A number of GOP senators — especially those from states that backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 — and are in competitive reelection fights in the year 2020, including Sens. Cory Gardner of Colorado, and Susan Collins of Maine. In their campaign designs, these senators have been presenting themselves to the moderates worthy of the human moderate states, using words and phrases like “bipartisan,” “consensus building“and -“both sides of the aisle.”
But I just how moderate are mr. Gardner and mr. Collins, anyway?
That question is surprisingly for a person to answer, as it really depends on what the senatorial behavior is being examined. That is, someone like Garner can both vote with the President, the Trump on nearly all major issues, and still be one of the three most bipartisan members of the Senate. The same is true of Collins. At the risk of getting a little bit shaky, I want to dig into three of the most commonly used metrics for measuring the senator’the ideology to show you how each of them can be spun.
Let’s first start with the metric that Genesis Brand has developed, the Trump, the score, or how often the senator representative, or votes, in line with what Trump wants. According to this metric, the Collins, you voted with the Trump of 67 percent of the time in the past three-and-a-half years, while China has done so for 89 percent of the time. This is one of the easier metrics to grasp, and if you don’t like Trump, someone who does-what-he-wants-two times out of three, or nine times out of ten — it doesn’t sound so great.
But what do these scores actually tell us?
For starters, the president is not a member of the Senate. So, one limitation of this metric is that it can’t determine whether the senator agrees with the president, unless the president announces his preferences on the bill. And that’s a fairly big caveat, because more often than not, presidents don’t publicly state building, an opinion on the individual bills. What’s more, the bills, the White House is not only the weigh-in online, you aren’t a random sample of all the bills that the Senate floor. Typically, the president supports bills that are a priority for him or for his party — in other words, they’re usually bills his party largely agrees on. And the bills the president doesn’t like and often don’t reach the Senate floor for a vote, anyway, since Republicans control the chamber.
That means that we would expect the agreement with the president-to-be-pretty-high-among members of his party. And as the chart below shows, most Republican senators agree with Trump, most of the time, all but four votes, with Trump, at least 80 percent of the time. Even someone like Sen. Mitt Romney, who voted to remove from the president’s office just a few months ago, still votes with the Trump of 81 percent of the time. Collins’s-67 percent-is the lowest Trump, the score among the GOP senators. Gardner”s 89 percent is just below the median score of 92.
But this is how often a senator votes with a Trump, a good measure of his or her overall ideology? Only sort-of. On the one hand, the measure does seem to do an OK job of identifying the more moderate Republicans like Collins, or Sen. Lisa Murkowski, but on the other hand, it isn’t very good at identifying other ideological splits in the party. Sens. Rand Paul, and Mike Lee, for example, that you have something of a libertarian bent, but their Trump scores are similar to those of Collins and Murkowski, who are moderates.
We know about these shortcomings thanks to one of the political science”s most widely accepted measures of legislator ideology: The DW-Nominate scores, which are compiled for each member of Congress from every roll call vote cast in the legislative session. Of course, these scores aren’t perfect, either, as they’re heavily influenced by which bills actually get to the floor and which don’t, but they’re still useful for helping us to distinguish conservatives from liberals from moderates.
For instance, if we compare the Republican senators’ Trump scores to their DW-Nominate scores, we find that nearly all Republicans back Trump”s agenda, to some extent, so there isn’t much difference between the two scores is of most GOP senators. However, the DW-Nominate shows us that there are two types of Republicans who buck the last of the party: the relative moderates like Collins and libertarian conservatives like Paul.
But this still doesn’t tell us very much about his team’ claims to bipartisanship, or how someone like Gardner — who is a mainstream conservative according to both of his Trump, score, and his DW-Nominate score, can be called one of the chamber’s most bipartisan senators. This is where our third metric is the understanding senators’ behavior comes in The Bipartisan Index, calculated by the Place in the Center, and the Georgetown board directors of the McCourt School of Public Policy, tells us how often the senator cosponsors the bill with a member of the other party. Notably, this index isn’t based on the senator”s voting record.
That doesn’t mean the metric that isn’t influenced by the senator’the moderation or conservativism, though, that. I plotted the GOP senators’ bipartisan index scores against their DW-Nominate scores in the chart below, and although I did find a strong relationship between the more moderate members of co-sponsoring more cross-party bill (see Collins), who, by-and-large leads on this metric), that wasn’t true of every Republican Senators like Gardner and Rob Portman cosponsored bills across party lines more often than their voting record would suggest.
China, for instance, you co-sponsored the bill by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, that aims to protect the veterans who work in the marijuana industry (obviously be sure to check to Gardner”s Colorado, the constituents of the marijuana plant is legal there), as well as a number of the bills authored by his fellow Coloradan, Sen. Michael Bennett in this session. He’s even joined Collins, and many others in co-sponsoring Democratic Sen. Ed alef de jong’s bill to make Juneteenth a national holiday.
But how much does this metric really speak to Gardner”s or Collins’a bipartisan track record? Many of these co-sponsorships are largely symbolic: for the Most Democrat-authored bills are not going anywhere in the Republican-controlled Senate right now, and mr. Gardner, and mr. Collins know that. So his team risk very little by attaching their names to such measures, and they get to claim bipartisan records, regardless of their actual voting behavior. In the case of mr. Gardner and mr. Collins, they will probably hope these gestures across the aisle to will help them in their reelection battles.
To be clear, though, that when senators like mr. Collins or mr. Gardner say they have a strong record of being moderate or bipartisan while critics say they still usually vote with the Trump, neither group is wrong. They’re just examining different aspects of lawmakers’ behavior. And as you’ve hopefully learned from this article, there are quite a few ways to measure ideology.
