The Case Against Kucinich

Nate Silver crunches the numbers comparing how Democrats in the House voted depending on how red their district is.  The interesting thing is when you remove the exception for "protest votes" from the left, that is votes against Obama's legislative agenda because the agenda is not progressive enough, it turns out that the Democrat causing the most problems is...Dennis Kucinich.

In December, I posted ratings for each Democratic Representative based on how they voted on 10 key agenda items in 2009. The idea was to see how each Democrat voted relative to the partisan slant of his district; a Democrat voting for the cap-and-trade bill in a Republican-leaning district would get quite a bit of credit for that, for instance, while one voting for the same measure in a district with a PVI of D+15 would get almost no credit for the vote since almost every Representative from such a district voted for the bill anyway. The analysis concluded that TN-6's Bart Gordon, who voted with the Democrats on 8 of 10 key agenda items in spite of coming from a R+13 district, had provided the most value to his party on key votes. (Unfortunately for Democrats, Gordon is retiring.) Artur Davis of AL-7, who has voted against several major agenda items because he is running for governor in Alabama, was the least valuable Democrat.

The original version of the ratings built in an exception for what I termed "liberal nos": votes that a Democratic member cast against his party's agenda, but which he justified by stating that the policy under consideration was not liberal enough. We did not count the liberal no votes as yes votes -- we just threw them out, treating them as non-votes instead.

But what if we don't build in an exception for the so-called "liberal no's" -- that is, simply take every vote at face value? It turns out, then, that Davis is no longer the least valuable Democrat. Instead, it is Dennis Kucinich, who voted against health care, the hate crimes bill, the budget, the cap-and-trade bill, and financial regulation -- all ostensibly from the left -- in spite of coming from from the strongly Democratic Ohio 10th district near Cleveland.

Kucinich's score of -4.22 is not only worse than that of any other Democrat: it is also worse than that of all but 22 Republicans.

Now that's saying something.  Silver's method assigns a positive number to Democrats voting for the ten items in a red district, and assigns a penalty for voting against the items in a blue one.  Kucinich gets nailed for his votes in a D+8 safe district.  To compare, that Kucinich score dwarfs almost every other Democrat in the House, period.  Artur Davis comes in at -3.91, but then John Barrow of Georgia is only -2.02.  Parker Griffith, who voted against every single one of the President's agenda items, all ten (and then switched parties to become a Republican) still comes up better at -1.05 because he was in a R+12 district.

So yes, if we're going on which Democrats should be primaried, if you're going strictly from a voting perspective only, the guy at your top of the list is Kucinich. He's at best a 50% reliable vote for the Dems.

It doesn't make him a Blue Dog, but it does make him the Original Firebagger, and puts him firmly in the Useful Idiot for the Republicans category.  There's a reason why the GOP's not too worried about attacking the guy.  They know he's far more trouble for the Dems than he's worth...and it's glad to see that worth -- or in this case the complete and total lack of it -- quantified.

As Nate says, Kucinich may be good liberal, but he's literally the worst Democrat in the House.