No difference between Democrats and Republicans?

So, what does a geek do when her DSL goes down and she can’t get on line? Enter voting record data in a spreadsheet, that’s what. I attended an Alliance for Retired Americans meeting on Wednesday, and got a summary of their lifetime voting ratings on issues of importance to seniors (available at www.retiredamericans.org). I noticed a lot of zeros for Republicans and 100s for Democrats right off, and I wondered how the polarization would work out if I put in all the data and got means and standard deviations for members of both parties. The gap turned out to be a huge chasm, and there were not very many of either party truly in the middle.

House of Representatives

Democrats mean = 94.6, standard deviation = 8.0, minimum value =58
Republicans mean = 5.5, standard deviation = 6.2, maximum value =33

Senators

Democrats mean = 93.3, standard deviation = 10.5, minimum value =52
Republicans mean = 8.0, standard deviation = 11.5, maximum value =69

I don’t think it affected the results very much to include Bernie Sanders with the Democrats in the House, but including former Republican Jeffords skewed the results for the Senate quite a bit with his rating of 69 in the conservative Democrat range. The second highest rating for a Republican in the Senate was 35. Note that the most conservative DINO is still about 25 points higher than the most liberal RINO.

As a check of how many legislators could be considered “moderate,” I did the same calculations for all Democrats with ratings less than 85, and all Republicans with ratings more than 15. And the differences are still pretty drastic, with very few Democrats (19 in the House, 5 in the Senate) in this category, and only 16 House and 7 Senate Republicans. (That last number includes Jeffords as a Republican—leave him out and the mean and standard deviation change noticeably.)

House “moderates”

Democrats mean = 75.8 standard deviation = 8.8, total number =19
Republicans mean = 22.2, standard deviation = 4.6, total number =16

Senate “moderates"

Democrats mean = 71.6 standard deviation = 13.0, total number =5
Republicans mean = 34.1, standard deviation = 16.5, total number =7
Republicans mean = 28.3, standard deviation = 6.5, total number =6 (leaving Jeffords out)

So bear in mind that when occasionally some Democrats make us mad by voting with Republicans on some issues that the majority of Democrats do not do so, and that the most conservative Democrat is more likely to be better for the interests of average citizens than the most liberal Republican by 40 or 50 points.

Now it's certainly true that Dems have been cheerful imperialists along with Repubs since the 1st World War, even that is changing. Never forget that 59% of our national legislators voted AGAINST the Iraq war.

http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2002/roll455.xml
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=107&session=2&vote=00237

Total number of Democrats in the House and Senate = 251.
Total number Democrats voting against the Iraq war = 148
That is 59% of all national Democratic legislators voting against the war.

--together with whatever other posts were made between 1AM and 4AM that day. It appears to be back now, so whatever Elad did seemed to have worked.