Hillary was 11th Most Liberal Senator during her time in the Senate

[Jim Lane]

75. That "stat" is essentially bullshit

When this was floated several days ago, I tried to track down the basis of it and came up with nothing reliable.

The thread is here. What I found, from my post in that thread:

The assertion is based on this Daily Kos post. The Kos post tosses out some numbers, labels Clinton the 11th most liberal, and concludes, "If anyone tries to tell you differently, ask them to show their work."

Good advice -- so let's apply it to these authors. I clicked through some links and found a bewildering array of more links that lead mainly to more links and to some abstruse explanations of statistical techniques. What I didn't find was what I expected, namely the list of specific votes, with the explanation of what the "liberal" and "conservative" position on each was.

For example, here's Clinton's "National Environmental Scorecard" from the League of Conservation Voters (lifetime score: 82%). The LCV lists the specific votes it scored. If you think that some bills were wrongly included or wrongly omitted, or even that a particular vote should have been scored the opposite way, you have the LCV's data, and you can make your case that Clinton's score is too high or too low.

In a few minutes of clicking, I didn't find the equivalent for the claim that Clinton was the 11th most liberal Senator. I didn't give it the full-court press on research because I think people announcing a conclusion like this should make it reasonably easy for a reader to find the underlying list of votes. If some DUer with more patience than I has found that list, I'd be grateful to be enlightened.

I remember how, during the 2008 campaign, Rush Limbaugh and his ilk touted the National Journal ranking that had Obama as the most liberal Senator in 2007. Plenty of us thought at the time that this was ridiculous. As a liberal Democrat, I would've been delighted if we'd nominated such a liberal candidate, but I knew we hadn't. Events have borne out my belief.

Certainly, during Clinton's time in the Senate, there were plenty of conservative Democrats (the Max Baucus - Blanche Lincoln types), so I wouldn't expect to see her ranked as the least liberal Democrat. Before I give any weight to this purported ranking, though, I need to see the data.

Show your work.

In response to my criticism, nobody posted a list of the votes that were scored.

Upon further review, I find this passage in the Kos piece:

DW-NOMINATE is a method for analyzing data on preferences, such as voting data, developed by political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal. Unlike the scoring done by interest groups, DW-NOMINATE doesn't rely on subjective determinations of what constitutes a liberal vote or a conservative vote--it sorts members of a population according to how similar each member's choices are to those of other members of the population.

If it doesn't assess votes as liberal or conservative, then I don't see how it can possibly support the conclusion that Clinton was the eleventh most liberal (or that anyone was the nth most liberal or most conservative). I think that it's measuring a Senator's frequency of voting with other members of his or her party, but even that much isn't clear to me.