My [Boris's] research, along with Princeton’s Nolan McCarty, allows us to make precisely these comparisons. Essentially, I use the entirety of state legislative voting records across the country, and I make them comparable by calibrating them through Project Votesmart’s candidate surveys.
By doing so, I can estimate Brown’s ideological score very precisely. It turns out that his score is –0.17, compared with [Dede Scozzafava's] score of 0.02. Liberals have lower scores; conservatives higher ones. Brown’s score puts him at the 34th percentile of his party in Massachusetts over the 1995-2006 time period. In other words, two thirds of other Massachusetts Republican state legislators were more conservative than he was. This is evidence for my [Boris's] claim that he’s a liberal even in his own party. What’s remarkable about this is the fact that Massachusetts Republicans are the most, or nearly the most, liberal Republicans in the entire country!
More liberal than Dede Scozzafava, and she was jettisoned from her party for being a heretic. It doesn't matter what Republican wins in the end, just as long as Democrats lose.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment