Before You Call Your Senator, Read This On How Our Trump Scores Work

[Stellar]

By Nate Silver

On Monday, we launched a dashboard that tracks how often members of the House and Senate have voted in line with President Trump’s position on bills and nominations. We were pleasantly surprised at how many people1 were interested in this feature — the level of political energy right now is about as high as I can remember in the almost 10 years that I’ve covered politics. But as a result, what we’d expected to be a fairly slow rollout suddenly occurred much faster. So I wanted to add a word of caution, along with a bit more methodological detail.

The caution is simply this: For the time being, these calculations aren’t based on very many votes. Therefore, they’re likely to bounce around over the next few weeks until more votes are taken. As of Monday, they included just four votes in the House and six votes in the Senate. It’s also important to note that we aren’t tracking all votes — only those on which Trump takes a clear position.2 So they represent a small sample size, for now.

Another unique feature of our dashboard is the plus-minus scores. The basic idea is to compare how often a member of Congress voted with Trump against others where the 2016 presidential vote was similar. For instance, you’d expect members to support Trump most of the time if they come from a state or district that voted for Trump by 30 percentage points, but not very often if they’re from one where Hillary Clinton won by that margin.

These estimates are calculated on a bill-by-bill basis. Here, for instance, is a breakdown of votes on confirming Mike Pompeo as CIA director based on the 2016 vote in each senator’s state. Almost all (38 of 40) senators from states that Trump won by 10 or more percentage points voted to confirm Pompeo. Just five of 24 from states that Clinton won by 10 or more points voted to confirm him, however. The majority of senators from swing states voted to confirm him, however, which is why his nomination eventually passed by a fairly clear 66-32 margin...

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[Longtime lurker 99]

1. Feinstein has to

The California voters may vote her out if she doesn't support trump

[LeftInTX]

2. I know how mine will vote, but

I also have a responsibility to let them know my POV.