We went a long way toward swinging the needle in the House to the left in the 2006 election. Obviously, this is a direct result of picking up 30+ seats, but there’s more to it than that. It’s also a matter of replacing Republicans with the right people: replacing a right-wing nutter with a progressive goes a much longer way toward than replacing a moderate Republican with a Blue Dog, and we did more of the former. In addition, most of our open seat replacements wound up being more liberal than their predecessors.
To explore this, I matched up the DW-Nominate score* for each representative in each seat in the 109th Congress (2005-2006) vs. the 110th Congress (2007-2008). (I also converted the scores into discrete ranks from most liberal to least liberal, as DW-Nominate scores don’t look very meaningful at first glance. However, I’m subtracting the scores, not the ranks, so that we’re measuring actual shifts in voting records, rather than measuring distortion caused by an increase in the size of the Democratic caucus.) Let’s start by looking at the seats where the overall shift was the largest (not coincidentally, these were the seats that switched from R to D).
| District | 109th Rep. | 109th Score | Rank | 110th Rep. | 110th Score | Rank | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MN-01 | Gutknecht (R) | 0.747 | 414 | Walz (D) | -0.337 | 161 | -1.084 |
| CO-07 | Beauprez (R) | 0.631 | 378 | Perlmutter (D) | -0.317 | 173 | -0.948 |
| WI-08 | Green (R) | 0.561 | 353.5 | Kagen (D) | -0.333 | 165 | -0.894 |
| KS-02 | Ryun (R) | 0.637 | 383 | Boyda (D) | -0.239 | 197 | -0.876 |
| NH-02 | Bass (R) | 0.479 | 302.5 | Hodes (D) | -0.397 | 126 | -0.876 |
| IN-08 | Hostettler (R) | 0.753 | 415 | Ellsworth (D) | -0.118 | 229 | -0.871 |
| NH-01 | Bradley (R) | 0.467 | 298 | Shea-Porter (D) | -0.398 | 124 | -0.865 |
| TX-23 | Bonilla (R) | 0.482 | 305.5 | Rodriguez (D) | -0.362 | 147.5 | -0.844 |
| AZ-05 | Hayworth (R) | 0.688 | 399 | Mitchell (D) | -0.148 | 224 | -0.836 |
| KY-03 | Northup (R) | 0.431 | 279.5 | Yarmuth (D) | -0.401 | 122 | -0.832 |
More over the flip…
In case you’re wondering which GOP to Dem switch made the least difference, the answer may surprise you: it was in PA-08, which was one of the few cases where we went from a moderate Republican (Fitzpatrick: 0.213 (207)) to a Blue Dog (Murphy: – 0.233 (200)). (Patrick Murphy gets a lot of netroots credit for his anti-war stance, but he’s pretty economically conservative.)
Now let’s look at seats where the leftward shift was the greatest but where the same party kept the seat (and in some cases, the same person kept the seat).
| District | 109th Rep. | 109th Score | Rank | 110th Rep. | 110th Score | Rank | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HI-02 | Case (D) | -0.222 | 184 | Hirono (D) | -0.57 | 40.5 | -0.348 |
| TX-04 | Hall (R) | 0.453 | 287.5 | Hall (R) | 0.249 | 237 | -0.204 |
| FL-11 | Davis (D) | -0.292 | 166.5 | Castor (D) | -0.459 | 88 | -0.167 |
| FL-13 | Harris (R) | 0.561 | 353.5 | Buchanan (R) | 0.447 | 294 | -0.114 |
| TN-09 | Ford (D) | -0.322 | 155 | Cohen (D) | -0.432 | 106.5 | -0.11 |
| MD-03 | Cardin (D) | -0.352 | 142 | Sarbanes (D) | -0.46 | 87 | -0.108 |
| MN-05 | Sabo (D) | -0.583 | 31 | Ellison (D) | -0.674 | 15 | -0.091 |
| NV-02 | Gibbons (R) | 0.641 | 386.5 | Heller (R) | 0.561 | 355.5 | -0.08 |
| OH-10 | Kucinich (D) | -0.727 | 7 | Kucinich (D) | -0.795 | 2 | -0.068 |
| OK-05 | Istook (R) | 0.601 | 365 | Fallin (R) | 0.537 | 340 | -0.064 |
I’m not really sure what overcame Ralph Hall. He switched to the Republicans in 2004 in order to survive the DeLay-mander, so my best guess is that he may have been overcompensating in 2005 and 2006 in order to prove his Republican bona fides and avoid a primary challenge, but now that he’s more safely ensconced in his seat, he’s reverting more toward his original Blue Doggish tendencies.
Finally, let’s look at the seats where there was the greatest rightward shift. If you look at the raw numbers, you might think the House as a whole moved to the right: there was a leftward progression in 149 seats and a rightward movement in 154 seats (with the score staying exactly the same in the other 132 seats). However, most of those rightward shifts are extremely small fractions, perhaps as the remaining Republicans closed ranks; a few bigger shifts resulted from open seats (both D and R-held). None of the shifts is anywhere near the magnitude of what occurred in seats that went from R to D.
| District | 109th Rep. | 109th Score | Rank | 110th Rep. | 110th Score | Rank | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OH-04 | Oxley (R) | 0.434 | 281.5 | Jordan (R) | 0.772 | 417 | 0.338 |
| MI-07 | Schwarz (R) | 0.317 | 229 | Walberg (R) | 0.623 | 374.5 | 0.306 |
| GA-09/10 | Norwood (R) | 0.711 | 405 | Broun (R) | 0.998 | 433 | 0.287 |
| NE-03 | Osborne (R) | 0.362 | 243.5 | Smith (R) | 0.627 | 376 | 0.265 |
| CA-22 | Thomas (R) | 0.399 | 261 | McCarthy (R) | 0.573 | 358 | 0.174 |
| OH-06 | Strickland (D) | -0.461 | 84 | Wilson (D) | -0.289 | 181 | 0.172 |
| TN-01 | Jenkins (R) | 0.548 | 344 | Davis (R) | 0.684 | 393.5 | 0.136 |
| IL-06 | Hyde (R) | 0.419 | 271.5 | Roskam (R) | 0.538 | 341 | 0.119 |
| GA-04 | McKinney (D) | -0.641 | 17 | Johnson (D) | -0.527 | 54 | 0.114 |
| IL-17 | Evans (D) | -0.47 | 79 | Hare (D) | -0.366 | 146 | 0.104 |
* I’m using DW-Nominate 1st dimension scores for this because, of all the methods for assessing voting records, it’s the best for doing linear, historical research where one Congress is compared against another. DW-Nominate scores reflect all votes on all roll calls, so there isn’t the cherry-picking problem that other aggregators run into. In some ways, I’d prefer to be using Progressive Punch or National Journal scores, as I’ve done on previous projects; they’re scored 100 to 0, and people can easily mentally convert them into the A-to-F grading scale. However, in addition to the distortion problems that come with those methods, there’s the matter of older National Journal and CQ scores being behind paid firewalls, and the matter of older Progressive Punch scores being available only as lifetime scores rather than being broken down by year or congress.
Here is their explanation of how the scores work; for those of you who aren’t professional statisticians, what you need to know is that the scores basically run between – 1 and 1, with – 1 being most liberal and 1 being most conservative. My eventual goal is to build a database that examines the relationship between DW-Nominate scores and PVIs over the decades, but, please, give me some time on that.