15 most liberal senators:

109th Senate Liberal-Conservative Rank Ordering

The ordering of senators was produced by ;the “Optimal Classification (OC)” algorithm - for a detailed discussion of how the algorithm works, and the rank ordering of all senators go to http://voteview.com/sen109.htm

15 most liberal senators:

California - D - Boxer
New Jersey - D - Lautenberg
Rhode I - D - Reed
Massachusetts - D - Kennedy Ed
Maryland - D - Sarbanes
Wisconsin - D - Feingold
New Jersey - D - Corzine
Vermont - D - Leahy
Vermont - I - Jeffords
Massachusetts - D - Kerry John
Oregon - D - Wyden
New York - D - Clinton
New York - D - Schumer
California - D - Feinstein
Maryland - D - Mikulski

3 most conservative senators are:

New Hampshire - R- Sununu
Arizona - R - Kyl
Arizona - R - Mccain

For a rank ordering of the house members go to http://voteview.com/hou109.htm

McCain is not the centrist people would like him to be. He's got some great quotes, but when push comes to shove....

a budget yesterday that made everyone swallow hard. They thought that the financial wizard would pull rabbits out of hats, but instead he got real. We need a huge dose of that on the national front.

Read an article in the NYT (apologies, I forget the author) who completely supported your position that even though McCain speaks against the administration on rare occasions, his votes tell an entirely different story - that is well to the right of the current administration, if that is even possible.

Is one of the most conservative.

Though the order makes some sense, I cant find the criteria.

For example, it seems totally weird that Jeffords would be the 9th most liberal senator and Durbin the 21rst (less than Bayh).

I am more than happy to look at whatever system you want, but this one has some results that make little sense.

..

Bayh?

In addition, even if I know Byrd is not a liberal, far from it, the idea that he would be less liberal than Landrieu (or about the same) is a little hard to digest.

It's based on 301 roll call votes from 2005.


"Below is the rank ordering of the 109th Senate as of 30 November 2005. This ordering was produced by the Optimal Classification (OC) algorithm described in:

"Non-Parametric Unfolding of Binary Choice Data." Political Analysis, 8:211-237, 2000...

....
How Optimal Classification Works in Two or More Dimensions (Under Construction)

There were 350 roll calls cast in the 109th Senate as of 29 November 2005 of which 301 roll calls had at least 0.5% or better in the minority and were used in the scaling. The rank ordering is based upon these 301 roll calls. Note that tied ranks are allowed.

The overall correct classification is 92.4% with an aggregate proportional reduction in error of (APRE) .782. In the ordering below, the number just to the right of the Senator's name is the classification error and the number to the right of that is the total number of roll calls cast by the Senator. For example, placing Senator Boxer at rank 1.0 only resulted in 9 classification errors out of a total of 294 votes cast. The proportion correct is 285/294 = .969 (which is shown just to the left of the rank).

The two parties are almost perfectly separated in the liberal-conservative ordering."

It does not answer my question. But forget it, anyway. The results are too weird.

down down down the drain. :smoke:

I can't believe Harkin is not on this. He is the epitome of liberal.

ranking of Senators that purports to tell us who's liberal and who's not. I say this as someone whose 2 senators are in that top 15. Harkin is far more liberal than Jeffords. Kerry's not on the list. I saw another of these the other day that was completely different. We should pay zilch attention to rankings like these and a lot of attention to the record of individual senators over the years.