The 11th Most Liberal Senator

You've heard it over and over from the Bush campaign: John Kerry is the most liberal member of the Senate. Not only that, John Edwards is the fourth-most liberal Senator. A day barely goes by when a Republican spinner doesn't pull this "fact" out to garnish an attack on the Democratic ticket, like a sprig of rhetorical parsley laid across a course of feigned outrage and misleading criticism.

Since we hear it so often, and since so few people know where it comes from or what it means (including some who use the attack themselves), it might be worthwhile to get our facts straight. As you might have heard, the ranking in question comes from the National Journal, a non-partisan magazine read widely in Washington and largely unknown outside the Beltway. Every year, the Journal selects a group of Congressional votes they think are particularly revealing of ideology, and count up where each House member and Senator voted on them. The legislators are then ranked in relative terms, each receiving a score indicating where they voted relative to the other members of their body (this is in contrast to the many liberal and conservative interest groups that give scores in absolute terms, on how often the member agrees with the group on votes important to them).

When the National Journal calculated their ratings for 2003, the Republicans got a gift wrapped up in a big red bow: John Kerry came out as the most liberal Senator, while John Edwards came in at number four. But there was something funny about the 2003 numbers, particularly when it comes to these two.

An Unusual Year

The funny thing about 2003 related to what the National Journal does when a legislator misses votes. The Journal used 62 votes to come up with the 2003 rankings, a fairly small number relative to the hundreds of votes a Senator casts in a year. They calculate three different ratings: one for economic policy, one for social policy, and one for foreign policy. These three are then combined to come up with an overall ranking.

But here's the catch: If a Senator misses more than half the votes the Journal uses in any one of these three categories, they don't count any of the votes he makes for that category, using only the remaining categories to calculate his overall score. If you're running for president, as both Kerry and Edwards were in 2003, you miss a lot of votes when you're off in coffee klatches and VFW halls in Iowa and New Hampshire. So Kerry missed 37 of the 62 votes, while Edwards missed 22. Consequently, the National Journal gave Kerry no score for economic or social policy, basing his entire ranking on his score on foreign policy. Edwards, on the other hand, got no score on foreign policy.

Is Kerry a liberal? You bet. He's pro-choice, against Bush's tax cuts, for environmental protection, and for universal health care, to name a few issues. Of course, so are a majority of Americans. But is he the most liberal member of the Senate? Hardly.

Obviously, if you want to know how liberal or conservative a Senator is, the best thing to do is to look at their entire career. How does Kerry compare to his colleagues? For starters, he's not the most liberal - in fact, among current Senators he comes in eleventh. Here's the top fifteen, with the composite score for each Senator in parentheses:

1. Mark Dayton, D-Minn. (90.3)

2. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md. (89.4)

3. Jack Reed, D-R.I. (89.3)

4. Jon Corzine, D-N.J. (88.8)

5. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. (88.6)

6. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. (88.5)

7. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa (87.6)

8. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. (87.3)

9. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. (86.2)

10. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. (86.0)

11. John Kerry, D-Mass. (85.7)

12. Carl Levin, D-Mich. (85.5)

13. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. (83.9)

14. Patty Murray, D-Wash. (83.8)

15. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich. (83.8)