives for whom there wasn’t enough information to calculate a National Journal score (Richardson, Broun, Foster, Carson, Tsongas, Latta, and Wittman are all too new, while Cubin has missed too many votes and Pelosi ordinarily doesn’t vote). For each of these missing representatives, I also didn’t rank the district lean, so that the lean of open districts wouldn’t cause any distortion. For the last table on lifetime PP scores, there was a pool of 431, for which I re-ranked the lean of their 431 districts, so there may be some slight difference in district rankings compared with the other charts.

I fully acknowledge that these rankings don’t incorporate where their money comes from, who their back-room friends are, what they say in front of the cameras, how they frame things, or anything other than how they vote, but that’s the only thing that can be fairly quantified.

UPDATE: There have been some calls to make the whole database available, so I’ve done just that. It’s at Google Documents.