Loebsack 7th Most Progressive In House

Progressive Punch: Loebsack 7th Most Progressive in House

The web site Progressive Punch has crunched the numbers on the votes so far this Congress and puts Iowa freshman Dave Loebsack at a lofty number seven. The top ten (do I need to even say, all Dems):

1 Yvette Clarke (NY)
2 Keith Ellison (MN)
tie Hank Johnson (GA)
4 Raúl Grijalva (AZ)
5 Mazie Hirono (HI)
6 Peter Welch, (VT)
7 Dave Loebsack (IA)
8 Barbara Lee (CA)
9 Jan Schakowsky (IL)
10 Steve Cohen (TN)

Seven of the top ten are freshmen (the senior members are Grijalva, Lee and Schakowsky). And other than Loebsack and Welch, the rest represent urban and/or majority-minority districts.

Around the delegation:

Bruce Braley is in a tie for 28th

Leonard Boswell is at #213 - the bottom Dem is at 232 and there's no Jim Leach-style overlap anymore; the last Democrat is just ahead of the first Republican.

Tom Latham is #329

And Steve King? Tied for 410th place.

Over on the Senate side, Tom Harkin is 17th - below presidential contenders Obama (13), and Clinton (15) but ahead of Dodd (27) and Biden (33). Chuck Grassley is down at 71, below McCain (58) but above Brownback (85).

The methodology?

After going through a number of steps and gyrations, we came up with a list of six hard-core progressive United States Senators (6% of that body) and 35 hard-core progressive United States Representatives (about 8-9% of that body). We take ANY VOTE in which a majority of those progressives voted in contradistinction to a majority of the Republican caucus then that vote then qualifies for the database. So, non-ideological votes such as National Groundhog Day: 429-0 with 6 absences, do not qualify for the database. Any vote in which a majority of progressives vote against a majority of Republicans qualifies for the database. The number of votes which qualify using this algorithm remains remarkably constant from one Congress to another, about half of all votes cast.

There are some criticisms that could be levied against our methodology. One is that it treats every vote equally, when they're obviously not all equally important. Another is that lonely principled stands, that might be viewed by some as progressive, such as Barbara Lee's sole vote against war in Afghanistan, do not qualify for the database.

The very handy site also offers breakdowns by issue area and look up your own reps features.