Most Liberal/Most Conservative Dem Senators: Here's the List

[orleans]

Thought I would do a little research to see who the most liberal democrat senators are. I recently did this with republican senators--just to see who tended to vote most often with Boxer, Durbin, Kerry and Kennedy when the D & R votes were split. This I did a little different. (it took about two days to finish;; I spent about 20 hours on it).

How it was done:
I looked at all 366 votes for 2005 and again I used bkkd (boxer, kennedy, kerry, durbin) for my base. I did not include 19 votes including vote #1 of the year in which every senator voted against Boxer when she contested the electoral vote count. The other 18 I did not include were votes where I was unable to differentiate the most liberal voice between the four of them (usually when kennedy and boxer were split).

(I did not look at what was being voted for or against to help me differentiate because I didn’t want my personal views on an issue to influence my decision as to which “side” (yea or nay) was the most liberal.

That left me with 347 votes to work with.

By looking at the bkkd vote I tallied who voted with or against and who did not vote. Then I looked at each individual senator. I subtracted any “no vote” from my working tally of 347 to get the entire number of times they voted that I could work with. Then I divided their “against bkkd” votes by their individual totals.

Results:

% of votes Names
Against of
Target Dem
Group: Senators:

1.73% SARBANES (MD)
1.76% LUNENBURG (NJ)
2.14% MIKULSKI (MD)
2.89% REED (RI)
3.19% CORZINE (NJ)
3.57% CLINTON (NY)
3.75% LEVIN (MI)
3.79% OBAMA (IL)
4.05% LEAHY (VT)
4.71% HARKIN (IA)
5.13% DAYTON (MN)
5.18% MURRAY (WA)
5.23% SCHUMER (NY)
5.49% AKAKA (HI)
5.53% STABENOW (MI)
6.36% DODD (CT)
6.45% FEINSTEIN (CA)
6.88% JEFFORDS (VT)
6.96% WYDEN (OR)
7.49% REID (NV)
7.64% CANTWELL (WA)
7.66% FEIN GOLD (WI)
8.09% ROCKEFELLER (WV)
8.72% BAYH (IN)
8.75% BIDEN (DE)
9.17% LIEBERMAN (CT)
9.30% INOUYE (HI)
10.14% KOHL (WI)
11.34% DORGAN (ND)
12.20% BINGAMAN (NM)
12.28% NELSON (FL)
12.96% SALAZAR (CO)
13.41% BYRD (WV)
14.36% JOHNSON (SD)
15.07% LINCOLN (AR)
15.94% PRYOR (AR)
17.57% CARPER (DE)
18.56% LANDRIEU (LA)
19.70% CONRAD (ND)
20.94% BAUCUS (MT)
38.55% NELSON (NE)

After typing up this list I realized several things:
1. I probably could have/should have excluded durbin in my “base” and gone with sarbanes or lautenberg--but who knows?
2. Hiliary surprised me. (not as conservative as I thought she was)
3. Feinstein surprised me (not as conservative as I thought she was)
4. Biden surprised me (not as bad as I thought he was)
5. Jeffords surprised me (not as liberal as I thought he was)
6. Nebraska....ahem....

[snowbear]

1. Excellent job ~~~ Kudos to Orleans !!!

Incredible amount of info ~ Great job!!

[orleans]

2. tank you tank you very much.

:D :blush: :patriot:

[Nutmegger]

3. Woo-HOO!!! LIEberman is not at the bottom!

Now if he would only change his "war" stance...

Thanks orleans for the info. K & R!!!!

[orleans]

5. i have to admit that he also surprised me too

(that he wasn't closer to the bottom)

[regnaD kciN]

6. It's not just his "war stance"...

...it's his habit of showing his "independence" by criticizing mainstream Democratic policy and politicians as often and in as public a forum as possible.

In other words, while Joe might not vote out of the ordinary that much, his public rhetoric provides ammunition for Republicans to characterize Democrats as "out of touch." He gets held up as "proof" that even "responsible Democrats" think that Democratic leaders and their policies are too far to the left -- even when he himself is voting for most of those policies.

[jobycom]

4. Good work. nt

[mom cat]

7. Great piece of work. I was also surprised by Lieberman, only a

bit worse than Feingold.

[cali]

8. One reason why this tells us very little

It's one year. My Senator has been there for 31 years. Obama has been there for a year. Clinton has been there for 5 years. Harkin has been there for a long time. Clinton, for instance, voted for the war. Both of my Senators voted against it, and made strong statements about it pre-vote. All votes are not of equal importance.

[WePurrsevere]

9. Over all it's an interesting sampling, Thank you...

for the time you put into it. B-)

As her constituent Hillary doesn't surprise me. She may not always take the stance I'd like her too but I think if her full record were addressed in the same way you just did this she'd still be voting a heck of lot more Dem then Rep.

Someday if you ever have the time it would be interesting to see just how Hillary and maybe a few others some consistently refer to as "DINOs" stack up with their votes over the last 5 yrs (911 on maybe?) when compared to those Liberals you used as your base.

[wyldwolf]

10. I'm not trying to belittle or discredit your research in any way... but...

... This is about the third formula I've seen on DU developed to try and measure the liberalness of our Democratic leaders and prove certain ones are more conservative. It always seems the results are "disappointing" to some (Clinton and Biden not so bad, others "worse" than thought.) You, however, seem genuine.

[orleans]

13. i was just curious as to how it would turn out.

like i mentioned, i did this type of thing with over two hundred votes with republican senators--and i did that for a reason. (i bought ten extra copies of "fooled again" and sent them, with a cover letter, to seven senators--three of whom are republicans--two dems in the house (louise slaughter & alcee hastings) and a copy to howard dean.)

in retrospect, like i mentioned, i probably could have substituted lautenberg or sarbanes for durbin.

someone had posted that they wondered how the dems would rate--
so that was why i finally decided to keep the four as the base that i used when i did the republican tally for the dem tally.


you know, how does one determine exactly who is the most liberal senator without somehow rating first what issue they are voting on?

i didn't want to do that--instead i took who a lot of people assume are "liberal" (kennedy, boxer & kerry). the votes i didn't count were 1,93, 96, 99, 104, 138, 139, 157, 160, 182, 190, 196, 216, 238, 253, 308, 321, 323, and 325.

maybe i should have just picked kennedy (who has had the reputation of being liberal forever) and compared them all to him. hummmm....there's an idea.... what do you think?

[welshTerrier2]

11. good but flawed

there's validity to the analysis you did but i think it's methodology has a serious flaw ... the study's approach is based on a "relative" liberalism rather than liberalism itself ...

so, while it may be fair to say that one senator is more liberal than another, it may not be fair to say that any senator is liberal at all ... in other words, you've staked what is liberal to a group of senators and how they voted on issues raised for a vote by the majority republican party ... that may not be a very good definition to determine what is liberal ...

[terrya]

12. Great job. That looks pretty accurate to me.

:thumbsup: