Teflon's U-Turn---Why I Will Vote For Republicans On Election Day

When voters go to the polls November 7th, I will be among them, and I will pull my lever for the GOP.

This will surprise MoltenThinkers. I have been unrelenting in my criticism of the Republican leadership.

I have not changed my mind because some have said it would be stupid to stay home.

I have not changed my mind because some have said ">abstaining would hand the election to Democrats and I would be in part responsible for that.

I have not changed my mind because some have said conservatives have nowhere else to go.

I have not changed my mind because some have said that the conservative base sitting this one out would weaken, not strengthen, conservative influence within the Republican Party.

I have changed my mind because my position was predicated on the notion that the Republican House and Senate have tacked leftward since 1994. That is not true, for reasons I will make clear in this post.

I have changed my mind because I was wrong on the facts and the data shows it.

First, some notes on my methodology.

1. As a conservative, I am interested not in the advance of party but of ideology. Of interest to me is whether or not conservative policies and legislation move through Congress.

2. As a conservative, I am comfortable with the way the American Conservative Union rates congressmen and senators as to how they vote. I believe the rating the ACU generates is indeed a good proxy for how conservative a given congressman or senator is in practice, not in theory or in how they would like conservatives to perceive them. Votes matter; all else is air.

3. To this end, I have relied on the ACU rating data as my indicator of how conservative legislators are.

4. To assess how conservative Congress is in a given session, I took the mean ACU rating of all legislators for that session. This allows for tracking of trends over time.

5. Since this distribution is strongly bimodal, I broke it down into 2 separate trends, one for Republicans and one for Democrats (and those who caucus with them).

6. Since Congress is bicameral, I separated House and Senate to see what the trends were in each body.

7. As my personal reference point was the 1995 session (the first session after Republicans took over Congress after the Contract With America in the 1994 election cycle), I've used that as the baseline.

8. ACU data unfortunately is in different formats throughout the 90s. 1995-2000 in particular is difficult to patch as it is segmented by state and one must work through each state (that's 50 times through). Since 1995 was my baseline, I didn't bother to put 1996-2004 sessions in my data. My results therefore answer the question as to how conservative Congress was in 1994 (just before the GOP took over), in 1995 (when they took over), and in 2005 (after 10 years in power). I make no attempt to determine whether Congress has regressed from a post-1995 peak to the present. This is largely because I am lazy. (I wish ACU would make a single file of data available.)

Okay, that said, let me show you some data.

Here is a table showing mean ACU results broken down by chamber, year, and party:



Let's take a visual look at what happened in the House over these years:



Gingrich's crowd swept an additional 54 Republicans in, which shifted the House 5.65 rating points more conservative. That implies the 1995 GOP caucus was not as fire-breathing conservative as I thought they were. Over the ensuing 10 years, this slipped by 0.4 rating points; a slight loss but nothing dramatic.

Let's break it down by party:



This is interesting: the mean conservativism of GOP congressmen DECLINED from the Foley to the Gingrich Speakership by about 1.94 rating points. The remaining Democrats were even more lefty---they declined 2.75 rating points. So how did Congress as a whole move up? Because the greater mix of GOP pulled the overall mean up, even if the caucus itself saw its mean slightly decline.

By this year's session, the House GOP rallied to top out 3.06 rating points ABOVE the Gingrich caucus. They breathe more fire now than they did then, from a conservative point of view. The Dems shifted slightly to the right by 0.4 rating points over this time as well.

Since GOP numbers have declined, the overall House number eroded slightly between 1995 and 2005; about 0.43 rating points.

Still, I cannot claim that this House leadership is less conservative than Gingrich's based on actual performance.

If the House is okay, what about the Senate I love to hate?

Here's the overall Senate performance:



Look at that again---the Senate has swung strongly to the right over the past 10 years; the average Senator is now MORE conservative than the average Representative.

What's going on?

Let's look at the party breakdown:



As with the House, the mean GOP senator score dropped slightly in 1994 (about 1.87 rating points). It sharply rallied over the past decade, though, until it picked up 6.45 rating points over 1995. That's big.

What's truly shocking is that the Democrat senators have become nearly TWICE as conservative over the same period---from 9.35 in 1995 to 17.7 in 2005. Given the close division of the Senate over this period, Democrats moving right has had as significant an impact in moving the Senate rightward as Republicans moving right has. That astonished me.

Now, I'll happily supplement this analysis with some statistical hypothesis testing and break it down into easy-to-use histograms, but for now, I've seen enough to admit that I was wrong and vote accordingly.

For those of you unconvinced by my reasoning in this post, please stick around for the meatier analysis to come.