Voteview contains interesting historical data on the ages, terms, affiliations and voting records of both congressmen and presidents. At first I was curious how the ages of congressmen has changed over time.
But as I dug in, I became more interested in how the DW-NOMINATE scoring methodology works and how the political leanings of public figures have shifted throughout the years. It’s interesting to see the growing divide as Democrats have shifted further left (negative DW-NOMINATE score) and Republicans further right (higher positive score), according to the roll-call vote methodology.
So, with longtime Democrats RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard (both former Democratic party presidential candidates) endorsing Donald Trump for President, I was curious just how liberal Kamala Harris really is.
Here’s how liberal.
The liberal-conservative scoring methodology is called DW-NOMINATE (Dynamic Weighted Nominal Three-step Estimation), developed by Voteview. Voteview is comprised of political science academics at UCLA, UCSD & NYU. The NOMINATE Dimension 1 measure uses Congressional roll-call votes to determine political leaning. You can learn more about it here.