First-term Rep. Tom Emmer, a Republican in the solidly red Sixth District, has been taking fire lately from conservative activists who feel Emmer is too moderate.
Moreover, the tea party-flavored attacks say Emmer's alleged left-leaning tendencies are of recent provenance — making Emmer not just a squish but an apostate, in their minds.
Take a full-broadside attack on Emmer published yesterday by the conservative website Alpha News. The unsigned piece said Emmer had "gone from staunch conservative state representative and gubernatorial candidate to reliable moderate House vote" since starting his congressional term in January.
Emmer spokesperson Becky Alery declined to comment specifically on the Alpha News article.
The piece cites ratings of Emmer from several conservative activist groups, but primarily musters a range of anecdotal evidence in support of its thesis of Emmer's "lurch" left. (That's not even getting into the article citing "a non-scientific Facebook poll" as proof of conservative discontent.)
As it happens, there is actual quantitative data designed for examining this exact type of question. Here's a brief, more rigorous look at Tom Emmer's political leanings.
Let's start with the beginning: Emmer's time in the state legislature. Alpha News says Emmer was a "staunch conservative" there, and the data backs up that assertion.
A dataset by political scientists Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty has used roll-call votes to estimate state lawmaker ideology. The dataset isn't quite complete — among other things, the Minnesota Senate has no recent data because the Senate (unlike the House) doesn't release its roll-call data in any machine-readable form. But the data that is there correlates pretty well with other political science ideology estimates, and we have data for Emmer's time in the House.
Shor-McCarty, in fact, rank Emmer as the single most conservative lawmaker in the 2010 Minnesota House — a few steps to the right of Rep. Steve Drazkowski. Emmer rated a 1.733 on the scale, where 0 is moderate and most lawmakers fall between very liberal at -2 and very conservative at +2. The median 2010 Minnesota House Republican (Rep. Tara Mack) had a score of 0.972.
And the 2010 Minnesota House Republican caucus was a fairly conservative one. Its median member score of 0.972 was the eighth most-conservative House GOP caucus in the country, behind Georgia, Arizona, Idaho, Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas and the hugely polarized California State Assembly, where the median Republican had a score of 1.362.
So how has Emmer voted in his six months in Washington, D.C.? For this, we turn to a more august rating system, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal's DW-NOMINATE. This ranks all members of Congress by roll-call votes on a scale that runs from most liberal at -1 to most conservative at +1.
Six months isn't a huge sample size, but there have been a fair number of votes and DW-NOMINATE already has estimates for all current representatives.
Emmer rates an 0.462 on DW-NOMINATE. That's definitely not at the far right of the House Republicans — but it's not at the far left, either. By this estimation, Emmer is just slightly to the left of the center of the House Republican caucus (a position that's far to the right of the center of the chamber as a whole).
There are 103 Republican representatives to Emmer's left, and 142 to Emmer's right, by the DW-NOMINATE estimations. The median House Republican's score is 0.493, and the range goes from 0.146 (Rep. Robert Dold, a pro-abortion rights Republican from the Chicago suburbs) to to 0.805 (Georgia Rep. Tom Graves, who "led the national movement to defund the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" in 2013) Here's a chart showing Emmer's position in the Republican pack:
UPDATE: Here's another chart, this time with the whole House and not just the Republicans:
How does this compare to other Minnesota Republican representatives in recent years? By DW-NOMINATE Emmer is in the middle of the pack, to the right of Rep. Erik Paulsen and to the left of Rep. John Kline:
Also notable is that Emmer is considerably less conservative than the person he replaced in Congress, Rep. Michele Bachmann.
These values are only estimates produced by algorithms, albeit pretty robust algorithms with strong track records. They do a pretty good job of predicting actual votes, and also a good job of capturing the general thrust — Bachmann is really conservative, while Jim Ramstad was pretty moderate. But the more specific you get, the fuzzier it can get. This isn't "proof" that Emmer is more conservative than Paulsen or more liberal than Kline — it just suggests that his voting record so far is somewhere in the middle of both the House GOP and the recent Minnesota Republican delegations.
Alery said Emmer's conduct in office has matched what he promised to do in his successful 2014 campaign, which she said focused on "jobs and the economy," transportation, "passing a budget" and "building relationships."
"Candidate Tom Emmer is very much the Congressman Tom Emmer that we have," Alery said.
She also highlighted Emmer's membership on the conservative Republican Study Committee and his work to produce the RSC's alternative budget to the version that ultimately became law. But Alery said it was "fair" to say Emmer was not focused on being a firebrand.
"Right now we have a Democrat president, so we're not going to get all that we wanted," Alery said. "We're going to have to take what we can get and keep fighting for the battles we can."
Political science tools aren't the only way to estimate ideology. Interest groups also rate lawmakers on how much they fall in line with those groups' ideals. The most venerable rating of conservatism, annual scores put out since 1971 by the American Conservative Union, don't yet account for congressional freshmen such as Emmer.
We do have ratings from some other conservative groups, Heritage Action and Freedom Works. Alpha News cites both these ratings as proof of Emmer's moderation: he's earned a 57 percent from Freedom Works and a 63 percent from Heritage Action.
What those scores mean depends on what they're compared to. The median House Republican has a 69 percent approval on the Freedom Works rating and a 73 percent on Heritage Action's rating, both higher than Emmer's score.
On the other hand, Emmer's scores are actually the highest of any of Minnesota's congressional delegation. Paulsen earns a 60 percent from Heritage Action, while Kline has a 59 percent. FreedomWorks gives both Paulsen and Kline 43 percent scores.
These two ratings are both based on a select number of "key votes", the same general methodology used by several other congressional rating systems such as the National Journal's. DW-NOMINATE looks at all roll-call votes — 389 House votes in the most recent update.
Another caveat: another measure of ideology, Adam Bonica's analysis of campaign contributions, generally matches up pretty well with DW-NOMINATE but paints a little bit of a different picture when looking at Minnesota Republicans. Emmer's 2014 donor base was only slightly less conservative than Bachmann's, and it was considerably more conservative than Kline's and Paulsen's. (This measure has Kline slightly to Paulsen's left, in fact.) This could be the root of the disillusionment reflected in Alpha News' article: donors expected Emmer to be pretty conservative and he hasn't lived up to their expectations. Or it could just be a fluke arising from Emmer's small sample sizes: six months of votes for DW-NOMINATE and one federal election in Bonica's database.
The post What the data says about Emmer's voting record appeared first on The Political Animal.